Open captions project
Saw this in one of the email threads on the video caption project at Google.
John Schimmel, a resident researcher on Assistive Technology at the NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, thought of an idea where instead of relying on a content owner to put captions on videos, he created a website where a community of know-how volunteers can help with making captions for non-captioned videos. That’s an awesome idea!
I think we have gotten too practiced to the point that every time we see videos or TV with no captions, we just scream. “Waahh!! no CC!!? don’t they know any better? haven’t they heard of Deaf people before or the ADA law!? they ARE required to have CC!! I’m going to boycott that network!! start a petition now!” Not that there’s anything wrong with that but I think that pretty much gets us nowhere and even if we write letters, we’d be 100 years old by the time we finally see that show getting captioned.
The power is in our hands now. Next time you see a video that’s not captioned? Simply, make a request on that website above and hopefully, someone with a good heart will notice your request and make captions for that video.