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.
Posted in Deaf Culture, Interpreting for the Deaf
Tagged accessibility, ASL, closed-captioned, closed-captioning, community, deaf, linguistics, me, opinion, signing, speaking, video
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.
Posted in Writing for the Web
Tagged accessibility, ASL, captions, closed-captioned, closed-captioning, deaf, signing, subtitles, technology, video
This is me singing Cole Porter’s song “I Concentrate on You.” 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.
Posted in Performing Arts
Tagged accessibility, captioning, captions, closed-captioned, closed-captioning, Cole Porter, me, oldies, singing, song, standards, subtitles, video
When I signed on to YouTube this morning, I noticed a new feature called Annotations that allows you to add Speech Bubbles, Notes, and Spotlights to your videos. I realized right away that the first two of these types of annotations gave me a way to caption my videos. They don’t allow for “closed” captioning; everyone who views the video sees them by default. There is a mechanism people can use, though, to turn them off while viewing them by clicking on the Menu button at the bottom of the player.
This morning, I captioned a video that I recorded on Mother’s Day. At the time of this writing, it seems that you can only see the captions if you view the video on YouTube. YouTube says that, once they get this feature out of beta, they will support embeds, meaning that the annotations will show up when videos are shared in blogs, on Facebook, and the like.
Although it was time-consuming (it took me about 45 minutes to an hour to caption a one-minute-forty-five-second [1:45] video), the graphical user interface (GUI) was rather intuitive. From my first experience using YouTube’s Annotations, I am certainly willing to use them again. Hooray for an easier way to caption videos!
Posted in Writing for the Web
Tagged accessibility, captions, closed-captioned, closed-captioning, deaf, hard-of-hearing, screenshot, subtitles, technology, video
While Apple has announced a new Apple TV and movie rentals on iTunes, now more than ever it’s high time they made sure that all their video content is closed captioned. With the writers’ strike affecting television programming and more people switching to downloadable content, let’s not take a huge step backward by delivering a huge mess of inaccessible content over the Internet! The ADA does not require Internet deliverables to be closed-captioned because the ADA was drafted before the Internet, but the spirit of the law is to ensure that people have access to media, and since most movies and television shows have already been captioned for legacy media, it shouldn’t be difficult to deliver those captions along with new media. Apple has put the technology in place for the viewing of closed captions in iTunes, QuickTime, and iPods. The next step is actually selling and renting closed-captioned videos!
Posted in Consumer Reviews, Deaf Culture
Tagged accessibility, Apple, closed-captioning, deaf, download, Internet, iTunes, opinion, review, video rental
One of the first people I saw when I got to the CIT conference on Wednesday was Jared Evans of DeafRead. We went out to lunch together and discussed blogging, vlogs, captioned videos, and voice acting (voiceover) for ASL videos. He’s just as nice and smart a guy as I felt he was from his blogs and vlogs. 
Posted in Deaf Culture
Tagged ASL, CIT, closed-captioning, conference, Conference of Interpreter Trainers, deaf, DeafRead, photo, voice acting, voiceover
This is my first Google video, and my first video with closed captioning. Click on the little “CC” icon to watch the captions.
I must say I’m a bit frustrated by the fact that there’s no sound in the video even though I uploaded the video with sound. I uploaded it as a QuickTime movie (.MOV). I don’t know if that made the difference or not. If anyone can help me make sure the videos I upload retain their audio track, please leave a comment. It was also a bit frustrating that the captioning did not appear as soon as Google said it was finished “processing” my video. I waited about 15-20 minutes for the captions to appear when I played the video (I kept refreshing), but it was after midnight and I really had to go to bed. In the morning, at about 6:30 AM, I watched my video again, and the captions were there.
Anyway, this was a successful experiment from the standpoint of captioning. The one mistake I made was typing one of my time codes with a period, rather than a colon, between the minutes and seconds. This made the time code show up in the captions. I corrected the captioning text and re-uploaded it.
For those interested in captioning, Continue reading
Posted in Writing for the Web
Tagged accessibility, ASL, closed-captioned, closed-captioning, deaf, me, sign language, signing, tutorial, video
This is what happens when you have the slightest error in your captioning text. The numbers at the bottom are not supposed to show up — they are time codes — but they showed up because I accidentally typed “0:01.28.500″ instead of “0:01:28.500.”
Posted in Writing for the Web
Tagged accessibility, closed-captioning, code, Google Video, screenshot
This is great news for deaf and hard of hearing people — and, I think, for hearing people, too! While the world of Internet video has been hurtling forward, deaf people have been thrown backward to a time when television was not captioned. Why? Because almost none of the video on the Internet is subtitled or even closed-captioned! Almost none of the content on YouTube, Google, or any of the news sites is captioned. And you know all those movies and television shows the iTunes Music Store started selling recently? Not captioned. Yeppers. It’s like the old days all over again for deaf people.
And what about for yourself, when you’re sitting at your cubicle at work and you want to watch some Internet video but can’t turn up the volume lest you disturb your neighbor? Yes, I bet my fellow “hearing” people would like captioning on Internet videos, too!
Just think about how closed captioning — something originally created for deaf people — has changed your life. You now can watch multiple televisions in airports, bars, at the gym– all by reading the captions that were put there ostensibly for “the hearing impaired”! Think about all the words you’ve learned to spell, all the late nights you’ve been able to sit up and watch TV without disturbing your roommates or family. And what would life be like if we didn’t learn what the words were for all those sounds we took for granted, like the “mewling” of kittens, or the “tittering” of swallows?
I joined Google Video this evening, and made my first video. It took me about 45 minutes to caption a two-minute video; granted, it was my first attempt. I uploaded my video to Google, and I added the captions. After Google finishes processing my video, I will blog it here.
Thanks to Jared Evans for posting the entry Google Video Has Captions Now!!!
Speaking and signing at the same time, in Pidgin Signed English, I show you how to set your contact information in your addressbook as your vCard. Then I show you how to turn on Bluetooth and send your vCard to other SK3s.
Posted in Consumer Reviews, Interpreting for the Deaf
Tagged ASL, Bluetooth, closed-captioned, closed-captioning, contact, PSE, sharing, Sidekick, signing, sim-com, SK3, tutorial, video
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