MARCH 4, 2010
The Future Will Be Captioned: Improving Accessibility on YouTube
Tens of millions of people in the U.S. experience some kind of hearing
impairment and recent studies have predicted that over 700 million people
worldwide will suffer from hearing impairment by 2015. To address a clear
need, the broadcast industry began running captions on regular video
programming in the early 1970s. Today, closed captions on video are more
prevalent than ever. But generating captions today can be a time-consuming
and complicated process.
Making video easily accessible is something we’re working hard to address at
YouTube. One of the first steps we took was the development of a caption
feature in 2008. In November of last year we released auto-captioning for a
small, select group of partners. Auto-captioning combines some of the
speech-to-text algorithms found in Google’s Voice Search to automatically
generate video captions when requested by a viewer. The video owner can also
download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new
version. Viewers can even choose an option to translate those captions into
any one of 50 different languages — all in just a couple of clicks.
Today, we are opening up auto-captions to all YouTube users. There will even
be a “request processing” button for un-captioned videos that any video
owner can click on if they want to speed up the availability of
auto-captions. It will take some time to process all the available video, so
here are some things to keep in mind:
* While we plan to broaden the feature to include more languages in the
months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English
is spoken.
* Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a
clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice
can’t be auto-captioned. President Obama’s speech on the recent Chilean
Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for
auto-captions.
* Auto-captions aren’t perfect and just like any other transcription, the
owner of the video needs to check to make sure they’re accurate. In other
cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But
please be patient — our speech recognition technology gets better every
day.
* Auto-captions should be available to everyone who’s interested in using
them. We’re also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads
that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you’re having trouble enabling
them for your video, please visit our Help Center: this article is for
uploaders and this article is for viewers.
For content owners, the power of auto-captioning is significant. With just a
few quick clicks your videos can be accessed by a whole new global audience.
And captions can make is easier for users to discover content on YouTube.
Twenty hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Making some of
these videos more accessible to people who have hearing disabilities or who
speak different languages, not only represents a significant advancement in
the democratization of information, it can also help foster greater
collaboration and understanding.
Source:
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/future-will-be-captioned-improving.html