A friend of mine on Twitter today was talking about a new venture of video on the internet. I piped up with a note about making video content accessible to those of us who can’t hear dialog. He said good point but where do we start?
So this is a compilation of resources to answer that question.
YouTube supports closed captions and video creators/uploaders can add them to their own content: Getting Started: Captions / Subtitles definition – YouTube Help
But what if you want to caption someone else’s video? Like a movie trailer for example. Check out Overstream.net, they have a tool that lets you add the captions to their site but stream the content from another site.
Other options include services that will provide captions or subtitles free on request:
SubPLY looks like they are using an automatic speech to text translation. I need to test this one as that never does work well automatically.
Project Read:On used to take requests but seems to be only for-hire these days.
And be sure to check out Bill Cresswell, who’s motto is captioning the internet one video at a time.
Of course the simplest option to providing Equal Communication Access is to just paste the text as a transcript. This is the better-than-nothing approach and very much appreciated. 🙂
