Perhaps a Solution?

There's some GREAT news in the captioning world from the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at WGBH, the public broadcasting station in Boston. AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to collaborate with NCAM to establish and manage a new International Captioning Forum to set standards for captioning on any kind of video presented on the Web. This critical mass of industry leaders provides real hope that captioning on the Web will one day be as common as closed-captioning on TV, which is now required in the U.S. by the Federal Communications Commission. It follows other recent positive developments, including Apple making its Quicktime video player caption-friendly, and NBC making a bold decision to invest in captioning for all its prime-time shows that are streamed over the web.

It's yet another breakthrough move by NCAM and WGBH, which have led the way in not only advocating for accessible media in all forms -- whether it be captioning on TV or in the movies, or audio description technology for blind moviegoers, or the booming video-on-the Web medium -- but also in actually making it happen.

More major network channels are setting up video players on their sites..and the good news is, the players show captions! More and more captioned programming is now available through Fox.com. This is a great start...

here are four options I have learned about this week for web video captioning:

• Project ReadOn - lets you submit a video and request captions. http://www.projectreadon.com/.
• BubblePly - lets you make your own "captions" and is not the same thing as professional captioning. http://www.bubbleply.com/. The folks behind BubblePly are also working on a similar function for subtitling.
• DotSub - Subtitling in multiple languages, including English. Videos are posted online for viewing at DotSub.
• Veotag - Similar to BubblePly and DotSub. Add text to a video. Videos are posted online at Veotag.
• Now if only Google Video would add a search option for "captioned" or "subtitled." Until they do, you can search video.google.com using "captioned OR subtitled."

I found this amazing site called: http://www.projectreadon.com/.

Project readOn is a team of people with the singular goal of making online media content available to all, whether you are hard of hearing, simply cannot or do not want sound on, or if the content is in a language other than your native tongue.

We have built a caption player that allows for universal access to online media. Our mission is to distribute this service to as many people globally who need it. Through advertising dollars, grants and the management of meta-data we hope to continue to provide this service indefinitely.

The owners of Project readOn have a long history in online services and closed captioning in the traditional broadcast world, and they bring this wealth of knowledge and expertise to Project readOn.

Our mission is to be at the forefront of the online video revolution by empowering people in the deaf and hard of hearing, and foreign language communities. Our service is also of great value to those who are in situation where they simply cannot or do not want the sound on. Our belief is that captions and subtitles are a universally valuable tool in online video proliferation and should be as commonplace in the online video experience as turning the sound up or down or moving to a different point in the video.

For other medias, I have this great site: http://ncam.wgbh.org/

The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media acts as the research and development arm of WGBH's Media Access Group and is involved in technology and policy and program development to assure that the nation's media and technologies are fully accessible to people with disabilities.

NCAM is an extension of public broadcasting's ground-breaking work in media access that began in 1972 with the establishment of The Caption Center at WGBH and its groundbreaking development of captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing television viewers.

NCAM is dedicated to equal access to media and information. Ongoing activities include: development of technologies that create access to public mass media, development of public media policies, research into how existing access technologies may benefit other populations, outreach to various communities and industries to educate people about media access issues, and support of the public broadcasting community in extending access to new and emerging programming and information.

NCAM strives to make media more accessible in schools, the workplace, the home, and the community. In addition to a focus on the retrofitting of existing media, such as television, radio, newspapers, and theatrical movies, NCAM is designing access into emerging telecommunications such as digital television, convergent media and Web-based multimedia. NCAM's mission is to ensure that the 45 million Americans with little or no access to media's sights and sounds will not be left out of the Information Age.

So, it is so wonderful to know that there are people and companies out there wanting to help the deaf and the hard of hearing's voice be heard..and fighting for our rights to to have full access to TV, Internet, videos, communites, and more.

Really, there is no excuse why the producers can't do captioning, goodness, there are people out in the world who are willing to do the work for free!