Out of personal interest this general topic was on my radar screen anyway, but Google’s announcement late last week sped up the timetable. In their DC policy office Google announced several capabilities for putting captions to videos:

• Auto-captioning: They will do automated captioning of YouTube videos. To start, it will only be certain channels (mostly educational) but the intent seems to be to make it available across the service;
• Auto-timing: They are using some of the same technology to make manual captioning (still better than the automated version) easier and available to anyone who has a script to do it; and
• Translation They are announcing automated language translation in 51 languages for the captioning (so if there’s a video in say English, and someone who speaks Japanese wants to know what it says, regardless of their hearing status, they can get captions in Japanese for the video).

To find out more about it I called up a former co-worker of mine, Tom Wlodkowski, Accessibility Director at AOL. It turns out he was at the Google Policy office for the announcement. I learned a lot in our brief telephone conversation. It turns out that HR 3101 (aka “the Markey bill”) has accessibility aspects to it and is currently being debated in Congress, as are the accessibility requirements around broadband access at the FCC.

While I believe Google when they say they held the meeting in DC so the disability rights groups could easily attend I suspect the congressional staffers were a target also (and maybe a few three letter agencies too). We here in the DC area are used to somewhat broad pitches really targeted to a mere 435 people. Tom predicts that we’ll see some regulation in this area over the next 12-18 months and he thinks it’s nice to see voluntary efforts like Google’s launch of an automated captioning system on YouTube in advance of regulation. To me this feels like one more step in online video becoming mainstream.

The current mark up of the bill pertains only to “broadcast comparable programming” not UGC. But I give Google kudos for getting ahead of the curve here. So, other than not being evil, why might Google be doing this?

• In the US alone there are 11-42MM people that have hearing difficulties. When looked at more broadly, estimates range from 1/3 of all US households having one member with a disability to 650MM people worldwide with a disability. The Advertising Educational Council speaks to the buying power of this market saying “The discretionary spending power of the disabled—at $220 billion in 2002, per the National Organization on Disability—outshines that of even the revered teen market, which laid out $170 billion in 2002, reports the market research firm Teenage Research Unlimited”. So, overall, it might just make good business sense for them.
• Also, it makes the videos more searchable and Google is all about search. Some people don’t realize this, but Google image search actually searches the text around images, not the image itself. With transcripts, they can now search inside the video. This opens up all sorts of possibilities. And, as an interesting aside, Plymedia launched video captioning the same day and their TechCrunch article only talked about search…nothing about helping the deaf and hard of hearing.
• Only 1/3 of the Internet users in the world speak English. Translations are probably another great business. Now I expect that some of that translation will not work very well; but I’m anxious to see how well it does work. And in many cases some idea (no matter how humorous the syntax may be) is better than nothing.

As to the personal reason for my interest mentioned at the beginning of this post; I’m hard of hearing. For some of my life I was nearly deaf. Two immediate family members have hearing aids. And, my husband is a disability policy expert. So to me, it hits home.

And, in closing, to bring it back directly to .tv not just online video; while looking for information on the size of the disabled community, I found this .tv site deafvideo.tv. It’s UGC of individuals signing their videos. I love that the Internet is a way for all to join in.