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Closed Captioning In Web Video?
mforbes writes "Like many geeks, I enjoy watching TV, movies, and streamed video. However, in company with 2%-3% of the population, I suffer from a problem known as Central Auditory Processing Disorder, which essentially means that I have difficulty separating the sounds of human voices from various background noises. When watching TV and when watching movies at home, this isn't a problem, as I can simply turn on the closed captioning. (I find radio to be simply an annoyance.) How much effort would it take the major purveyors of Internet video (the broadcasting majors, etc.) to include an option for CCTV? I doubt the bandwidth required would be more than 1% of that required for the video already being presented. As a social libertarian, I would never ask for government regulation of such an enterprise; I ask only that the major studios be aware of the difficulties that those of us with auditory disorders face. If it's rough for me, how much more difficult can it be for someone who can't hear at all?"
Lots of google talks have closed captioning and I use them to watch the talk without listening to the audio. This is really nice sometimes and often beneficial when there are foreign speakers with heavy accents.
The question is not whether the government should regulate it, but whether they already do. I recall a minor uproar amongst Libertarians here last year when it became a legal requirement for web sites in the USA to conform to accessibility regulations (even though it's pretty trivial for standards-compliant code). I wonder if this same law extends to video on the web, and whether the likes of YouTube are operating illegally. There might have been some opt-out clause for user-provided content (otherwise I can't imagine MySpace existing), but what about web sites for TV companies?
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According to the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (A UK charity), there are nearly nine million people deaf and hard of hearing people in the UK alone. I'm sure a fair proportion of these would benefit from subtitling for online content - I certainly would. I am deaf in one ear, and wear a hearing aid to help boost what remains of my hearing in the other, and have difficulty understanding a lot of online content. I find the only reliable medium for subtitles to be DVDs - TV subtitling in the UK differs widely depending on network. And when the content is available online, for example from the BBC, subtitling is not present - even for content that was subtitled on TV!
Whilst it needs to be done, I doubt it will be - seems there's just not enough money in it. Guess I'll have to keep on buying those DVDs, or missing out on a lot of content.
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IMO with today's voice recognition software it shouldn't be very hard to make a problem that makes closed captions on-the-fly. A good commercial product that does this would be very good for people with hearing problems. Maybe software like this already exists, I don't know. Might be worth checking out. Then you can have closed captions with every video/youtube/thingy on the web.
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The hassle is not into distributing it, but in making it ! Hopefully, we are not that far from voice recognition softwares that would caption videos automatically
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I've always wondered why there is so little contact between people doing closed captions and the fansubbing scene. Maybe they see us all as "pirates" and prefer to buy overpriced software rather than using some free tool that has "rip" in its name. I don't know about CC ripping software, but Google Video started years ago by distributing ripped TV shows with ripped captions, and subs for TV series are being ripped from CC and published on shooter, seriessub, opensubtitles, etc. within 2-3 days even if nobody gets paid for doing this, so it can't be that hard. What is hard is transcribing/translating subtitles by ear, but even that is being done by a lot of people, just for the sake of serving the community and fame for their group.
It's getting bigger every year, and as time goes on, it's probably going to become an important minority. I've just recently developed high-frequency hearing loss, and my audiogram shows a typical "artilleryman's notch." Not surprising, considering the time I spent on the Gun Line back in '72. More and more 'Nam vets, Gulf War vets, and Iraq vets are going to be needing hearing aids as time goes by, and it's a good thing that the VA provides them! (FYI, the VA is the biggest purchaser of hearing aids in the US.)
But we're not the only ones who's hearing is being ruined by noise exposure, there's a lot of you out there who are doing it to yourselves. What do you think all those rock concerts are doing to your ears, and your boom-boxes set to 10? Your hearing might be fine now, but give it time and you'll be wanting closed captions just like the rest of us. I think having them on video clips (as an option) is a great idea, but I'd rather see it done voluntarily than by government fiat.
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