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Archive for December, 2009

Google Adds Captions for Deaf to YouTube Videos

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

The deaf and hard-of-hearing Internet users now have a way to watch free videos on YouTube. Google announced earlier this year that it has added automatic caption capability to videos on YouTube.

The change has been lauded by advocates for the hearing impaired, such as the Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Milwaukee. The center called it “great news for deaf and hard-of-hearing Internet users” in a press release.

Machine-generated captions on videos from 13 YouTube “partner channels” will initially be available only in English, with plans to expand the feature to include more languages in the future. YouTube users have had a manual version of the service since last year, but it has not been broadly used and does not include most of the site’s content.

The caption project was led by Ken Harrenstein, a deaf Google software engineer.

“In some ways this reminds me of when closed-captioning (CC) was first introduced,” said Mr. Harrenstein in a Google news release. “Before that, little on TV made sense, and the only movies worth paying for were foreign films, because those were the only ones with subtitles! I now have the same sense of hope that I did then.”

Full Article at Epoch Times

 

About: The Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Many federal laws have been enacted to require greater access to telecommunications. There is only one problem – the federal laws that we worked so hard to enact over the past 20 years have not kept pace with many new technologies. For instance, television shows that are re-shown over the Internet are under no requirement to be captioned – even if they had captions when they were shown on TV! Also, small TVs, cell phones, PDAs, and other mobile devices are not required to display captions, even though they are now capable of showing TV shows. Also, for now, 9-1-1 emergency call centers cannot accept calls from people who need to communicate in video or via pagers.

During the spring of 2007, a new coalition, the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology (COAT), was established to try to fix these problems. Founding organizations include Communication Service for the Deaf (CSD), the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), and the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB). As of April 10, 2009, over 230 national, regional, state or local organizations are members of the COAT.

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Youtube’s New Technology Brings Captions to the Deaf Community

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: November 19, 2009

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In the first major step toward making millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired people, Google unveiled new technologies on Thursday that will automatically bring text captions to many videos on the site.

The technology will also open YouTube videos to a wider foreign market and make them more searchable, which will make it easier for Google to profit from them.

While the technology can insert captions only on English-language speech, Google is giving users the choice of using its automatic translation system to read the captions in 51 languages. That could broaden the appeal of YouTube videos to millions of other people who do not speak English but could use the captioning technology to read subtitles in their native language.

The speech recognition technology that Google uses to turn speech into text is not new; Google currently uses it to transcribe voice mail messages for users of its Google Voice service. But Ken Harrenstien, a deaf engineer who helped develop the automatic captioning system, said the technology had never been applied on such a large scale.

“This is something that I have dreamt of for many years,” Mr. Harrenstien said, speaking through an interpreter. “To see it happen is amazing.”

Full Article here