Subtitles?

Is there any chance for you to subtitle all of your Channel 9 videos?

I'm deaf and I want to understand what they are saying.

The Deaf people are missing out a lot. And it's not fair.

Please think about us...

Thanks,

Tony

That's possible.  Consider, however, that this is basically one or two guys who show up with a consumer-grade camera and little money or time.  They'd have to type, time, and encode each piece of text themselves.

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I'm aware it takes time to do it. But if many others can do it, I'm sure it can be possible.

Heck even in one of the Microsoft beta newsgroup, they posted a video, I asked for subtitles to be added, they released a video with subtitles in less than 15 hours. If the MS beta team can do it, I'm sure C9 can do it too.

Subtitles on TV has been around since 1980s and early 1990s for videos and DVDs. Things has improved a lot and there is no excuse to miss it out now that we're in 2006.

I'm not being pushy or anything like that, I'm just saying that we need to have the same access as the hearing people, that's all.

Thanks all.

Sounds like a good idea to me....

If someone has some reasonable influence among any of these companies.

http://www.podzinger.com/

http://www.podtranscript.com/

http://castingwords.com/

C9 may have a limited budget and time available for people to do things, though I have to agree, why should this content be limited to users with accessability issues.

Hey, BillG even gave a reference to how impressed he was with sight impaired users having access to the internet, 'They used to have a couple of books in braile, now they have access to the entire internet via screenreaders' (Paraphrased by me)

I agree, people with a disability should not be left out... It’s a very good idea.

It's a good idea, but very hard to do. I once made the mistake of volunteering to transcribe a 3 hour audio file... man, it was tough. But that might just have been because I can't type fast enough to keep up with the voices.

Does it have to be done manually?  Aren't there automated closed captioning programs?  They don't actually manually caption all of the TV programming do they?  Can you just run the audio track through a closed captioning program, and then when you are watching/reviewing the video correct any incorrect transcription?

z33driver wrote:

Does it have to be done manually?  Aren't there automated closed captioning programs?  They don't actually manually caption all of the TV programming do they?  Can you just run the audio track through a closed captioning program, and then when you are watching/reviewing the video correct any incorrect transcription?

Here in the UK, pre-recorded programs are subtitled when they're made, usually by just copying 'n' pasting the script.

But for live programs like the news, I understand they hire extremely fast typists with special keyboards to type it up, hence the 10-20 second delay between the TV and the subtitles in live programs (you also see the words popping up on the TV in real-time too)

I'll vote for this, and not just for the hearing impared.  My hearing has problems, but I'm not wearing a hearing aid yet, but my family still finds we can follow TV programming better with CC turned on.  It would also be useful at work, where some of the videos are related enough to my job to be considered appropriate for viewing, but having the volume up for a lengthy video would be considered very poor etiquette in the cubicle farm.

I understand the technical difficulties involved, but if a way can be found, it should be done.  And an effort should be made to find a way .

Yeah, if it's possible, I'd encourage them to caption their content, for all the reasons listed above.

And W3bbo/z33driver, AFAIK, closed captioning works the same way in the US.

CannotResolveSymbol wrote:

Yeah, if it's possible, I'd encourage them to caption their content, for all the reasons listed above.

Here's an idea:

Free MSDN Subscriptions to those who transcribe 10 or more videos.

Well, there are transcripts, but I guess not too many of them. I think WMV supports something like a text subtitle thing? On top of transcribing uttered words, syncing it with video must be a bigger job.

W3bbo wrote:

CannotResolveSymbol wrote: Yeah, if it's possible, I'd encourage them to caption their content, for all the reasons listed above.

Here's an idea:

Free MSDN Subscriptions to those who transcribe 10 or more videos.

Universal?  Heck, I'll volunteer to do 20 of them .

W3bbo wrote:

But for live programs like the news, I understand they hire extremely fast typists with special keyboards to type it up, hence the 10-20 second delay between the TV and the subtitles in live programs (you also see the words popping up on the TV in real-time too)

Wow! They must be really fast, especially considering the speed at which some news is given, "Breaking News" is always in a hurry, I think.

Angus Higgins

Angus wrote:

W3bbo wrote: But for live programs like the news, I understand they hire extremely fast typists with special keyboards to type it up, hence the 10-20 second delay between the TV and the subtitles in live programs (you also see the words popping up on the TV in real-time too)

Wow! They must be really fast, especially considering the speed at which some news is given, "Breaking News" is always in a hurry, I think.

Even live TV is broadcast with a small delay (around 10 seconds), which the subtitlers use to stay ahead. Even so, they sometimes miss complete sections of the spoken text.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk could help out here, or a local C9 version of a similar format. To the first 'x' users are assigned 'x' seconds of video to be transcribed.

A reward of some kind added to the c9 profile, this c9er helps, this c9'er doesn't park in handicapped spaces. :O

I will volunteer to write sub-titles for some of the videos. But I guarantee nothing in relation to spelling and or grammar. Plus making sub-titles is very time-consuming, it takes at MINIMAL twice as long to write sub-titles as it does to watch the video (Unless I can get one of those typex machines they use in court ).

Edit: I just tried to transcribe the Gates interview and discovered it would take me AT LEAST 2 hours and would have a lot of mistakes in it. Plus it doesn't make a lot of sense on paper (e.g. "your you understand")

I tried to use voice recognition to help and this is the output (!)

Windows Voice Recognition wrote:

There were less than half of the next five or ten years, I shall I do not hear a little time to sort it all works out of the On the mind-set against the dollar commitment critique of the season in an online countermeasure evening session drew that gives an overnight using for him to release the river and into our future, that are on the most important things than just so I hear in the beta sigma that I’ll never do not let it all over the other is called mix of sense are how long they have their insurers of runtimes and schools and is looking at the home level of execution of the house, the last word, both in terms of the month that are based on a better

It goes on like that for a while