Re: YouTube with new accessibility features

I agree that this is exciting news for captioning, and I applaud Google for once again leading the way.  Having a company as influential as Google pay attention and devote significant resources to accessibility is a very important breakthrough.

However, I also urge everyone interested in captions to give this new approach and software a thorough test.  While auto-caps is not yet available for public consumption, auto-timing is.  I've been testing it today and have found that it's reasonably accurate in some situations but has a lot of room for improvement.  When auto-caps becomes available for everyone to use, I urge everyone here to give it a good workout and provide useful feedback to Google.  As Google admits, auto-caps' output is not now perfect.  But it is crucial that its output *becomes* perfect in order for it to be optimally useful for both viewers and authors.

Geoff/NCAM



On 11/19/09 10:44 PM, "Silvia Pfeiffer" <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Thought you should know: Google/YouTube continues to paint the way -
of follow John Foliot here. :)

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.html

They provide automated captioning using speech recognition, but only
for specific publishers right now.

What's more interesting is that they allow for the provisioning of
transcripts and automatically create the time-alignment. This is very
similar to a service that John Foliot explained in the Video
Accessibility Workshop before TPAC.

I'm very excited about this - now they just need to start doing
textual audio descriptions and hook them up to screenreaders and we
have made a huge step forward in the online video world.

Now we just need to do the same for HTML5. :-)

Cheers,
Silvia.