Twenty years ago Congress took a stand for deaf individuals by requiring closed captioning technology on virtually all TV sets. Six years later, in 1996, most shows were mandated to have captions.
What was a huge victory then is now a distant memory, as more viewers are utilizing the internet for news broadcasts and television shows. Unfortunately, most streaming content is not currently captioned. Marlee Martin, who is deaf, is an actress advocating to change this. After appearing on “Dancing with the Stars” and being unable to watch a captioned replay of the show on ABC.com, she knew she had to take action.
According to the New York Times, advocates want Congress to update the 20-year-old bill to include “captions on any online video that has also appeared on TV,“ as well as more accessible consumer electronics. While this would not immediately make it mandatory for all online content to be captioned, it would be a step in the right direction.
Currently, CBS.com, CNN.com, and MSN.com all lack captions, and ESPN.com, NBC.com, and ABC.com all offer inconsistent captions. YouTube.com, however, has been noticed for using fairly accurate voice-recognition services for its videos and Hulu offers captions for many programs in several languages. Netflix, although originally resistant to the change, is now working to reformat files as well.
For information on how to caption your videos, check out the following blog posts by blogger Proud Geek:
- Captioning Your Videos #1: Windows Movie Maker
- Captioning Your Videos #2: Jumpcut
- Captioning Your Videos #3: Subtitle Workshop
- Captioning Your Videos #4: Overstream
- Captioning Your Videos #6: DotSub.com
- Captioning Your Videos #7: OpenCaptions.com
Captioning Your Videos #5 (not listed) related to the progress YouTube had made as of 2007. Instead, view the following YouTube video to learn about how YouTube has progressed with automatic captions:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6jXPpqVPVI]
SOURCES: nytimes.com, proudgeek.com, about.com