Discuss: This is How the Web Gets Regulated
by Joe Clark
- Editorial Comments
2 A cup of joe and an article by Joe - one hell of a
Joe, great piece. I sincerely hope it doesn’t come to heavy-handed top-down mandates here in the US but fixing the captioning mess will likely have to start that way. I was disappointed to read about the secretive practices at WGBH. I’d love to see MAGpie spun off as an Open Source project with greater transparency. I think it would do a world of good.
posted at 05:41 pm on November 18, 2008 by Pat Ramsey
3 Illiberal is an understatement
What about those of us who don’t reach a wide enough audience with our video to warrant the expenditure on captioning? A legal requirement for captioning would waste money for those who would never reach a customer who needs them. Anyone who stands to profit from providing captioned video will do so, and forcing someone to provide services without compensation is tantamount to slavery.
posted at 05:54 pm on November 18, 2008 by Thom Blake
4 Captioning vs subtitling
(I’m going to show off my ignorance here): The article referred several times to the difference between captioning and subtitling, but never seemed to explain. What’s the difference? And why does it make such a difference?
posted at 06:09 pm on November 18, 2008 by Nathan Walton
5 Re: captioning vs subtitling
Nathan, there was a link at one of the mentions of the difference: http://screenfont.ca/learn/#h1-0
posted at 06:15 pm on November 18, 2008 by John Lascurettes
6 This is much more a judgement call
Is it a good idea to caption your videos? Yes, for both accessibility and to allow search engines to index it properly. It’s also a pretty cool development exercise to at least learn how to do it, I’m sure.
Should it be a legal requirement? Well, not always I don’t think.
I think certain sites should be policed to make sure that all their content is as accessible as it can be. I’m talking about companies that the vast majority of the public have no choice but to deal with (Local councils, utility companies, banks and healthcare services).
Average Joe’s blog and one-man-band design studio, on the other hand, can only stand to suffer by being forced to jump through hoops where only a fraction of a percent of their users will see any benefit at all. It should definately be on their to-do lists as it can benefit them, but they shouldn’t be forced to do it at their cost.
posted at 06:18 pm on November 18, 2008 by Daniel Schonhaar
7 Best Practice Examples
I found the article interesting, but frustrating. I acknowledge my lack of understanding of the issue of the difference between closed / open & captioning /subtitling and would like to do something about it, but there seems to be a complete lack of links to the right way to be doing captioning.
The one link mentioned explains a bit of the technical, and does have an examples section, but is of little use. The examples links take us to Joe’s flickr sets, and it is difficult to tell if they are showing best practice or what not to do, as many of the comments seem to be negative.
Any chance of a ‘let’s do it the right way’ example?
posted at 07:06 pm on November 18, 2008 by Kim Agnew
8 hmmmm
I’ve never even thought about captioning on the Internet. I mean I care, and I use alt text and stuff, but it never occurred to me to caption.
posted at 07:58 pm on November 18, 2008 by Jupiter Florida
9 Frustration
> You have to caption your online video
Call me an ignoramus but I wouldn’t even know what video captions are (not subtitles, that’s apparent) or how to begin adding them to the video I want to put on my website.
I think, besides deciding on a standard, that a lot also will depend on making adding captions easy in software.
I sense a lot of frustration in this article, but it’s equally frustrating at the moment for the webdevs who just want to do “the right thing”. I guess I want to say “don’t just legislate, but educate”… maybe in a follow-up article: captioning for dummies?
posted at 07:59 pm on November 18, 2008 by Erwin Heiser
10 Cameron, Thom, Daniel
Captioning of what is dismissively known as UGC (user-generated content) remains a grey area. It is easy to make the case that the general video uploader would find it an undue hardship to caption their videos. Undue hardship is a legitimate exemption in every relevant piece of legislation. So let’s assume that you the video uploader wouldn’t have to do it. Fine.
But what about your host? Google could afford to do it for you, though they wouldn’t want to. Should they have to? I’m actually not sure. I am, however, positive they should have to caption the videos they produce themselves.
In PDF/UA, we came up with a distinction between embedding/ownership and linking: If you embed a multimedia file (now possible in PDF) and/or you own the rights to it, you must make it accessible. If you merely link to it (and on the Web, the terms are deceptive – OBJECT and EMBED are both merely linking mechanisms), then you don’t have to make it accessible.
The analogous arrangement on normal Web sites might be “Is the host rich enough to afford to caption it?� Then the next question becomes “If so, do they caption only their own materials or everybody’s? Or caption anybody’s materials on request?�
I don’t totally know the answer to these questions. But how many of you think that commercial videos you pay for (e.g., on iTunes) or that you watch with advertising support (e.g., on Hulu) or that are produced by public broadcasters (e.g., BBC, CBC, SBS) should always be captioned (and described)? I certainly think that.
posted at 08:03 pm on November 18, 2008 by Joe Clark
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1 OK so what about independent captioning?
I have several screencasts I’m working on and need a way to caption them. I don’t mind spending the extra time doing them. I also don’t mind if they are captioned outright as the default option.
I had thought transcripts might be a decent alternative to screencasts as they are similar to articles in length and format.
Any ideas?
posted at 05:38 pm on November 18, 2008 by Cameron Westland