Posts Tagged ‘captions’

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.

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