Posts Tagged ‘Youtube’

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

Youth Parliament Elections campaign – a social media case study

Monday, July 12th, 2010
Make Your Vote Count! Scottish Youth Parliament Elections

Campaign graphic

Later this week I’ll be attending a national awards ceremony, at which one of our campaigns has been nominated for an award. ** UPDATE – we won! **

Edinburgh’s 2009 Scottish Youth Parliament election campaign has already won a Bronze award in the Marketing Society’s Star Awards – the only local authority campaign to win in any category. It was also a finalist in the CIPR national awards, in the category of best campaign under £10k.

It has now been shortlisted for the “Government to Citizen Communications” category of the Good Communication Awards, and I’ll be representing my organisation at the ceremony on Thursday.

The tremendous reception that the campaign has received is thanks to the enthusiasm, innovation and hard work not only of my colleagues, but also of the young people involved in the elections, and I’m proud to represent such a campaign as just one of the many people who worked to make it happen.

The following gives a flavour of the efforts, and hopefully offers some inspiration to others, especially those involved in e-participation and youth engagement.

More about the campaign and our use of social media

Creating a dynamite campaign

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Today I found myself in the opulent surroundings of Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel for a breakfast seminar, run by Precedent, on creating dynamite campaigns. The following are some of my notes.

The seminar was lead by John Campbell and Mark Baillie, and John began by considering the good, the bad and the ugly. Examples of good campaigns included:

  • Coca-Cola’s 80s/90s “Can’t Beat the Feeling” adverts – a tune that many of us still recognise today and an excellent example of strong branding.
  • The University of Birmingham’s Circle of Influence campaign to raise £60 million. Astonishingly, they’ve already reached the £50m mark, combining online strategies with a more traditional print campaign.
  • Drinkaware’s drink diary, which allows you to monitor your drinking and compare with friends, adding a social element to the mix. You can even download a phone app. I couldn’t help thinking this could backfire though – imagine people using the diary to compare how much they could drink in a week and actually trying to beat each other!
  • Volkswagen’s Fun Theory website, featuring various viral videos aimed at making people change their behaviour for the better:

John notes that common factors to all of these successes were creativity and innovation.

More on creating dynamite content

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

Accessibility and social media – my presentation

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Those of you who read my overview of accessibility and social media back in June know that I spoke about the subject at the ScotWeb2 unconference. Liz Ayzan, from LGEO Research, has kindly posted a section of my talk to YouTube (also available via Liz’s blog post about the event). I thought (in keeping with the very theme of the talk) that I should offer a text alternative of that video. A full summary of the talk can still be found on my original overview (as linked above).

View the video and read the transcript of my presentation

Accessibility and Social Media – an overview

Thursday, June 18th, 2009
My talk at Scotweb2

My presentation at ScotWeb2 - photo courtesy of Jadu

This post explores some of the issues that I plan to discuss with attendees at tomorrow’s ScotWeb2 event in Edinburgh, regarding the current state of accessibility on Social Media sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. I hope to have some interesting feedback to post here after tomorrow, so for now here’s an overview of the subject. I’ve also thrown in a few open questions to kick-start the discussion.

[Edit: see a summary of the event on the ScotWeb2 blog]

Read the rest of my introduction to Social Media accessibility

Social Media lessons learned the hard way

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Barely a week goes past without another news story about some hapless individual getting into trouble as a result of Social Media. Accordingly I’ve decided to keep a record of some of these tales of woe. See the list of Social Media gaffes

Deaf Awareness Week and BSL video online

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

This week (4th – 10th May 2009) is Deaf Awareness Week. This year’s theme, “Look At Me”, aims to:

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:
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Report from Scottish Public Sector Barcamp 27th March

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
Microsoft Offices at Waverley Gate

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.
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