Basic web accessibility is a known commodity now. Web applications can almost be made accessible; eventually web application accessibility will also be a known commodity, too. Those are clear wins.
But nearly ten years after specifications first required it, online captioning still pretty much does not exist. That’s probably going to change, and the way it’s going to change is by government regulation.
Does that strike you as unthinkable? Do you view the web as a libertarian place where old-media laws barely apply, if at all? Well, prepare for a shock. Legislation is probably coming. And not only should you let it happen, you should get behind it—but only if it’s done using open standards.
Captioning is required, but you wouldn’t know it from the real world#section2
If you’re reading A List Apart, then you know that every web-accessibility specification requires captioning of multimedia for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. WCAG 1 (and the Samurai corrections), WCAG 2, Section 508—they’re all the same. You have to caption your online video.
Some specs also allow transcripts, which are as good as useless for all but the shortest and simplest of videos. Other specs may also allow sign language, which, “Deafness and the User Experience” notwithstanding, makes video accessible to a minority within a minority.
“Closed” captioning is a problem, not a solution#section3
Online captioning—and let’s define that as captioning on anything delivered by internet protocols, including a download to your iPod—barely exists, and one reason for that is an insistence on closed captioning, i.e., captioning you have to turn on. This is a failed holdover from television broadcasting, where a single channel has to work for everyone. That’s why captions are hidden in broadcast signals.
But that method has no relevance whatsoever to the online world, where you can serve up as many versions of a video as you like. Closed captioning exists to hide captioning from sensitive hearing people, not to provide captioning to people who need it and will never turn it off.
“Closecaptioning” is a semi-familiar concept to a lot of people, for whom it is the single indivisible word I just quoted. Everyone with more than five years’ experience doing captioning has done mostly closed captioning or nothing but that. As a result, everybody in the business is going full steam ahead trying to gin up some kind of closed-captioning system for online video. It’s all they know.
The four major online video types (QuickTime, Windows Media, RealPlayer, and the one that ate them all, Flash) technically support closed captioning in one way or another—often several ways. Hence every video format needs its own specific closed captions. Are you, like the BBC, transcoding video into dozens of formats for the iPlayer and other platforms? Well, guess what: You’ll have to transcode your caption formats, too. Does that sound easy, “because it’s just text”? It isn’t easy.
- You can’t rely on Unicode character encoding. Systems have an annoying tendency to use their own encoding, or rely on the encoding of a text file, or simply not declare one and hope for the best.
- Caption positioning isn’t always preserved, or even supported the same way across platforms. (There are no right-justified captions in RealPlayer, for example.) There are people who, to this very day, do not understand that captions must be positioned. (Such as captioners in the British Isles, who set nearly every caption bottom-center.) Color isn’t always supported, either.
- Fonts are a mess everywhere in captioning, but any captioning source that assumes monospaced fonts (e.g., an analogue TV captioning system) is going to break in unpredictable ways when translated to a proportional font—even to a nonfont such as Arial. (Did you center your captions by typing little space characters in front of the line? Those spaces are going to collapse.)
Fundamentally, closed captioning of online video requires two or more files—the video file, the caption file, and probably a third file to mate the two. Do you think those files are a happy nuclear family that will never be split up?
What about players? How do you turn captions on and off? The YouTube technique (see below) could not possibly be worse—an unlabeled menu that only works via mouse. An interface like that one will violate the (universally ignored) User Agent Accessibility Guidelines and common sense, yet this is exactly the sort of half-baked, inaccessible, untested interface design you can expect on all players.
That’s just a partial list of the problems with closed captioning of online video. But everyone who is even pretending to address the issue of captioning is rushing headlong down that path. I’ve been telling people for years that closed captioning, as a general approach, just is not going to work for online video. That will continue to be true even if I’m the only person saying it and everyone is tired of my saying it.
What’s the alternative? Open captioning, i.e., captioning everyone sees. You’d have two files, a captioned video and an uncaptioned video. Pick one and you’re done. The issue of typography becomes even more important, and you’d need an external file to make videos searchable, but open captioning just works, right then and there, with no hassle.
The voluntary approach#section4
Thus far, online captioning has been strictly voluntary. How well has that been working out? Not very well. Online captioning is effectively nonexistent, and not a single attempt to remedy the problem has worked.
Of course the biggest news is Google YouTube’s alleged support for captioning. We’re all supposed to applaud this, but in fact YouTube’s implementation further entrenches the confusion between captions and subtitles. The explanatory video that YouTube produced mixes captions and subtitles and doesn’t even bother to position them correctly. (It also pretends that the way to make sign language accessible to non-speakers is just to add subtitles. Blind people can’t watch the signing or read the subtitles.)
In effect, YouTube’s presentation format is subtitling—bottom-centered titles, typically two lines max, (though sometimes up to four). And this is one of many cases where typography pretty much hasn’t been considered. I hope you can read white Helvetica or Arial on a black mask.
Noticeably absent from YouTube’s announcement was a link to the now-ancient announcement of Google Video’s support for captioning. (Sort of like how people forgot about a functionally equivalent announcement from AOL in 2006.) A year later, there are still only about 100 videos with captioning on Google Video, and some of those are merely subtitled, not captioned. This is a failure by any standard. While the YouTube captioning page specifically states that captions can be searched, you can’t search YouTube to find all the captioned videos. So who knows how many there really are? In all likelihood, next to none.
That bit about searching captions is important. One reason Google has added captioning is for accessibility, but the primary reason is to make video searchable. Google Video even wants you to upload a timecoded transcript, and Google separately launched a limited speech-recognition service. I want everything searchable, too, but I’d prefer a bit more honesty up front. They’re mostly doing this for business reasons, not to help deaf people. (And now they’ll even machine-translate your “captions” for you. Machine translation will work as badly there as it does anywhere else.)
In the wake of the YouTube announcement, for some reason TechCrunch sponsored 5,000 free “captioned” videos via SubPLY, another of the start ups in that field (cf. DotSUB). The use cases that were listed in TechCrunch’s announcement were actually for subtitling—yet another confusion. And the results aren’t great—you can get two sets of captions, each unreadable for different reasons, right on top of one another.
What Google did was to implement yet another technical variation of a voluntary closed-captioning system. Of course it isn’t working. It has never worked before.
Legislation#section5
Laws and regulations may well need to be passed requiring the captioning of online video.
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Nothing will change in the U.S. in the foreseeable future. Regulations under the Americans with Disabilities Act (recently renewed) may be expanded to include captioning at movie theaters and at stadiums, but that’s about it. A draft bill to expand accessibility to the online sphere is just that, a bill.
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In Canada, an important yet almost unknown set of hearings takes place in November 2008, held by the CRTC, the broadcasting regulator. Its initial filings have challenged broadcasters to prove why their websites should not be “W3C compliant.” That could mean anything, but it certainly means that online video would be captioned. There’s been other discussion about requiring online captioning. This would be a departure, as the legislation that empowers the CRTC to regulate broadcasting does not apply to the internet—although, after a separate hearing that’s coming up, that may change.
But the Canadian constitution (the Charter of Rights and Freedoms) and the Canadian Human Rights Act arguably supersede that other legislation. In short, disabled people’s right to be free of discrimination trumps the belief, however fallacious, that the internet cannot or should not be regulated.
Additionally, regulations in the province of Ontario may unwittingly require national and transnational corporations doing business there to caption everything.
- In Australia, a much-delayed senate inquiry into captioning may or may not be proceeding, but, as a separate discussion paper explains, it explicitly covers online captioning. The timing is interesting, coming as it does after the expiry of an exemption from prosecution granted to Australian TV broadcasters in return for captioning significantly less than 100% of their programming. One of three things could happen—nothing, new legislation, or another human rights exemption in return for some captioning.
The Canadian and Australian cases are important. Once either or both of these constitutional democracies require online captioning, dominoes begin to topple. The effects will be felt in the U.S. Of course the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Association of Broadcasters will fight any captioning requirements. But Canada and Australia also speak English, and the effect of requiring captioning there would be to require captioning in America, too. It becomes impossible in practice to serve a video with captions to Canada or Australia and serve the same video without captions to the U.S. You’ve got only one video in the first place; that’s why you went with closed captioning.
Who’s writing the standards?#section6
How are people trying to solve the entire problem of standardization of online video? By commissioning new sets of standards from organizations that have something to gain from the process.
First there’s the technology, which is a matter of technical agreement. In broad terms, the technical standards for online captioning are settled. While there isn’t as much documentation as anyone might like and the standards may be lousy, they are established.
The bigger problem is one of methods. How exactly do you do captioning? For 30 years, this has been a matter of opinion and nothing more. I have a pretty solid set of opinions; some mom-and-pop captioners make it up as they go along; and in between those poles you can find everything from committee-driven nonsense to ironclad ideologies, neither of them based on fact.
It’s curiously difficult—even when, as I do, have three linear feet of reference materials and research papers backing you up—to knock some patently ridiculous ideas out of the water, but ultimately no one “knows” how to do captioning. Instead, everyone merely insists their way is best. Essentially, video accessibility for deaf people rests on opinions—often poorly justified, if at all, and vehemently defended. All of this begins to explain why, in broad terms, captioning sucks. (It does.)
Still: who is writing the standards?
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In Canada, the CRTC worked out a deal with the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) to write yet another so-called standard for Canadian captioning—totally in secret. The authors aren’t captioning experts. (Some are deaf, as if that’s all that mattered, and one of those authors struck out once before with captioning standards.). The “standard” won’t be user-tested. This is the same thing the CAB tried once before, with dismal results. And the whole thing won’t be done in time for the November 2008 hearing.
Reading between the lines, the CRTC plans to force broadcasters, and presumably netcasters, to use the so-called standard written by the industry it claims to regulate. Industry self-regulation is one of the biggest stories of 2008—news that has apparently failed to reach the CRTC. Self-regulation works about as well in captioning as it does in high finance. The difference is there’s less money involved.
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In the U.S., Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft announced the formation of the Internet Captioning Forum. You probably read the announcement on various blogs. Did you ever read anything else? Like the fact that, while the announcement claims the four companies “joined” with WGBH, WGBH essentially runs the project?
WGBH is a public-television station in Boston. WGBH did the earliest open captioning on U.S. television and has been captioning continuously for 30 years. I used to be a big supporter (I was sending them typewritten letters in the 1970s), and I’ve visited their operations several times. But, my confidence in WGBH has been shaken, not least by its foolish decision to close down its main captioning operations. They invented a whole technology for captioning first-run movies, and they’ve done a lot of work in online captioning. Like the CAB, WGBH is working in secret. And all roads lead to WGBH.
- In a conflict of interest, the accessibility manager at AOL used to work at WGBH. So this is a WGBH operation through and through. Even the official URL,
InternetCCForum.org, redirects to WGBH. And where is Mozilla looking for a solution to its captioning problem? WGBH, of course. - Nonprofit WGBH is an active competitor in the captioning market. This means there’s money at stake. Watch The Simpsons on TV in the U.S. or Canada and you’re watching WGBH captions, for example. Not coincidentally, WGBH is also first on the list of YouTube’s suggested captioning service providers.
- WGBH isn’t done there. They’ve also got a U.S. federal grant to research captioning on PDAs (and on planes). A recent e-newsletter recruited subjects for a user test of “preferences” for fonts and other topics. Since this is the same organization that produced subpar research on HDTV fonts, somehow I expect that PDA users will be asked to choose between Arial and Courier.
- In a conflict of interest, the accessibility manager at AOL used to work at WGBH. So this is a WGBH operation through and through. Even the official URL,
How well do you think all of this is going to work out? Do you trust secret groups to set standards for a complex communication medium like captioning? I don’t.
This is a time for legislation#section7
Broadcasters and internet titans prefer an inside job. They prefer outcomes they can predict, if not control. They want minor tweaks to a system that’s a proven failure, all the while making it look like they’re solving the problem.
The only effective method of increasing the quantity of captioning is actually on the horizon. That method is to bring the force of law to bear to actually require it. Nothing else has worked.
Captioning is a giant crater in the online accessibility moonscape. If you support web accessibility and accept that it isn’t just about blind people, you need to support online captioning. Maybe there are other things you also need to support, but we aren’t talking about those today.
If you accept the proposition that, beyond simple fairness and the technical fact that the web can be accessible, a fundamental reason to provide accessible online content is because people with disabilities have a legal right to it, you need to get behind whatever measures are necessary to make those rights real. Broadcasters in many countries are already regulated and have to provide captioning, as do cinema operators in a few places. Fundamentally, what we’re making accessible is the moving image—it’s film, it’s television, it’s video. It may be other things, such as screencasts. But at root, the delivery method should not matter.
If a deaf person has a legal right to watch TV or movies with captions, that person has a legal right to watch online video with captions. The voluntary approach has done practically nothing to make that possible. Laws or human-rights regulations are necessary and inevitable. You should get behind them.
If you think this opens the door to wholesale regulation of the internet, it probably doesn’t—or at least not in the manner I expect you’re worried about. You could still publish anything you wanted within the existing legal limits (the internet already is regulated). It’s just that some or all video would have to be captioned. Again: I want you to support that.
Neither the technical standards nor the methods for captioning should be decided behind closed doors by parties with money to lose or gain in the process. One could make a fair case that legally required captioning based on “standards” presented as a fait accompli by industry does not pass the sniff test. Government regulation of online accessibility should be based on open standards.
If not, what’s the alternative? Has anything else worked?
Call to action#section8
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Submit a comment to the CRTC hearing on accessibility. (Good luck figuring out how to do it. Try sending mail to the listed contact, Sylvie Bouffard. Or use the main contact form.) Doing so before December 2008 would be most helpful, but the process won’t conclude until January 12, 2009, at the earliest.
If you agree with the following, tell the CRTC you support a requirement that at least some kinds of online video must be captioned—such captions being created only on the basis of open standards.
I’m not even going to pretend I’m not asking you to explicitly support me and my research project, the Open & Closed Project. Tell the CRTC you don’t think a “standard” written by the same broadcasters who have blown it for 30 years amounts to much—if you believe that, of course. And if you believe something else, say that instead. You don’t have to be in Canada to take this step.
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Show some support for an independent accessibility advocacy group down under, Media Access Australia, which submitted quite a solid response (PDF) to the Australian discussion paper on access services. This step would make sense mostly for Australian residents.
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Now here’s the biggie: The only way anything is going to happen in the United States is if somebody files a lawsuit. I need one or more deaf people to file a suit (possibly class-action) against one or more “content providers” on the grounds that uncaptioned video amounts to discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
At the very least, the case could be made that online presentation of a moving image that was previously captioned for a different kind of presentation (e.g., television, home video) should also be captioned.
Don’t think this is doomed to failure just because you’re going up against companies with more money than God. Major studios settled a class-action lawsuit over DVD captioning (not a great settlement, but much better than nothing), and even Apple has been making accessibility improvements—apparently to avoid lawsuits from blind groups and governments.
It’s time to try something that works#section9
Voluntary online captioning has not worked and will not work. The only way to put more captioning online is to require it. And the captioning has to be done according to standards developed in the open, not by the same industry that never gave us much captioning in the first place.
Haven’t seen me ask politely yet? That’s my point exactly. I’m only one person among millions of people. You don’t know who I am and haven’t seen my countless polite requests over the years for captioning and other accommodations in other places. Ask anyone who knows me personally, and they’ll tell you that my requests tend to be very polite.
You see, I’m in the minority. I simply don’t have the numbers or resources to get my polite requests heard by even a significant portion of the majority, much less get them motivated enough to care.
If I were to politely ask each and every one of you here on ALA to caption your videos, you might say, oh, what a sweet little deaf girl (I’m a bit older than 4 years old, by the way), and then go merrily about your daily life as a member of the comfortable majority. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a member of the comfortable majority (I myself am white), it’s just how it is.
Maybe one or two of you would actually caption your videos if I asked politely, and thank you for that, truly. But that’s a mere drop in the ocean. Then, next time this issue comes up, in another forum, I’m faced with a whole new group of people who have never seen me or my previous polite requests, and I’m back at square one. It’s a Sisyphysian task.
This is where the law comes in.
History shows the majority does not pay attention to needs of the minority until those needs begin to affect the comfort level of the majority. Case in point: the complaints that this article doesn’t provide tools to make captioning easier. I counted over 70 links in the articles to resources, including many tools to make captioning easier, even to free (!!) services that will do it for you.
Hence the need for regulations, as distasteful as that may be.
I would rather it not be this way. I would rather that billions of dollars in litigation and untold angst be saved by people simply being aware of others’ needs and making efforts to treat them equally. But that is not what I have seen of human nature.
Let me emphasize: this is not a personal attack on anyone. This is simply an account of my experience with majority vs. minority issues and human nature.
This article has generated 11 pages of comments in a single week. Wouldn’t it be great if some change actually comes out of this discussion, _before_ lawsuits are needed?
I’ve read the article twice now, and I can’t see a single link in there that doesn’t have a comment preceding it or followiing it that points out how crap _that_ particular concept or effort was.
After two reads I still don’t have a really clear idea of the differences between open or closed captions, and between captions and subtitles. And I can still read arial on black, and don’t _actually_ understand what the problem with that is, because Joe was just far too angry at the world to bother to explain _any_ of his points properly.
I don’t know what technique Joe thinks is the best way forward to serve the needs of those who need video to be augmented to be accessible, I just know that he’s angry and wants legislation to enforce that _someone_ does _something_. Oh, and that he wants the _something_ to be done in the open, woop.
So, even as someone who would love see things move forward – that article didn’t educate me at all. It was just a very long complaint – no; in tone it was more a long _rant_.
You see, the thing is, Joe and Alicia – of all the web design fora on the web, this is probably the one most likely to give some positive consideration to a call of “the status quo isn’t good enough, here’s why; what can be done to make it better?”. Especially if it were accompanied with some actual constructive insight into a sensible way forward.
But that’s not what Joe wrote. He wrote a polemic, and it turns out the audience were turned off by it.
Opportunity wasted.
bq. Maybe one or two of you would actually caption your videos if I asked politely, and thank you for that, truly. But that’s a mere drop in the ocean.
Exactly. It requires more than just individual people asking here and there, then yelling that they’re past the point of asking to people they’ve never talked to before. It requires organization and advocacy, the sort of thing that has made the post-Lynx web far friendlier than it used to be for the blind.
bq. I counted over 70 links in the articles to resources, including many tools to make captioning easier, even to free (!!) services that will do it for you.
Which he linked while saying they’re utterly inadequate.
I came away from his post heavily _discouraged_ at the prospect of properly captioning a video.
bq. This is where the law comes in.
No, here’s where the law is _not_ going to come in any time soon, at least in the US.
If you want more captioning, you’re going to have to actually communicate with and convince people who don’t understand the full details of your needs, and at a level above rants and “He got your attention, didn’t he?”
bq. And I can still read arial on black, and don’t actually understand what the problem with that is
I assume the usual (serious) difficulties many people with weak vision have with light text on dark backgrounds. It’s more strain than dark-on-light. Even many with 20/20 vision notice the strain.
I’d simply like to echo what Richard said (comment 104), and add my voice to the chorus of criticism, not so much for the topic or arguments of this article (which I’m generally sympathetic with), but for its unconstructive tone.
Despite itself, the article did teach me about a few methods and tools (and certainly debates) I hadn’t been aware of, and it addresses a very important topic. But it left me, a small-time designer, without a clear sense of how (or whether) I should make my videos more accessible in the meantime. That’s why I read it in the first place.
It doesn’t offend me to see A List Apart featuring more broad, state-of-the-web articles than before. But this wasn’t a very helpful specimen. And its tone (continued in the author’s comments) doesn’t meet the standards of constructive discussion and pragmatic advice I’ve become accustomed to seeing here.
As regards the premise of the article, I think the first place for more regulation should be at the desk of Zeldman or whoever it is who ultimately edits these articles. I believe with a little more attention the same basic article could have been crafted into something worthier of the venue.
Several points brought up by recent commenters have already been addressed by the article and earlier commenters. Here’s a recap:
From a commenter:
bq. Actually explain the differences between captioning and subtitles as most people won’t know the difference. Explain pros and cons to both.
The answer, in an excerpt from the article:
bq. “¦the confusion between “captions and subtitles”:http://screenfont.ca/learn/#h1-0.
That link leads to a very handy list of the differences. This was also pointed out in “comment #5”:http://alistapart.com/comments/thisishowthewebgetsregulated?page=1#5 .
Another comment:
bq. Explain the benefits of providing captioning and/or subtitling to a website and/or web video.
Early in the article, Joe states:
bq. If you’re reading A List Apart, then you know that every web-accessibility specification requires captioning of multimedia for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. “WCAG 1”:http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CORE-TECHS/#audio-information (and the “Samurai corrections”:http://wcagsamurai.org/errata/errata.html#video ), “WCAG 2”:http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/20080430/Overview.php#qr-media-equiv-captions , “Section 508”:http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.24.htm#(c) —they’re all the same. You have to caption your online video.
Simply follow the above links for more information.
Yet another comment:
bq. Provide examples of tools so that the readers may research for themselves. Maybe even give a quick description of your favorites.
This article isn’t a captioning how-to article – “plenty of those”:http://tinyurl.com/6xrv6l already online, the product of many years of tremendous effort by advocacy groups trying to take the ‘positive approach’ espoused by some commenters. As Joe points out, those voluntary, if laudable efforts, have resulted in a confusing mess of tools with no one clear solution. His recommendation at this time is to “outsource the captioning”:http://alistapart.com/comments/thisishowthewebgetsregulated?page=2#14 (the article contains links to free captioning services).
Rather than a how-to, this article is intended as an exposition on why voluntary captioning has failed and why Joe now believes regulation is the next step.
If this article is taken as it’s intended, it’s actually very beneficial to ALA readers. After all, you’re being given a chance to beat your competitors by getting your house in order – so that your competitors, not you, are the ones blindsided by the coming regulations. Joe is also calling for a simplification/standardization of captioning techniques and asking for your help in developing those open standards, in a way that will work for you and your business.
I’m very appreciative of all the commenters who have posted good points to consider, such as the need to protect captioners from copyright penalties and weighing the flexibility of closed captions vs. the stability of open captions. I hope to see more of those comments.
bq. If this article is taken as it’s intended, it’s actually very beneficial to ALA readers. After all, you’re being given a chance to beat your competitors by getting your house in order — so that your competitors, not you, are the ones blindsided by the coming regulations.
Translation: “You may disagree that forced captioning is inevitable and desirable, but because the author intended to convince you of these facts, quit arguing, knuckle under, and make the best of it!”
This comment manages somehow to be both nonsensical _and_ offensive.
Oy.
Yes, let’s dwell on the people who didn’t follow every link and were thrown on captions vs. subtitles and use that to spackle over the non-answers.
Saying “You have to caption your online video.” is *not* an answer to “What is the benefit of this?”, nor is it even *true*, except perhaps in Canada, depending on a theoretical court case.
Also, do you not see the huge disconnect between saying:
bq. those voluntary, if laudable efforts, have resulted in a confusing mess of tools with no one clear solution
and then
bq. calling for a simplification/standardization of captioning techniques and asking for your help in developing those open standards, in a way that will work for you and your business
while keeping in mind that Joe says _voluntary action will never be sufficient_ on this matter?
Now, we can wish that a great law would be passed that would call for the creation of a wonderful, open captioning standard to be completed in just a couple of years, to be followed by its use everywhere, but that’s fantasy. The best-case hope in the US would be WGBH getting to define the legal standards.
Further, unless you’re Joe’s sock-puppet, maybe you should stop going on about his supposed _intentions_ and look at what he *said*. He’s not saying “regulation is coming” – he’s specifically *denied* that, beyond his hopes for Canada. He said _this will not get fixed without regulation_ and went down the list of how the current tools and technologies are not up to the task – and how even some accessibility standards and the standards organizations struck him as inadequate – with some complaints about how some things done in this area seem designed to actually do more than just help deaf people.
Saying _this will not be fixed by voluntary action_ is not a call to voluntary action. It’s an abandonment of voluntary action. Abandoning voluntary action when the government calvary won’t come is _abandoning the problem_.
bq. Translation: “You may disagree that forced captioning is inevitable and desirable, but because the author intended to convince you of these facts, quit arguing, knuckle under, and make the best of it!”?
Well yes, with a side of, “Nobody needs to be informed of this – you should know this already! That you haven’t jumped to take care of this unbidden means you will never do it without being forced to, so please choose to help us force other people to do this.”
@Alicia
Since you responded on my comments of the article I suppose I’ll respond to yours.
I requested an explanation of the differences between captioning and subtitles. You point out the link in the article. It was nice that the article provided the link but that sort of thing should be a footnote for more information. A short description in the article would have sufficed. For instance:
Subtitles display text of what is spoken, often for translation purposes.
Captioning displays descriptions of sounds that can be heard including speech, often for a deaf audience.
I believe I got that right.
I then ask for an explanation of the benefits of providing captioning and your response is to point out more links to the standards. I didn’t look myself but do the standards explain the benefits of following them which is what I asked? It’s possible but I doubt it.
I then asked for a list of suggested tools for me to research for myself. Your response is the article is not a how-to article. I agree, that wasn’t what I was suggesting. I asked for a list for me to investigate on my own. But the response to that; there are too many tools and none of them are good enough. So, exactly what are we supposed to do?
“Rather than a how-to, this article is intended as an exposition on why voluntary captioning has failed and why Joe now believes regulation is the next step.”
I admit it’s been a while since I read through the article but I don’t recall an explanation of why voluntary captioning hasn’t worked, just that it hasn’t. I remember a long rant that the solution is to force everyone to do so with regulation but there’s no suggestions as to how this would work, especially in an international setting, nor any thought to the negatives of doing so.
Since you did not write the article and you are allowed to assume its intent then I may do the same. But I am unable to guess the intent of the article other than being a long rant on the subject. I did not feel the article was asking for help in determining an open standard, I felt it was calling for regulation which is not exactly the way to go about creating an open standard.
And most companies will not be blind-sided by such regulations and you already assume they will happen. The easiest solution to the regulations, if they happen, is to take down all video that does not follow the regulation. Then it will be decided if it would be worth the additional costs and resources to include the required elements to put the video back on the web. I fear that many will feel it is not worth the cost.
And I have to say I appreciate your comments as it is very helpful to get a different viewpoint of the matter. Plus the additional bonus is that you’ve been much more civil in the discussion than Joe was with his comments. This, I feel, is what those of us that disagreed with the tone of the article actually want. Because in the end, I do not disagree with the subject of the article but the attitude of the author.
AIGA has made a commitment to improving accessibility of its websites because it’s the right thing to do, consistent with one of AIGA’s core values: fair and equitable treatment.
It is, admittedly, time- and resource-consuming to generate captions for online rich media, but it is worth it.
It took a significant amount of research and development to settle on our current solution, including development of a caption-capable media player by Citizen Scholar, Inc. Yet, all told, the process proved less expensive than imagined.
Though developed specifically to provide access to hearing-impaired designers, others benefit when using the media player with captions visible in a public or noisy environment. In addition, PDF transcripts are provided, offering take-along access, of particular interest to students or others doing research.
Though there is more work to be done to make AIGA.org completely accessible to people with varied abilities, it doesn’t take regulation to do it, just commitment to doing what is right.
Lydia Mann, web director
AIGA | the professional association for design
Nothing more to add.
Lydia, I am pleased and impressed by the captioned videos on your site. Thank you for your and your organization’s efforts – it’s definitely a great start. I look forward to when the rest of AIGA’s videos are captioned.
If I may ask, what were the key factors (or people) in AIGA’s decision to make this commitment to captioning its video?
These days, most captioned video seems to be on US governmental agency sites, which are required to comply with Section 508. I’m glad to see that AIGA is doing this even when not required.
I only know of one other mainstream (i.e., not specific to the deaf community) site NOT under Section 508 that has captions on the majority of its videos: “Barack Obama’s site”:http://www.barackobama.com/closedcaptioning/ .
Anyone know of any more “unregulated” sites with captioned video? I’d love to see them.
“Writing Content that Works for a Living” by Erin Kissane was mostly negative, 90% of the article was concentrated on dissecting the bad example. Sure, there is a follow-up coming on that article but I don’t believe that I was the only one who missed that little note.
A simple headline adjustment: “Writing Content that Works for a Living – Part 1” would have done a lot. I just don’t like reading a whole article and in the end find out it was mere part one and all of the article was about how not to do it.
Maybe I am overreacting a bit but… 🙂
It is wonderful to see the work being done by AIGA. However, AIGA is *one* company commited to doing the right thing. History has shown that without a mechanism in place to inspire—or force—businesses to accommodate minority customers…many do not.
If you look at the history of Black Americans, it was major legislation that ushered in eras of greater opportunity. It has been the same for Deaf Americans. “The Technology Access Program at Gaulladet University”:http://tap.gallaudet.edu/ has a summarized presentation of the history of Communication Access for the Deaf. You can find it “here”:http://tinyurl.com/6pq2ww.
In the US, we have a host of laws that regulate business. As business has naturally extended itself to the Web, it is only a matter of time before the laws governing business follow. Some of those laws happen to pertain to the accommodation of Deaf, blind, mobility and cognitively and otherwisely talented individuals.
Deaf people do not wish to force others to do something they do not wish to do, there is no gain in that. Deaf people seek to gain equal access to the fastest growing communications medium. It doesn’t strike me as plausible that this can be accomplished in a reasonable timeframe, with standards and interoperability for mobile devices and various players, on a voluntary basis.
Is regulation desirable? Not really. But, it does tend to get things organized.
With regulation, companies such as AIGA will have standards to look to for implementing their web accessibility initiatives. This will decrease the research and development burden as no one will need to reinvent the wheel.
Regulation would not mean that every video on the web needs to be captioned. As one commenter stated, that is akin to building a ramp on every house or requiring every book to be printed in braille.
Do not imagine a YouTube where all UGC is captioned. Imagine a YouTube that captions its own corporate videos, requires captioning of videos from Business accounts, spotlights captioned content and points users to tools to caption their works.
Ok, all that said, perhaps the Internet can turn history on its head and the captioning of online video content can evolve as Web Standards have. It is possible.
Perhaps, like AIGA, YouTube will do this voluntarily.
There are many comments and I’ve not had a chance to read them all. I would say that even if there’s a need for legislation on this matter there’s absolutely no point trying to force all hosts/producers of online video to provide accessible material at all times.
Not only will ot be too expensive/time consuming for the majority but it would open up so many cases for litigation that the authorities just wouldn’t cope.
The way to do it would be to require organisations to provide the material in a timely manner unless they could provide a valid reason for not doing so.
As far as I’m aware that’s more or less how it currently works with more traditional media (ie print) here in the UK.
bq. Deaf people seek to gain equal access to the fastest growing communications medium. It doesn’t strike me as plausible that this can be accomplished in a reasonable timeframe […] on a voluntary basis. Is regulation desirable? Not really. But, it does tend to get things organized.
Your inability to get other people to fulfill your wishes according to your schedule does not justify forcing them to do so. This is the method of bank robbers and dictators, and it’s both wrong and “ineffective”:http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp .
No more regulation. Not no way, not no how. It’s ridiculous the direction this world always heads. Let’s force people to do this, or that, and by the time anyone realizes something’s wrong, people are being forced to sit in internment camps doing two things: working and starving.
There are places where regulation makes sense, especially in matters of public safety and anything that involves extremely large quantities of money (the root of all evils is too tempting for most men), but we’re talking about a medium that hasn’t even developed to its full potential yet. An open standard for captioned content can’t be enforced on any massive scale on the internet, purely for the problems of man-power.
Going off-topic slightly: Eileen, you draw a comparison between Black History and the topic of regulation here, and I can only presume you mean to compare the efforts of black people to do things like: earning freedom, the right to vote, and ending segregation, to the current plight of deaf people to get captions in online video. This is a crude comparison of struggles, as I’m sure it boils down to more than just “getting captions,” but functionally, that’s what this article is about.
Freedom for the former came down to a punishment for the south for seceding. I believe West Virginians were still slave owners after the civil war, but just them. Either way, this was not a push for regulation for the betterment of humanity or the internet or something like that; it was plain old revenge.
Winning the right to vote was a great victory, but let’s be honest; how in the hell is the privilege of watching videos online even comparable to the inextricable right to vote? Hell, we took our sweet time on that one, anyway; we even continued to deny women the right to vote for awhile.
And the ending of segregation. Also a great victory, but this is the part where I go back to enforcement, because enforcing desegregation can be a problem, and my real problem with this proposal for regulation (apart from it being regulation) is how it will be enforced.
Now, I’m not suggesting that this occurs regularly or has even happened at all, but it most certainly could: say a black man walks into a restaurant and gets kicked out for being drunk, loud and obnoxious. What’s to prevent him from accusing the restaurant of removing him because of his race? Even if there were other black people there, the restaurant would need them to testify, because in cases like this the burden-of-proof these days is a joke. Hell, it could go the other way around, too; say the restaurant refuses him service because of his race. When he sues, the restaurant cites some obscure paragraph of a law or otherwise makes it impossible to bring proof. So the question really is, what the hell does the regulation do?
Simple. Matter. Of. Fact. NOTHING. De-segregation regulations effectively do nothing now. That’s not to say racism is over (thx2u obama 4 endng racsm), but rather that they aren’t necessary. Any intelligent company that wants to stay open these days will serve every market, because if they don’t, someone else will. These old regulations have now become a heaping pile of cash for someone with a good story and a better lawyer.
Through obscurities in text and manipulation of key phrases in said text, John Smith might get rich off of Shelly’s Toy Store because he got kicked out after he cursed at a kid and Shelly never got cameras. These particular regulations are probably the least abused, but how many stories about some lucky jerk getting $50,000,000 for finding a nail in his soup have you heard? And those are NECESSARY regulations!
I don’t care if you want to talk about provisions in the law that might protect UGC and small websites, because it doesn’t work like that. It is not as simple as saying “this is UGC” or “this is business,” and I don’t think that’s a point I have to prove. Anyone who sees things as that black and white is blind, and I’m not talking about their capacity to see light.
If you want focus on this issue, you’re better off rewarding the people who develop the first widely-used and implemented open standard, rather than establish a regulation to punish everyone for failing to do so.
I forgot my favorite point. The fact of the matter is, laws don’t really touch the internet.
Hi, I’m serving tons of video content and making megabucks off it. Captioning? Nah, too expensive. What do you mean it’s regulated, and that I have to? Ohhhh, I see where you’re getting confused. See, my server isn’t in your country, and we don’t have those laws here. I’m not really doing business in the states; folks from the states just happen to use my site more than any other country.
There’s a certain pirating site where they’ve been doing this to get around things like the DMCA and such for years, and it’s incredibly successful because it’s easy and legally valid!
“Internet” laws and regulations are really just computer regulations. A given country has authority over the computers in its area and that’s it. Personally I like it that way. Please don’t change it, please don’t regulate it, because you’ll ruin the freest, most human invention before it ever gets its chance to shine. Laws are a black mark on humanity, demonstrating only that we are unable to control ourselves.
The article is making a big deal of the alleged difference between captioning and subtitling. In the UK – where closed-captioning was invented, by the BBC in the late ’70s – it has always been known as subtitling. As far as I know it’s only the US (and presumably Canada) which has this definition of the difference, and there’s no particular reason that the US definition should be the one the internet takes on.
Otherwise, the idea of every video online being captioned is lovely, but unrealistic. In an hour, one person can produce an average of six or seven minutes of reasonable quality block subtitles, so the number of man-hours that would be needed to caption every video online is phenomenal.
*Video subtitling is extremely useful to non-native speakers*. I wrote an article on “online video subtitling”:http://vizualbod.com/articles/online-video-subtitling-is-not-just-for-deaf as a response to this post. I’ve explained why is subtitling important to the whole world of n-th language speakers, sketched the microformat for video subtitling and explained my vision of the subtitling microformat implementation.
Where is your discussion of rights? You propose a government solution to what you say is a problem, but you don’t even mention the concept of rights. Let me speculate why you don’t mention them. You acknowledge that non-governmental efforts to get in place what you want have failed. So, your solution is to force your desires on people. Acknowledging rights would end the argument.
Rights do not conflict. I have a right (well, in 19th century America, I might have had) to my life, which entails a right to acquire property. This legislation you propose conflicts with that right, because it draws on my resources. It therefore doesn’t represent a valid right. In your totalitarian little scheme, I’m not free to act, I’m constrained by d#$%heads that want to tell me how I am allowed to pursue wealth creation. I want you and a55holes like you everywhere to know just how much I hate you.
Joe,
I’m not sure if you’re still reading comments, since they seem to have become a tit-for-tat discussion, but there is a giant hole in your entire argument. To be fair and to make sure I hadn’t missed it, I re-read the article and re-read every comment.
Which government institution will be responsible for monitoring, reviewing, reprimanding, and prosecuting the private institutions which create online video content? Should this new government entity actively seek out offenders or simply respond to submitted complaints? Will there be an approval process before video content can be displayed? Will compliance with captioning law be dictated by the size of the group that creates the video, the number of online views, the type of site (or channel therein) which hosts the video, or the legal status of the organization which creates the content? By extension, how will fines (or other criminal ramifications) be determined? Will there be rewards and/or incentives to being compliant? Who determines those incentives and how will they be paid for?
Let me be clear, captioning is a necessary step toward universal accessibility, but regardless of one’s particular political leanings, government regulation is an objectively terrible way to implement it. If universal accessibility is truly the goal, then regulating and requiring the implementation of CSS3 and strict code validation would go much, much further toward that end.
In your first screencap, Greg is described as a “Deaf Singer,” an obvious and slightly hilarious misspelling. Please describe the legal process required to force an update of the spelling and, if the offending organization was unwilling to change it, how they would be punished.
You rubbed me the wrong way when you started out saying that government intervention and legislation are good things for the internet. However, I do agree with you that better “features” need to be implemented to help the handicapped.
wow..
great
but : may i suggest – one more ->
standard for login and captcha – should have a finite set of twists ..
cheers
olga-nesher-lednichenko
thanks a lot for that useful post. i was not look from caption side before…
For real, thank you for posting this article. It does illustrate the lack of centralization in the industry. I think it’s because of basic competition and the numbers game, companies need to cater to the largest audience possible, that’s where profit is, unfortunately this causes many issues. I can see that standards are finally being used, but sadly, there is much left to do and few willing to invest in getting it done.