More accessibility on the WWW

1/5/2010 11:59:02 AM

Automatic Captions Added To YouTube Videos

Google, the owner of video exchange website YouTube, has started providing automatic captions for some English language videos on the website, increasing accessibility for deaf users.

The ‘auto-caps’ system is made possible by Google’s own automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, working alongside the current YouTube captioning system.

Although captions are already available on YouTube, it was previously necessary for the owner of the video to insert them manually – a time-consuming task, given the sheer number of videos uploaded to the site.