Week 13: Accessibility News

Google has added Automatic Captions, Automatic Timing to YouTube

This is too cool and I want to make a video just to try it out.

The automatic speech recognition technology being used in Google Voice was combined with the existing captioning technology used by YouTube to create automatic captioning. The captions are created without any extra input or effort on the part of the person who created the video. It does it for you. It's not perfect so they're not making it available to everyone yet but there's a list of channels at the end of the article above that have it available.

The automatic timing is also cool and it is available to all YouTube users. It makes it easier to add captions to videos by figuring out when the words are said for you. All you have to do is upload a text file containing all the words in the video. If it's a video that you wrote a script to create you have that anyway.

My only question at this point is how do you add non-verbal captioning with these tools. Sometimes captions will explain off screen sounds and describe the music being played. Perhaps that's to be left to the annotation tool.

Cushing Academy's Library Goes Digital

I first heard about this story on NPR. Cushing Academy not only added a huge database of books to their library but they removed most of the physical books. The latter had some people upset: The president of the American Library Association said that it will hurt the students who don't take to the technology; they'll learn better if they can handle the material. The Dean says that students weren't using paper sources for research anymore.

It's an interesting argument from the president of the ALA. Some people are visual learners. Are some people tactile learners? Or perhaps she simply meant that frustrations with an electronic device would be a barrier to learning.

Electronic sources have the potential of making the material more accessible to the disabled but the text-to-speech capability only works in the Kindle if the author and/or publisher allows it.

More on Accessibilty: Introduction to Web Accessibility from the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative