Closed Captioning In Web Video? 164
mforbes writes "Like many geeks, I enjoy watching TV, movies, and streamed video. However, in company with 2%-3% of the population, I suffer from a problem known as Central Auditory Processing Disorder, which essentially means that I have difficulty separating the sounds of human voices from various background noises. When watching TV and when watching movies at home, this isn't a problem, as I can simply turn on the closed captioning. (I find radio to be simply an annoyance.) How much effort would it take the major purveyors of Internet video (the broadcasting majors, etc.) to include an option for CCTV? I doubt the bandwidth required would be more than 1% of that required for the video already being presented. As a social libertarian, I would never ask for government regulation of such an enterprise; I ask only that the major studios be aware of the difficulties that those of us with auditory disorders face. If it's rough for me, how much more difficult can it be for someone who can't hear at all?"
It absolutely sucks for deaf people (Score:3, Insightful)
Google should get on it.
The market (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It absolutely sucks for deaf people (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wouldnt this.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:dotSUB (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The market (Score:5, Insightful)
*wipes soda off of the screen*. What planet are you from? The reason most close caption is because they are required to by law. Most really don't care about the small segment of the marketplace. If you want proof, look at the large number of complaints about poor close captioning, and the vast majority of commercials without CC (Commercials are not required to CC by law). If the market drove companies to produce close captioning, then the commercials would be CC'd as well. Your argument does not stand up to scrutiny.
Re:It absolutely sucks for deaf people (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah wouldn't it be nice if we had a way of transmitting information in a text format saving huge amounts of bandwidth and without the need for any fancy browser plugins? Oh wait, we have this thing called html, or heck even plain text.
Video is killing the internet, making information inaccessible to many users. As a 28.8Kbps dial-up user, I simply cannot get the information contained in huge videos that so many people link these days, when a simple text transcript of perhaps a few kilobytes would download in seconds or less.
And how does one spider the content of a video? (yeah sure, download the video use sophisticated software the separate the audio track and transcribe it... blah, blah - wouldn't it be so much easier to just post a transcript?)
Damn kids! Get off my lawn! I want my text based internet back!
Re:we can't coddle the deaf (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The market (Score:3, Insightful)
The TV, and now online video, is so diverse and diluted to the point where viewers can only watch so much. Speciality channels in particular have very small audiences. With the multiplication in the number of shows, the number of viewers for each show diminishes, yet the cost of captioning each show remains the same (until machine speech recognition evolves to a suitable point). Thus, it is actually become less and less worthwhile--if it was ever worthwhile at all--for stations to caption their shows, because the number of hearing-impaired people *per capita* is not really growing.
So, personally, I'd rather see it done by government regulation rather than trusting content providers to just 'be nice.' We all know how well that tends to work. What would end up happening if captioning laws were revoked would be that 1) almost all stations would cease closed captioning, 2) then a speciality station catering to the interests of deaf people would start up, and 3) this single station would be the extent of the choices that hearing-impaired people would have.
Re:This is actually a disorder? (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem I think starts at the mastering. For some reason or other, the person at the mixing panel decides that some SFX has to be REALLY LOUD, and of course, there's some conversation going on or another. Well, the sound effect ends up masking the dialog! (Probably through the same effect that makes things like MP3 possible). Oh great, now what did the guy say?
Then when movies get broadcasted on TV, they get mixed down, making the effect even worse. Or heck, even TV programs do the same - they overlay SFX or canned laughing or other stuff that masks the dialog. Or if it isn't masked, it covers some syllable making you do a double-take (did they just say what I thought they said?).
I have pretty good hearing as well - but I have closed captioning on all the time - at least I can read what I just missed or figure out what they just said. The fact that A/V receivers and DVD players come with "dialog clarifiers" should be indication enough that perhaps people want to understand dialog.
YouTube and the like videos are even worse - there's often so much background noise that even normal conversation levels are hard to make out over the buzz. Properly done YouTube videos often re-mix the audio afterwards, but they're the minority. The rest are either echos or the guy speaking (muffling voices even more over the background hum), or talking just barely louder than the noise level.
Re:AOL Video Provides CC (Score:3, Insightful)
It's basically like subtitling, you just leave out the translation part. This is a lot of work, and unless there are already plans to subtitle/localize the program into other languages, I don't know whether anybody would really do this.
Re:The market (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, there are people who call on the supposed omnipresent "Market" like some ancient pagan deity. Like any religion, their belief is more than a little irrational and unsubstantiated. Adam Smith has been elevated to the status of a prophet, and all he did was write a book or two. The Church of the Market has unfortunately become the state religion in many countries. Whither now separation of church and state?
The "Market" cannot solve everything. Some things it will not even attempt to solve or rectify, subtitling programs among them, as pointed out by other posters. Better example include public services, healthcare, water and electricity production and distribution, education, etc, etc. Any attempt to leave such matters entirely in the hands of "Market" forces has resulted in the wider stagnation of society. Yes, Government can be big and inefficient, but at least it gets the job done. Private companies won't even do that unless there's money in it for them.
Cuts off the only viable solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
Quite frankly, it only incenses people that understand that the free market isn't going to solve this for everything.
After all, by the tenets of the free market, the lack of presence of these services shows that they do not meet the test of reward vs. cost. If the market for people that needed closed captioning was large enough to defray the costs of providing closed captioning, it would be more common. To ask businesses to provide closed captioning at a loss is antithetical to the core tenets of free market capitalism.
However, if you think that helping the hearing impaired be fully included in society is a worthwhile goal, then you should be able to accept government intervention in the matter. Otherwise, you're left "voting with your dollars" for a position that will never gain the critical mass to succeed. You reap what you sow.