Posts Tagged ‘captions’

YouTube’s caption tools – still hit and miss

Friday, August 27th, 2010
Video with inaccurate caption text

A YouTube caption fail

I’ve been spending some time on YouTube recently, as we’re hosting a number of videos on the platform for a campaign we’re running to recruit foster carers.

Obviously we wanted to make sure we added captions to the videos, and to save a bit of time I’ve been trying out the caption tools. Firstly I noticed that YouTube automatically ‘machine transcribed’ some of the videos. On inspection, though, the accuracy of these was way off – possibly made worse by the particular accents which the speakers had, to which I doubt YouTube’s voice recognition is very well tuned.

More about YouTube’s captioning options

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The long way round

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

This post has been written for Blogging Against Disablism Day 2010.

I recently bought a new phone. It’s great, but like most smartphones it’s taking a bit of time to get completely used to the complex interface.

On the second day of playing with it, I was browsing the web and came across a site which had Captcha. It was a Google product, and I had to complete the Captcha field to continue with what I wanted to do. The problem was, the image that it had come up with was terribly distorted, and I couldn’t make out the letters and numbers. I tried several possibilities, failing every time. Normally I would simply refresh the page to get a new image, but I hadn’t yet learned how to do that on my phone! I tried going back then forwards again, but it just loaded the same image. And crucially, there was no link to an accessible alternative.

It was one of those rare occasions where I had hit an absolute brick wall because of an inaccessible web design feature.

Read more about taking the long way round

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Auto-captioning on YouTube

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Just a quick post to point out a very interesting post over at the official Google Blog, where they’ve announced that automatic captioning is coming to YouTube. This is really exciting news for anyone who uploads video content to the platform and wants to make sure their content is accessible, and is a really welcome move by Google towards promoting and advancing accessibility. The announcement also describes auto-timing, which makes it easier for people to add captions by simply uploading a transcript which is then synchronised to the video.

I hope to have a closer look at these features in the near future, especially as I’m currently involved in putting sign language videos onto YouTube. For now, though, have a look at the video below for more info.

PS thanks to Phil Teare for the original heads-up about this over at Accessify Forum.

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Captioning BSL videos

Friday, November 6th, 2009
Video of a woman signing

Screenshot of a BSL video

Some of you will know about my project to get British Sign Language content on our corporate website. For the background to this, see the original business case and my experiences in the studio filming the videos.

Last week I got the BSL videos from our audio/visual unit, with all the audio editing complete, bringing us a step closer to getting them online. All I needed to do was add the captions and run them past our BSL expert one more time, to make sure nothing had been lost in translation.

With impeccable timing, Henny Swan blogged about captioning earlier today so I’d encourage people to read her post too as I’ll be referring to her findings here as well.

More about captioning videos

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