Google Adding Captions to YouTube Videos
Google has announced that it is adding technology that will automatically generate text captions for English language videos. This will make videos more accessible to viewers that are hard-of-hearing or deaf. In addition, text captions will make video content more searchable. Viewers will also have the option of using Google’s automatic translation system to translate the captions into 51 languages, thereby making YouTube content more accessible to speakers of languages other than English.
This new feature was reported in the New York Times and is currently limited to content on a few, mainly educational, channels, such as Stanford, Yale, Duke, Columbia, and MIT, and other channels such as PBS and the National Geographic (look for the closed captioning [CC] logo). Google plans on gradually expanding the the feature to other channels. In addition, it is making tools available that will make it easier for producers to add captions and foreign language subtitles to their videos.