Netflix currently has closed captions for 82 percent of all the videos it is streaming. By October 2014, this number will go up to 100 percent, according to a consent decree the company entered to settle a lawsuit with disability rights advocates. Read more »
Netflix wants your help – and we are not talking about its troubled stock: The company is looking for volunteers to join its crowdsourced subtitling community. It’s all just an experiment for now, but it could one day become a massively crowdsourced closed captioning operation. Read more »
Google’s Hangouts group video chat service just got more accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing people, thanks to a new app called Hangout Captions. The app allows users to caption conversations in real time or use professional transcription services. Machine-powered transcription could be next. Read more »
Video of President Obama’s State of the Union speech has already been translated into seven languages, and additional translation efforts are underway online. The multi-lingual captioning efforts are the result of an election year partnership between PBS Newshour, Universal Subtitles and Mozilla. Read more »
Imagine citizen journalists could remix radio programs or TV news features simply by copy and pasting text fragments of their manuscripts and closed captions: That’s the idea behind hypermedia, and first tools to make it happen could become available as early as next year. Read more »
Netflix is being taken to court over not providing accessible videos for the hearing impaired. In a lawsuit, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) accused Netflix of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by not providing captions for most of its streaming videos. Read more »
Companies can now monitor in real time what people are saying about them on various BBC programs, thanks to a new cooperation between the broadcaster and media monitoring service Critical Mention. The service already indexes more than 30 hours of audio and video content per minute. Read more »
