DATA: Breaking News: Google announces YouTube Captioning

PPSV´s Digital Accessibility Trend Analysis (DATA): Global disability policy, legal and marketplace drivers

BREAKING NEWS E-BULLETIN

At the end of November, Google announced the preliminary roll-out of automatic captioning in YouTube, an innovation that takes advantage of Google´s speech recognition technology to turn spoken word into text captions.

While this will benefit the deaf and hearing impaired, it will have broader effects as well, as the YouTube captions can be automatically translated, making video more accessible across languages. While users have had the ability to manually caption videos for a while, automatic captions and automatically timed transcripts lower the barriers and helps open YouTube to everyone.

At the November meeting, over 60 accessibility leaders from the National Association of the Deaf, Gallaudet University, AAPD and other organizations joined Google to be the first to learn about these new features as well as provide direct feedback to Google engineers.

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Source: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-on-youtube.html