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.

YouTube's auto-captioning is way off here

However, the transcript tool fared much better. This lets you upload a plain text file with the transcript of the video. This is far easier than creating captions, which require timecodes.

YouTube then processes the file in a matter of seconds and applies the text as captions to the video, making a best guess at the timing. With the 7 videos I had uploaded, the results were very good, with split second accuracy in many cases.

A bit of user input makes all the difference

One thing that did sometimes throw the timing a bit was where I had skipped some of the dialogue or shortened it for brevity and ease of reading. Overall, though, it was certainly satisfactory and a massive time saver.

In conclusion, then, I certainly wouldn’t rely on the auto-captioning, but it’s fantastic that YouTube are offering this given that the majority of uploaders will never bother manually adding captions. The transcription tool is an excellent compromise delivering better than average results, as it certainly worthy of praise.

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.

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.

Online captioning tools

Due to my employer’s IT policy, which means I can’t install software onto my work PC, I’m going to have to settle for online captioning tools. This limited me somewhat, but I was hopeful that I could find something suitable.

YouTube itself recommends CaptionTube, but I’d also heard good things about YouTubeCC, so I decided to give that a go first.

YouTubeCC

YouTube CC

To start, make sure your video is uploaded and processed on Youtube. Next, go to YouTubeCC and enter the URL of the video that you wish to caption. This will bring up the video on the left with a box for the captions on the right.

The idea is that you play and pause the video, tapping in the captions as you go and adding them to the box on the right. YouTubeCC automatically adds the start times, according to where you’ve paused the video.

The first issue I encountered was that there seemed to be no way to preview the captions on the video itself, as you enter them. This makes it impossible to judge whether you have given each caption enough time on-screen, or whether you need to split them up.

Bigger problems were to come, though, upon completing my first video. Clicking the Export to YouTube button brought up the following error message:

Warning:
Some of the captions/timecodes are bogus and will not be added to the export.
Do you want to export anyhoo?

I have no idea why the captions or timecodes should be ‘bogus’, and could see no obvious error, so I went ahead and exported anyway, which enabled me to save the captions as a .sub file (YouTube requires either sub or srt file formats).

Adding captions using YouTube CC

Finally, heading back to YouTube and clicking on the Captions buttons under the video, on the My Videos page, it was a simple case of uploading the .sub file. The results weren’t bad – no sign of the bogus captions or timecodes – but as per my first concern, the timing was not perfect and some captions were far too brief. Also, captions remained visible until the next one came along, which in some cases was not ideal. I realised that you have to insert blank captions to achieve breaks between captions, which seemed a little convoluted.

Overall, then, I found YouTubeCC not bad but lacking features necessary to get really tight captions. Perhaps I wasn’t using it properly – I’d welcome suggestions or advice!

CaptionTube

Caption Tube beta

Next I thought I’d go back to YouTube’s original suggestion, CaptionTube. Henny has already done a great job of reviewing the pros and cons of this one, but I thought I’d add a bit more about some of the things I liked and disliked.

I really liked the timeline at the bottom. Anyone familiar with editing software such as Final Cut Pro will be very comfortable with this kind of interface. Unfortunately, it appeared to lack some of the functionality you might hope for, such as the ability to drag, drop or resize segments.

Caption Tube's timeline

Another feature I liked was the ability to set the duration of a caption. A fairly essential feature, I’d say, but having seen the difficulty of doing this in YouTubeCC I appreciate its existence here.

A definite down side was the need to swap between two pages to edit the captions then preview them. This slowed the process considerably, and although the Preview option is very welcome, I can’t help thinking it could have been integrated more usefully into the main view.

Caption Tube requires you to go to another page each time you want to preview your captions

A final plus, though, is that Caption Tube connects directly to your Google/YouTube account so there’s no need for a separate login.

Overstream

Overstream

Next up, then, is Henny’s preferred option – Overstream. Unlike the previous two, this one requires that you create an account. There’s no obvious privacy policy which is not great, and the password length can only be 10 characters long, far shorter than my usual hyper-secure passwords! Nevertheless, I duly sign up.

The first problem I encounter is the Overstream doesn’t appear to be able to access videos that are not yet public on YouTube. I guess this makes sense, although it wasn’t a problem for the previous two sites. Even using YouTube’s Limited Access URL option doesn’t seem to work. I don’t really want the video to be public yet, but to use this service I don’t have much choice (and can always hide the video again after adding the captions), so I temporarily make the video public.

Overstream has a handy demo video showing you the main controls so after watching this I plunge right in.

A screenshot of Overstream's interface

It’s immediately obvious that many of the issues I had with the previous two services have been addressed here. You can see the captions immediately appear on the video, each caption is given a default length which you can easily adjust, and you can drag and drop each individual caption on a global timeline.

Once finished, you can save the captions, or ‘overstream’, for editing at a later date, and can then export as a .srt file.

Uploading the .srt to YouTube worked a treat, and the timing was much better than before.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Overstream appears to offer by far the best online tool for captioning that I’ve used so far. The other options are ok, but far more basic and not without their faults.

I can’t show the results just yet as I promised to let our BSL signer have a look first, before it went public. I’ll be sure to update my blog as soon as the completed videos are online.

My talk started by introducing the idea of accessibility and how it applies to social media. I then spoke about CAPTCHA, and how this continues to be a significant barrier on many sites, preventing some users from even creating an account on certain sites.

I then went on to argue that if we are relying on social media sites to present content to our users, or to hold discussion and debates, then it’s our responsibility to make sure that the content is accessible. That’s where the following video kicks in (the text equivalent can be found below, after the video). Apologies for the background noise – Liz maintains that the saxophone was not added in later but was, rather, a bonus from the street of Edinburgh…

Transcript of video

If we’re putting our content on their sites, it’s our problem. I was thinking about this a couple of days ago and I wrote a brief blog post which I’d like to read from. Social media is a revolution and with all revolutions some people have been left behind. There are individuals who are at risk of exclusion – I’ve mentioned disabled individuals such as the blind and users of screen reader – but also the ‘digital divide’, where people aren’t connected to the internet and possibly even don’t want to be connected to the internet. We have to remember that these people aren’t going to be using these platforms.

It’s also an issue because it’s out of our control. We can make our own websites accessible but with other sites, for example if we wanted to create a Facebook account, we have to live with the consequences that those sites may not be as accessible as we’d want them to be.

Some of the other problems we need to be aware of. I’ve already mentioned CAPTCHA, impacting on the very first process of signing up to an account. There is also the fact that much of social media relies on dynamic web pages, rich internet applications – where pages update automatically as new content comes along. How do screen readers manage that? Do they know that the page has updated, and will they read out those updates? Evidence suggests that most new screen readers can handle some of these things but not everyone has the latest screen reading technology.

There’s also the issue of the volume of content; the pure number of videos there are out there on Youtube and so on, or the pure number of Tweets on Twitter. That makes it really hard to find content that you’re really interested in.

Probably the biggest overall accessibility concern of social media and our use of it is the fact that it is user-generated content. We don’t have any control over the content that other people are authoring to these sites. That’s the very nature of social media and, despite all of its benefits, that’s the big risk as well.

YouTube is an obvious example; anybody can put a video on YouTube but have they, for example, added captions so that deaf people can access the audio content, or audio description so that blind people know what’s going on on the screen? Probably not. We can do it – if we want to put a video onto YouTube we can make sure all of those processes are in place, but the average user may not want to or may not know how to.

So, if we’re directing people to this kind of content and saying ‘have your own discussions around that’ we need to be aware that some people may be left out of it.

So what can we do? The first thing is to put pressure on the likes of YouTube and Facebook, to tell them to make their services more accessible…

The video ends there, but I did go on to talk about the need to make sure that we are aware of any barriers that exist, making alternative arrangements where possible or directing people to more accessible versions (for example, Accessible Twitter and Easy YouTube).

As before, I’m keen to keep this discussion going so would invite any comments here. There’s also a discussion about social media accessibility over at Accessify Forum which I’d love people to contribute to.

1. Automatically playing audio on a webpage is usually an action which the user will not expect. It is therefore, at the very least, an irritation, especially if the user is in an environment where this is not appropriate.
2. At worst, though, the audio may conflict with other audio that the user is already listening to. That might be music, or perhaps another video. But far worse, it could be a blind user’s screen reader software, and the resulting conflict would make it very hard to browse that page to pause the video or mute the sound.

Auto-play = poor usability

When I asked about whether the auto-play was necessary, I was told that it was to ensure that people watched the videos, which contained important content. I would guess that people are far more likely to recoil at the auto-play and close the page than they are to happily watch the video, which then has an impact on them accessing the other text content on the page. Also, users may consider this a breach of website etiquette, making them likely to distrust the entire website as an ‘unknown quantity’.

In general, people don’t like anything unexpected being forced upon them. You could argue that in some instances you can give the user due warning (for example, via link text which states that the video will start automatically) and in certain contexts it is probably more acceptable (offering a link to a YouTube page, for example, means that anyone who follows that link has clearly decided to view that video). But neither of these apply in this instance – the main link text stated that it was to ‘information’ on the subject.

Auto-play = poor accessibility

As mentioned above, auto-play can conflict with screen reader software. For this reason it is specifically addressed in the internationally recognised Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0), which has the following to say:

If any audio on a Web page plays automatically for more than 3 seconds, either a mechanism is available to pause or stop the audio, or a mechanism is available to control audio volume independently from the overall system volume level. (Level A)

WCAG 2.0. Success Criteria 1.4.2 – Audio Control

The ability to turn off the audio is therefore considered to be a sufficient compromise when using auto-play, although the recommendation is that the control be made available at the top:

The intent of this technique is to allow a user to turn off sounds that start automatically when a page loads. The control to turn off the sounds should be located near the beginning of the page to allow the control to be easily and quickly discovered by users.

Technique G170: Providing a control near the beginning of the Web page that turns off sounds that play automatically

However, WCAG 2.0 does still give the following warning:

Playing audio automatically when landing on a page may affect a screen reader user’s ability to find the mechanism to stop it because they navigate by listening and automatically started sounds might interfere with that navigation. Therefore, we discourage the practice of automatically starting sounds (especially if they last more than 3 seconds), and encourage that the sound be started by an action initiated by the user after they reach the page, rather than requiring that the sound be stopped by an action of the user after they land on the page.

Understanding Success Criteria 1.4.2

It’s interesting to note that in the example I’m referring to, where my organisation has embedded a WMV in the page using Windows Media Player, I found myself unable to tab into the player using FireFox. Even when you can tab into the player, you have 36 links to tab past before you get to it. This means that we fail this criteria as a result, as non-mouse users will not be able to stop the video easily, if at all.

Given that the content of the video was considered so important that we apparently needed to force it onto people using auto-play, we’re seriously letting down those users who won’t be able to access that content properly.

Client preference vs user preference

This is a great example of the preferences of the content provider conflicting with the needs and preferences of the content consumer. These sorts of conflicts come up many times when developing sites (perhaps the most common is the request to open external links in new windows). Almost always, the arguments benefit the client, rather than the user. And whilst you may force a few more people to view your video, or stay on your site, or view something the way you want them to – ultimately you are harming your relationship with that user and, more often than not, they’ll be gone before those end credits roll…

Camera and bluescreen set-up

I’ve just got back from a busy day filming BSL videos – simple, short clips of a person signing key content taken from the website. For the whys and wherefores, see my previous post on Deaf Awareness Week and BSL videos online. In a nutshell, many users have BSL as their first language, with written English being their second language. Offering content in the form of a BSL video takes this into consideration, showing that we are aware of the needs of these users and ensuring they have optimised access to information offered online.

Preparations and requirements

Before the day I prepared five scripts, taken from key pages on our website. It was my estimation that each video would last between 90 and 180 seconds. The idea was to identify content that was high-level enough not to need regular updating – i.e. an overview of a particular service with contact information and maybe a weblink to further info. These were then passed to our signer to read through and prepare the BSL.

On the day we had the signer and another deaf colleague to assist with checking the signing, as well as an interpreter. We were told that ideally our signer would have brought two interpreters, but a second one was not available for today’s session. This meant that the interpreter spent all day speaking and signing, which must have been quite a drain on her. We aimed to stop for breaks whenever required, although there was a concern that stopping for too long would break the signer’s momentum, so we ended up taking a rather late lunch too!

As we had planned to add the audio in post production, we did not need a location with perfect acoustics, although in future it might be possible to record the interpreter’s voiceover live and have that accompany the final video, to save on production time.

Lights, camera…

We prepared a room with a blue curtain backdrop and a video camera positioned about two meters away. On the day, no additional lighting was required although it may have been necessary to position additional lighting on the signer and backdrop to ensure that the two were distinct.

We also set up a mic so that the interpreter could sit to one side and interpret the signing aloud in real time. In post-production we will use the interpreter’s commentary to help us ensure the correct timing for the official voice over, as well as the closed captions.

…and action!

Each video required only four or five takes, taking between 30 minutes to an hour depending on the complexity of the content.

Flip-chart with script prompts

The signer set up a flip-chart behind the camera to serve as a memory prompt for the reading order of the content, as well as an aid for any tricky sections (for example, lists or contact details). She also had various discussions with her colleague about the best way to get across particular concepts in BSL, as certain phrases in the written English did not work as smoothly once signed.

I was on hand to give clarification about any particular points in the script, and to make sure that the overall message was maintained. This was particularly important with some of the scripts, where the descriptions of processes or services had to be accurate and specific.

While it would have been possible to film each script in chunks, reconstructing them in post-production with subtle cuts, we actually managed to get each one perfect in single takes. This will make editing far easier.

Contact details and web addresses

Although the original scripts involved the signing of key contact details and web addresses, it was generally felt that it would be better to offer these as on-screen text against a plain background at the end of each clip, to avoid any confusion that could arise by trying to follow the signing and the text at the same time. It was also observed that users could then simply pause the video to write down the information, rather than potentially needing to watch the signed version more than once.

Next steps

Our Audio/Visual technician will now edit the clips, adding the contact detail screens and opening titles for each video. I’ll then be back in the studio next week to oversee the adding of a voiceover track for each video before we finally add the captions and upload them for all to see! I’ll blog here again once we’ve gone live. In the meantime, if you’ve got any questions or comments, do get in touch!

improve understanding of the different types of deafness by highlighting the many different methods of communication used by deaf, deafened, deafblind and hard of hearing people, such as sign language and lipreading.

Deaf Awareness Week website – www.look-at-me.org.uk

For a while now I’ve been working on a business case to pilot a project, offering key content from our website in the form of video of a British Sign Language interpreter. The following is an extract from that business case, explaining why such content could be valuable:

Scotland has an estimated 758,000 deaf or hard of hearing individuals (according to RNID stats). Of those, 57,000 are severely or profoundly deaf, and may use British Sign Language (BSL) as their first or preferred language (usually the case where the individual has been deaf since birth or early in life). A report by CLAN Edinburgh estimates the number of BSL first language users in Edinburgh to be 1,000 – 1,500 . This compares with 1,698 registered blind persons in Edinburgh in 2003 (by Scottish Government figures).

Individuals who have BSL as their first language may find it harder to read written English, as concepts unique to BSL can interfere with the learning process. Differences include word order, inflexion of verbs and lack of certain articles.

The Government officially recognised BSL on 18th March 2003.

Many organisations offer key online content in video format, with an interpreter delivering the content in BSL. An excellent example of this can be found on the British Deaf Association website. This is also increasingly being implemented by a number of local authorities.

Screenshot of a BSL video from the BDA website

A Scottish Government 2005 report on access to public services for BSL users suggested a serious lack of use of certain key areas, including social services, education and libraries. 54% of the people asked felt that they never accessed services from their Council.

Comments included:

• “We need more BSL information on the Internet like Deafstation.”
• “I think getting the information from the computer would build more confidence for Deaf people…”
• “Now we look for any web site that has BSL information, since Deaf people are interested in that website…It is more important to have BSL on the website.”
  

Offering certain key content in BSL Video format via the website represents one of a range of accessibility features which can enhance the inclusiveness of the website. It will help us engage with its deaf community, showing ourselves to be proactive in addressing their needs.

Audience

Target audience

The intended audience for the video content would be all individuals for whom benefit would be derived in accessing the information in this format, over and above the traditional online formats. Primarily this would be individuals who use BSL as their first language, but other groups who could benefit include:

• the blind and partially-sighted (assuming audio description is included)
  
• those with low literacy or other primary language
• those with a learning disability such as dyslexia

Secondary audience

It is also expected that the general public and professionals, both locally and nationally, will have some degree of interest in the videos.

Benefits

Encourages Inclusion for all

Such content would continue the efforts of the Council to be socially inclusive by improving the accessibility of one of its key channels of communication with its citizens. This could be measured by comparing usability results prior to and following implementation, as carried out with volunteers from the BSL community. It is expected that accessibility should be significantly improved for these individuals.

Provides a precedent

If successful the project would provide a compelling precedent for similar future developments. Video content can also be utilised for the benefit of citizens with other needs, as outlined above.

Exemplifies Best Practice efforts

The project would offer evidence of best practice in regards to accessibility and inclusion, and could be high-profile and prominent enough to encourage national interest and favourable coverage.

Risks

Cost of video production

Due to the high cost of producing video content, it would be difficult to amend or update, or to produce new content.

Increased demand for more BSL content

If the initial video content proves successful, this could generate requests for other information to be made available.

Increased demand for similar audio/video content

This approach could benefit citizens with other needs, such as individuals with dyslexia, low literacy or English as a second language.

No guarantee of service

Where a third party service (such as YouTube) is used to host the video content, no contract of service exists. Therefore, no guarantee can be secured regarding the permanence, availability or quality of service offered. No recourse is possible in the event of loss of such service, and a contingency plan is necessary in the event of such loss of service.

Project underway!

The project is now underway, and I’ve made contact with a local deaf literacies worker who will give us support in making the videos. We have a dedicated Audio/Visual unit who can produce high quality video, and have started work on identifying the sort of information we want to present in this format.

Once we’ve launched I’ll blog about here, of course. In the meantime, I’d be really interested to hear from other organisations who are looking at, or already doing, this on your website.

Microsoft Offices, Edinburgh

At 5pm last Friday, dozens of like-minded web enthusiasts gathered at the Microsoft offices at Waverley Gate, Edinburgh, for a Scottish Public Sector Barcamp meetup. On the agenda was everything from Web 2.0 and social media to the credit crunch and website rationalisation, and we only had two hours to put the world to rights.

The four sessions took place two at a time, which meant I was only able to take part in two. The ones I missed were about freeing our data (shame to miss that one, and I had some interesting conversations afterwards on that very subject) as well as WordPress (again, shame to miss as it’s a definite area of interest).

However, the discussions I did attend provided plenty of food for thought:

Social Networking

In a discussion led by Pete Martin of The Gate Worldwide, we explored issues around the changing landscape of media consumption, the various business models that are emerging, and what this all means for the public sector.

Points to consider:

• use of the web is far from ubiquitous – Pete tells us that only 60% of households in Scotland have broadband, and that only 11% of the population are based in an office. For most of us in the room, we’re used to having access to the web pretty much all day. For the vast majority, this simply isn’t the case (although Paul from Falkirk rightly observed that the emergence of mobile browsing goes some way to blur the boundaries). Nevertheless, there is an inherent risk of social exclusion.
• This is compounded by the fact that many business models are shifting towards a two-class system of access, where you can get the basic stuff for free but have to pay for the good stuff. There are already many examples of this.
• And what about cost benefit? I spoke with Pete after the discussion about this, and he pointed out that the cost benefits can be huge in certain cases, with massive profits to be made. But in terms of social media, where we invite our citizens to interact with us, the cost savings in using these channels of communication can be quickly eaten up by the resources needed to train people to use them correctly.

Also, Pete observed that ‘engaging with the disgruntled’ can be costly and often, ultimately, pointless. The truly malcontented will never be satisfied, and will gladly suck up all of your available resources.

Nevertheless, providing a platform is often important in its own right. A good example is the Guardian’s Comment Is Free website, where users can directly engage in conversation around articles and editorials. It was suggested that the users got the most value out of such an exercise, and we assume that the writer of the article does not usually bother to read the hundreds of comments generated. Therefore, is the ability to engage in conversation more important than the outcomes of those conversations? (Edit: see Peter Ashe’s post about the event for an interesting analogy of hosting a party – frustrating for the host, who can barely hold a decent conversation with anyone, but hopefully great for your guests)

Finally, there was a brief discussion around the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to any involvement in social media. It’s not just a ‘techie’ project, but nor is it a purely comms one. Getting the right people on board is essential if any voyage into Web 2.0 waters is to be successful.

Online videos

The next discussion was around online video, led by Christian Storstein from the Scottish Government. This was of particular interest as I’m currently looking at how my organisation could use this medium to present information online.

Youtube was, unsurprisingly, the main focus, and Christian presented a comprehensive list of reasons why it was the best option for him. These included:

• The excellent community built up around Youtube
• The Related Videos function, which can drive more traffic your way
• The ability to add Closed Captioning and automatically translate them to a variety of languages
• A good analytics package, including the ability to identify your videos’ hotspots (allowing you to see which parts of your video people are interested in, and at which point they might be losing interest)
• The ability to add collaborative functions, including peer annotation
• A great API which allows easy integration into your own site

I’ve had my concerns about using Youtube, and I put these to Christian in the pub afterwards:

Firstly, monetisation – Youtube is owned by Google, and it’s unlikely that they’re fully satisfied by the site’s revenue streams. In theory, Youtube could start inserting adverts into the videos whenever it wants, with a potentially serious impact on the videos hosted there. Christian optimistically dismisses this, though. He points out that we, the user, make Youtube what it is. We provide the videos, and we have the power to withdraw them if we’re not happy. A good point, but I wonder if it is enough to convince senior management?

My other concern was around the ability to comment on videos. We’ve seen disasters in the past with organisations putting videos online and getting a torrent of abuse in the Comments section. You can of course turn Commenting off, as Christian points out, but I wonder if doing so might send out the wrong messages about openness and our desire to listen to our citizens. Such one-way conversations seem to fly in the face of Web 2.0, although the risks of allowing unmoderated comments probably make such an approach unavoidable.

Other issues discussed in the session included mention of sites such as VodPod and Vimeo, as well as the practicalities of making a decent video on a tiny budget. There are some pretty good guidelines out there, it was suggested, and with a low to mid-range digital video recorder you should get decent results.

Chris Holme of the Scottish Government reminded us that there is already plenty of great video out there, and that organisations have been doing this for decades. As such, the medium is not new, and the business cases are long-established. Finally, third parties such as news agencies are desperate for video content, and will actively seek out your content without the need for too much promotion. This makes it potentially a very effective and cost-efficient medium.

Some people I met

• Great to see Alex Stobart (@alexstobart) again – hope we can work together on some things.
• Nice to chat to Baxter Tocher (@btocher) – and thanks for the dabr tip!
• Interesting chat with Tony Purcell of W00tonomy – I definitely share your vision for improving our web content!
• Useful chat with Pete Martin (@smuji) and thanks for sharing your notes with me!
• The post-event pub discussions went late into the evening with Alex and Christian, Duncan Stephen (@doctorvee), Chris Holme, Katie Cooke, Ross Lyon (@ly0nsd3n) and others.
• Sorry if I’ve missed anyone out – hope to see you all next time! (next ScotWeb2 event is on June 19th)

Related links

• The official Barcamp Wiki for the event – with list of attendees
  
• Scotweb2 blog – including a summary of the event
  
• Some photos of the event on Flickr, courtesy of Calgacus Wasabi

Upgrade my host

My main website is currently hosted for free at Awardspace. They have been fantastic – only a bit of downtime and lots of features. However, it’s time to upgrade to something a bit more professional, so I’m now looking around for the best paid options. I’ll need to be able to host a couple of blogs too (including this one after I found an interesting article on Why Your Business Blog Shouldn’t Be On BlogSpot.com). Edit – I’m now on WordPress

Complete a list of resources for implementing WCAG 2.0

There are lots of resources appearing, but there still isn’t a comprehensive source of everything you’ll need to design and test according to the new guidelines. I hope to bring together an ever-increasing collection of resources for this purpose, building on it with my own experiences as I work on new projects.

Figure out how to make the most of Twitter

I’ve only recently started using Twitter, and I’m still not entirely sure what purpose it is fulfilling. I’m sure that I should be on there; I’m just not sure why. So I’m going to follow more people, post more updates, promote my presence on there, and see what happens.

One situation where I think Twitter could help is within my organisation, as a tool for communicating to staff exactly what I’m up to on a day to day basis. For many, our website and online presence remains a bit of a mystery, and I want increase understanding amongst colleagues so that they understand what the web has to offer. By posting regular tweets about the projects that I’m working on and the latest things we’ve put online, people will hopefully get a better idea of the breadth of content we publish, the projects we’re supporting, and the process involved in getting things online. The brevity of Twitter lends itself to this far more than, for example, a traditional blog.

Publish more videos online

I really want to get to grips with Youtube and its peers this year, to get a solid idea of the functionality of these services and to kick-start some research on the possibilities and limitations of such platforms. The first obvious step is to get stuff on there – some will be basic footage of local events, others will be experimental projects (I’m very interested in time-lapse photography, for example).

One major project that I’m hoping our organisation will support later in the year is to get much of the content of our corporate website available online as British Sign Language video, with audio and captions. This will primarily benefit severely or profoundly deaf individuals for whom BSL is the first language (1500 of which are estimated to be living within our authority alone), but could also help other deaf users, individuals with low literacy, blind users, and many others.

Get up close and personal with WordPress

I’m also hoping to get to grips with self-installing and customising hosting WordPress, not just for my own blogs, but also as a platform for building CMS-driven websites. Worpress offers tremendous potential for very effective customisation, and I’ll write more about my experiences as I progress.

Be more secure

I think online security is going to continue to increase in importance in 2009, with more peolpe expecting higher standards of security and the penalties for poor security becoming ever harsher. I’ve already overhauled all my passwords, and will next be looking at beefing up my security practices across the board.

So that’s it – a few things which will be keeping me busy over the next 12 months. Stay tuned to see how I get on.

Part of the business case that I’m writing involves appraising the options for hosting such videos. Option 1, in-house hosting, seem an unlikely choice due to recent performance issues and the potential demands such content could place on our servers. Options 2 and 3 are outlined below:

Option 2 – Youtube

Summary

Youtube is an internationally recognised brand, now owned by Google. Nottinghamshire County Council posted a number of videos onto Youtube in January 2008, featuring the CEO discussing staff restructuring.

Costs and issues

Currently there is no charge for posting content to Youtube. A potential risk is that Google have announced that they intend to introduce advertising to Youtube videos in 2008 , and the nature and suitability of these adverts can not yet be ascertained. There are also no guarantees over the permanence or quality of service provided.

Restricted access

A problem also exists in that Youtube is currently blocked by the Council’s web filters. A change in policy would be required to allow access either for selected staff only or on a Council-wide level.

Option 3 – public.tv

Summary

Many local organisations and government bodies have posted content to public.tv – a site owned by media company Ten Alps. This includes the Scottish Government, Scottish Parliament and the University of Edinburgh.

Costs and issues

There is no charge to post videos to public.tv. As with Youtube, there are no guarantees over the permanence or quality of service provided. The public.tv is not blocked by the Council filters. Advertising is present on the public.tv website, but does not appear within the video presentation itself.

Based on these findings my colleagues are now looking more closely at Public.tv to see what it can offer us. I’m excited by the possibilities that this sort of feature could present to us, and will post details of any progress here in due course.