Netflix currently has closed captions for 82 percent of all the videos it is streaming. By October 2014, this number will go up to 100 percent, according to a consent decree the company entered to settle a lawsuit with disability rights advocates.
Netflix wants your help – and we are not talking about its troubled stock: The company is looking for volunteers to join its crowdsourced subtitling community. It’s all just an experiment for now, but it could one day become a massively crowdsourced closed captioning operation.
Google’s Hangouts group video chat service just got more accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing people, thanks to a new app called Hangout Captions. The app allows users to caption conversations in real time or use professional transcription services. Machine-powered transcription could be next.
Video of President Obama’s State of the Union speech has already been translated into seven languages, and additional translation efforts are underway online. The multi-lingual captioning efforts are the result of an election year partnership between PBS Newshour, Universal Subtitles and Mozilla.
Imagine citizen journalists could remix radio programs or TV news features simply by copy and pasting text fragments of their manuscripts and closed captions: That’s the idea behind hypermedia, and first tools to make it happen could become available as early as next year.
Netflix is being taken to court over not providing accessible videos for the hearing impaired. In a lawsuit, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) accused Netflix of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by not providing captions for most of its streaming videos.
Companies can now monitor in real time what people are saying about them on various BBC programs, thanks to a new cooperation between the broadcaster and media monitoring service Critical Mention. The service already indexes more than 30 hours of audio and video content per minute.
