Accessibility captions made easy in Youtube

November 29th, 2009 by sridgway in Uncategorized

video by sridgway

Google has recently announced a new feature a new feature in it’s Youtube service which automatically generates video captions from a speech to text recognition process. To date the fully automated captioning process has only been enabled for a limited number of channels, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke,UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic.

In the interim, regular users can  use another new feature called auto-timing, which lets you upload the transcription of a video and while the youtube audio to text conversion process generates it’s own transcription and matches it again your provided text to generate the captions. The captions and time codes can be downloaded as a *sbv file which is basically your uploaded transcription file with the time codes added.

This is a great tool for educators who need to have captions on videos to provide accessibility options for students.

As you can see from the video above, the results are very impressive.