Not a very long post this week, but I have just spotted something that I found really interesting. It appears to have slipped under the radar, but as the BBC reported earlier this week, YouTube are to introduce automatic captions on their videos.
As web developers we focus a lot on accessibility and usability. This story made me realise, that as web technologies have progressed (explosion of video, music sharing etc.), accessibility has struggled to keep up with it. Sites like YouTube effectively offer content that is predominately inaccessible by deaf users and that is obviously a major problem (I must point out that they have used captions for a while but users have to physically add them).
From our technical vantage point this is also an interesting development as processing speed will undoubtedly be an issue, it will be very interesting to see how quick and ultimately how usable it is. As with all accessibility measures that are put in place it also helps a much wider audience. Consider a user who doesn’t have access to sound or can’t hear it – mobile users in a crowded public place for example.
The solution was devised by a Google employee who is deaf himself. I think that acts as a reminder that it is usually possible to make things accessible and no amount of excuses or barriers will change that!
Update 25/11/09:
Thinking back to my dissertation, one of the major problems with video on the web was that of indexing and searching. Extracting content from video has always been difficult due to the amount of information stored in every frame. This technology could help this process as it enables speech in the video to be extracted and stored without taking up a lot of room. This means it is then searchable. Watch this space.
Tags: accessibility, Captions, Google, indexing, searching, storage, Video, YouTube
