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. 
Speaking of Equal Communication Access… I made a vlog a couple of years ago, with the help of the bloggers and vloggers of DeafRead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNLvqY97ak4
A Deaf Pundit’s last blog post: Complaint Filed Against Sorenson
Yes! That’s where I first heard / saw the term. Great video.
Overstream now has over 4000 videos with English Captions by many different authors.
It’s a cool way for lots of people to contribute, and it allows captions to MySpace, DailyMotion, and YouTube Videos.
Bill’s last blog post: More Captioned Videos Added by More Authors
Can I refer you to my good friend’s blog, where in this post she has captioned a segment from the Rick Mercer show.
http://mstoastburner.blogspot.com/2009/06/mercerilocks-and-three-bears-captioned.html
I’ve also emailed Rick with a link, and suggested he do a piece on being hard of hearing for a day. Whether that comes to anything is another matter.
Nice blog post. Thanks
YouTube’s CaptionTube web app should be mentioned here too, as it makes the work of captioning a YouTube video much easier than it used to be. It uses the same kind of intuitive interface that Overstream and DotSub use.
http://captiontube.appspot.com/
Sean
Twitter Comment
@GuyKawasaki @techxav @AlohaArlene @timoreilly – Adding captions to online video content – via @sajego [link to post]
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