Google and YouTube: Leading the Way for Internet Captioning, Part 2

By Cheryl Heppner

November 2009

Editor: The good news is that Google intends to caption YouTube videos. The bad news is that they will be using speech recognition software to do it. Don't get me wrong! I'm a big fan of speech recognition. But I have yet to be convinced that a speech recognition program can do a decent job of transliterating the speech of any random person. I'd love to be wrong on this!

Anyway, here's Cheryl with her report on the meeting where this announcement was made. This is part two of three parts.

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Here's part one

Ken Harrenstien Introduces Captioning Features

Vint Cerf introduced Ken Harrenstein, and engineer who is deaf, who worked with him on DeafNet, an early attempt to bring the Internet to people who are deaf. He called Ken the strongest proponent and technical contributor to access initiatives who is passionate about this work.

Ken, who gave his presentation in sign language, talked of his frustration during the many years he has pursued the goal of access to the Internet. He reviewed what is already available, beginning with YouTube, where videos can display captions and subtitles. There are options to increase or decrease the size of the captions and also to add or remove the panel behind the captions.

Next Ken demonstrated the ability to change the captions to another of the 51 different languages that YouTube supports. This translation feature is still in beta testing but I enjoyed making use of my rusty French when he selected that. He demonstrated Japanese as well.

Hidden Treasure in Captioning

For a great incentive for anyone to use captioning, nothing beats the fact that they are text makes a video instantly searchable. To show the power this brings to the Internet, Ken did a search for "one small step for man" on You Tube, and from among the options he chose a captioned video of the famous walk on the moon.

Since their launch for the first time in 2008, the growth in captions on YouTube has surprised and pleased Ken. He said there are now hundreds of thousands of captioned videos. I did a lazy woman's search to check this out, going to YouTube.com, entering the word "captions" in the search box and clicking to see the result. Holy cow! There were 20 pages of results with a total of about 32,300.

Challenges Remain

There are still some hurdles before captions can begin to be commonplace on the Internet. Ken did a nice job of sidestepping the geek talk to help us visualize the Internet as a bunch of pipes that water runs through with 20-23 hours' worth of videos being uploaded each minute. Then he showed a photo of Niagara falls to demonstrate how only a small amount of those hours are captioned. "Who's going to bottle that water?" he asked.

And then he answered. This Google/YouTube event celebrated the launch of speech recognition and YouTube to make captioning widespread. Thirteen educational partners have joined forces for for an early launch. Among the partners are University of California at Berkeley and at LA, Columbia University, Duke, MIT, Stanford, Yale, and University of New South Wales. Google will add more partners as quickly as they can.

You can see Ken in his black Google tee shirt at the beginning of a year-old video "YouTube Captions and Subtitles": http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about.

Watch for Part 3 for more interesting details!

NVRC Note:

This morning we heard from several people who were listening to news on the radio. The Google/YouTube event was covered by WAMU and NPR, and it included mention of NVRC. You can click on the link below to hear the audio and read the transcript of some WAMU coverage.

Despite New Technology, Internet Accessibility Lags for Deaf and Hard of Hearing (http://wamu.org/news/09/11/20.php) Source: wamu.org
November 20, 2009 - By Sabri Ben-Achour

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