Google and YouTube: Leading the Way for Internet Captioning
By Cheryl Heppner
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Today was my day to learn cool and exciting new stuff. I went with Debbie
Jones, NVRC’s Technology Specialist to a special event by Google and YouTube
at which they would be making an announcement. The invitation had hints it
would be something important to do with accessibility. YouTube is all about
video so immediately I wondered if they’d had a breakthrough with captioning. How
could I stay away?
I arrived at the Google office on New York Avenue in DC and got a hug from
Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, while I was fresh off the
elevator, followed another just moments later from his wife Sigrid. The
Google folks were easy to pick out. They had black tees with a fingerspelled
Google, each letter in a different color.
In the meeting room I found Debbie and lots of fellow advocates – Nancy
Bloch, Brenda Battat, David Nelson, Shane Feldman, Cindy King, Lise Hamlin,
Bob Davila, Tom Wlodkowski, Rosaline Crawford, Jenifer Simpson and so many
more.
Introduction by Jonas Klink
We all settled in our chairs to hear Jonas Klink, the Accessibility Product
Manager at Google start things up by introducing Vint as a critical element
for his unwavering support of an accessible Internet. Vint took the stage
and spoke of Google’s goal to organize the world’s information and make it
universally accessible for everyone. He said that access was personally
important to him as both he and Sigrid have hearing loss, and joked that
Sigrid hears so well now with her two cochlear implants that he had to buy a
bigger house so she could have bigger parties.
Background Information from Vint Cerf
YouTube has shown that there is an extraordinary desire by the world’s
population to express itself through video. Over 20 hours of video are
uploaded each minute to YouTube. It has become a powerful medium of personal
expression and an equally powerful medium of political expression, giving an
individual the ability to tell the rest of the world what is happening. But
accessing You Tube has also posed a huge challenge for individuals who are
deaf or hard of hearing as well as individuals who are blind or visually
impaired.
Google has a history of coming up with new ideas and then putting out a
product for beta testing to see what people will do with it. The company is
constantly seeking all kinds of ways to help people find information, and
making that information internationally available and usable.
Vint showed a chart with data about the languages most used by people on the
Internet. In the top spot was English, followed by Chinese. But the chart
also noted the number of people with disabilities, including the large
number of people who are deaf, blind, have poor vision, and limited
dexterity.
In trying to improve accessibility, Google Apps has been focusing on
keyboard access. Google’s Android was released as open source to encourage
developers to add functionality. Its Chrome browser is also an open
platform.
“Google is fully prepared to pursue accessible features in all its products
and services,” Vint said.
Ken Harrenstien Introduces Captioning Features
Vint Cerf introduced Ken Harrenstein, and engineer who is deaf, who worked
with him on DeafNet, an early attempt to bring the Internet to people who
are deaf. He called Ken the strongest proponent and technical contributor to
access initiatives who is passionate about this work.
Ken, who gave his presentation in sign language, talked of his frustration
during the many years he has pursued the goal of access to the Internet. He
reviewed what is already available, beginning with YouTube, where videos can
display captions and subtitles. There are options to increase or decrease
the size of the captions and also to add or remove the panel behind the
captions.
Next Ken demonstrated the ability to change the captions to another of the
51 different languages that YouTube supports. This translation feature is
still in beta testing but I enjoyed making use of my rusty French when he
selected that. He demonstrated Japanese as well.
Hidden Treasure in Captioning
For a great incentive for anyone to use captioning, nothing beats the fact
that the text makes a video instantly searchable. To show the power this
brings to the Internet, Ken did a search for “one small step for man” on You
Tube, and from among the options he chose a captioned video of the famous
walk on the moon.
Since their launch for the first time in 2008, the growth in captions on
YouTube has surprised and pleased Ken. He said there are now hundreds of
thousands of captioned videos. I did a lazy woman’s search to check this
out, going to YouTube.com, entering the word “captions” in the search box
and clicking to see the result. Holy cow! There were 20 pages of results
with a total of about 32,300.
Challenges Remain
There are still some hurdles before captions can begin to be commonplace on
the Internet. Ken did a nice job of sidestepping the geek talk to help us
visualize the Internet as a bunch of pipes that water runs through with
20-23 hours’ worth of videos being uploaded each minute. Then he showed a
photo of Niagara falls to demonstrate how only a small amount of those hours
are captioned. “Who’s going to bottle that water?” he asked.
And then he answered. This Google/YouTube event celebrated the launch of
speech recognition and YouTube to make captioning widespread. Thirteen
educational partners have joined forces for an early launch. Among the
partners are University of California at Berkeley and at LA, Columbia
University, Duke, MIT, Stanford, Yale, and University of New South Wales.
Google will add more partners as quickly as they can.
You can see Ken in his black Google tee shirt at the beginning of a year-old
video “YouTube Captions and Subtitles”: http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about.
NVRC Note:
This morning we heard from several people who were listening to news on the
radio. The Google/YouTube event was covered by WAMU and NPR, and it included
mention of NVRC. You can click on the link below to hear the audio and read
the transcript of some WAMU coverage.
Despite New Technology, Internet Accessibility Lags for Deaf and Hard of
Hearing (http://wamu.org/news/09/11/20.php) Source: wamu.org
November 20, 2009 – By Sabri Ben-Achour
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(c)2009 by Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing
Persons (NVRC), 3951 Pender Drive, Suite 130, Fairfax, VA 22030;
www.nvrc.org. 703-352-9055 V, 703-352-9056 TTY, 703-352-9058 Fax. You do not
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For the official scoop from the Official Google Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/