Jared Evans Global Microbrand

A technology reporter from Wall Street Journal Online has contacted me about the state of captioning for online video clips.  I think it’ll be a very interesting article to read once it comes out!

This is what I had to say to the reporter:

Internet has traditionally been a place where I could, as a Deaf person, go and get equal access to information.  The vast majority of content on the Internet has been text and images which don’t require hearing abilities in order to understand the content.  Lately, online video clips are becoming more prevalent on the Internet and the issue of equal access starts to come into play.

Nowadays, when I visit the websites of many of the major media companies, they
show their professional created content as online video clips.  However, these online video clips are now a step backward for the Deaf people.  I view it as a blatant slap across our collective Deaf face, since these same companies already have decades of experience in adding captions to content on TV but are opting to not doing the same with their online content.

The online video clips have exactly the same content that is already shown on TV with closed-captioned text. It would be a child’s play for the media companies to take the existing data of the TV video with its closed-captioned text and timecodes and re-encode it into a web format that gives full access to all the information.  If done properly, computer programs could automatically do this encoding process at a very small incremental cost. All the hard manual work of creating the subtitles has already been done on the original content for TV.

There are many deaf people who are actively adding subtitles to their homemade American Sign Language (ASL) video clips so that hearing people can understand what they are signing.  If these amateurs can do it, so can professional media companies with their departments of video experts and so can the professional bloggers with greater resources and a large following (such as Robert Scoble who create many interesting videocasts that are not yet captioned).

Anyone who is involved in creating online video clips should work on the assumption, that not everyone in the world can hear and take the appropriate steps to increase their potential viewing audience. Adding subtitles to the video clips is simply the right thing to do in the face of a global audience.

For shining example of online companies that have enabled subtitles for video clips, look to Tecnocato, AOL, and Google Video with their new closed captioned features!  All the other companies and bloggers should follow in their footprints.

I have even created a video clip that covers this very issue and I also subtitled it for your viewing pleasure:

http://jarednevans.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/my_first_video_.html