March 8, 2010 by Jenny Sanderson
Video hosting site Youtube has shown its support for the less fortunate this week by announcing a service that will automatically caption any video uploaded to the website in the English language.
The announcement will be met with much appreciation by the 9 million deaf and hearing impaired people in the UK as it will give them full access to the seemingly never-ending pool of videos on Youtube.
The service is not quite perfect yet however, as Youtube owners Google have stated that there are still a few things that need to be ironed out before it works as well as they want it to and as well as any service run by them is expected.
It does seem quite an insurmountable task to have every English language video captioned considering how many there are, but the ever innovative guys at Google have a clever way of speeding up the process. They will be basing the service on the technology that they had previously developed that powers the ‘Google Voice Search’ service. Inevitably the captions can only be accurate as long as the audio quality on the video is clear, which in many cases it isn’t, but the company have promised that this is an issue that they will work daily to try and improve.
They are also going to allow the owners of the video content to download a copy of the its transcript and make any changes or improvements as they see fit as well as the creation of a button that will enable users to request the auto-captioning service on videos that do not already have it, this will then be done as soon as humanly possible.
This is a very good move by Google (Youtube) both ethically and selfishly as it will allow people that could not previously have enjoyed the service a chance to do so whilst increasing their number of visitors by a possible 9million.
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