I was criticized by a deaf person for posting a one-minute long closed-captioned spoken video on YouTube the other day. The deaf person said that they were disappointed that I didn’t sign my video and that, being a sign language interpreter, I “represent the deaf community.” This is my response, signed and closed-captioned.
I created this video on October 3, 2006, and at the time, I was one of the first handful of people in the world to publish a video using Google Video’s new closed-captioning implementation. I just found out that YouTube now supports the same method (which makes sense, since they were bought by Google a couple of years ago). Apparently, though, YouTube has been supporting this closed-captioning method since Fall 2008. Who knew? Anyway, since this method of closed-captioning is now supported here, I’m uploading my old Google Video movie with its accompanying closed-caption file so people can view it via the more popular and extensible YouTube.
I used YouTube’s “Captions and Subtitles” feature to upload a subtitle file. I hand-coded the subtitle file in BBEdit using the subtitle (.sub) format. To view the video with captions, click the up-arrow button on the bottom-right corner of the screen and choose CC, English: English captions.
