This week I attended the Google and Adobe Share Their Video Accessibility Strategies webinar from 3Play Media with guests Naomi Black, Accessibility Engineering Program Manager at Google and Andrew Kirkpatrick, Group Product Manager Accessibility at Adobe Systems joining Josh Miller, co-founder of 3Play Media to discuss video accessibility strategies, impact of HTML5 on video, recent US legislation regarding captions in videos, and OSMF (Open Source Media Framework).
Check out the recording of the webinar on the 3PlayMedia website.
Top Takeways
- Captions benefit 48 milliion deaf and hard of hearing people (15% of website visitors) in the United States as well as:
- People who speak a second language
- Website visitors and companies who search videos
- People watching a video in a noisy environment
- Adobe Flash CS5.5 supports closed captioning using an open standard
- Adobe Captivate supports closed captioning for eLearning presos and demos
- Google’s Goals for Captioning
- Every video has closed captions
- Make captioning easy to do
- Re-use existing captions files
- Captions meet consumer needs
- Distinction between TV and web is blurred
- Captions should just work everywhere
- Consumers should be albe to control the display
- Users should be able to caption our own videos
- Every video has closed captions
- YouTube Scale
- 4 billion+ views a day
- 60 hours of video uploaded every minute
- Supports 155 languages and dialects
- As of March 2012, 1.6 million videos have captions (not many, Naomi mentioned “it’s a drop in the bucket.”
- YouTube Caption Uploader Tool
- Easily filter movies on YouTube to only show captions
- In the About section for a video, you can see what other languages are available for captions
- Captions can display underneath the speaker
- Feb 2012 update from Google on status of captions in YouTube videos highlighting ability to:
- Change how captions display including font size, font color, and location of captions (you can easily drag and drop the captions to another location on the display)
- Support for many caption formats including: SRT, SBV, CAP, SCC, EBU-STL and more
