Google engineer Ken Harrenstien (above) has been deaf since he was five. He enjoyed the Internet because he had no need of a sign language translation, but has had troubles because of online videos that had no caption. Almost all videos on the Internet have no captions and that makes it impossible for deaf people to enjoy them. Harrenstien is working to create captions on videos right now, and the product is great. On Youtube, Google's video search engine, there is auto-caption technology which automatically puts in captions if the user posts the text correctly. However, there aren't a lot of people posting these captions and in the few videos that do have captions, there are many errors due to the program's misunderstanding of words. Dianne Stark of the Described and Captioned Media Program says that Google's program is a start, but there is a 10% error rate and thinks that the government should require captions on online videos to increase the number of captioned videos.
I have never thought about the fact that there are no captions on online videos and this article opened me up to the idea that we should have captions on online videos as the Internet is such a huge and useful network now and should be available to deaf people as well. Although I don't agree with a law to have captions for videos, I feel that promoting this idea and supporting it with better technology and programs to allow the uploaders to conveniently post captions without being put down by difficult and annoying programs. Simply promoting and advertising will increase the number of captioned videos as I am sure that there are many people like me who have never even thought of captioned online videos.
Check this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/09/deaf.internet.captions/index.html?iref=allsearch
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