[Web4lib] Video repositories beyond Facebook

[Keith Gilbertson]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 8:03 PM, S Perkins <20run20 at gmail.com> wrote:

> What steps are you taking to make these Flash objects accessible to
> disabled users?  Are you providing transcripts or closed-captioning?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Steven C. Perkins
>
>
>
Steven,

I can't speak for any particular institutions, as I'm currently
independent.  In general though, much of the professionally produced and
purchased content going forward will arrive on DVD.  Many of these DVDs have
machine readable, time encoded captioning files included on them.  There are
now web-based video players that can make use of the caption files (as long
as they're placed in the appropriate location) to automatically provide
captions for the derivative video formats (FLV, MP4, etc).

Here's an interesting idea for legacy or locally produced content, which
typically won't have captioning information readily available.  There's a
service called "Amazon Mechanical Turk" for crowdsourcing tasks when you're
unable to dedicate your own time to those tasks.  One thing that it's often
used for is to produce (human readable, non time-encoded) transcripts of
video files.  Video files are posted to the Mechanical Turk website, someone
from the crowd grabs the video and produces the audio transcript.  The
person producing the transcript is compensated for the work, encouraging
accuracy.

I'd like to see a library obtain a grant for a project comparing the cost
and time efficiency of using Mechanical Turk versus professional
transcription services, and then share the results with the library
community.

--keith