the video web: leaving the Deaf out of politics?

28 August 2008 in captioning, survival, technology, web development, web standards
Tags: captioning, Deaf politics, web video

Web video has changed a lot about advertising, PR and broadcast media. Yet it’s fairly easy enough to avoid, or at least ignore. I have enough distractions as it is, so if there isn’t a large world of captioned video on the web it didn’t really feel like any great loss.

Until the 2008 presidential campaign.

With YouTube debates during the primaries and video feeds and uploads of speeches and now the DNCC, I suddenly have the distinct feeling that I’m being systemically left out of the process. This is an unacceptable situation. (And the political teams that fill my inbox with video announcements that aren’t captioned or at least come with an easily discoverable transcript — which is the lesser solution, of course — are not endearing me to their causes.)

I’ve written before about the Open and Closed Project and the absolute necessity for video captioning on the web to embrace common, open-source standards — the same kind of standards that helped create the explosion in content of the so-called social web (a.k.a Web 2.0) over the last few years. Web standards allow for low overhead through cheap and easily deployable solutions. Unlike the web of the 1990s, we aren’t today reinventing the wheel with each new dot-com.

Web video captioning needs to be at a similar place, where captions are easily read and created regardless of what video player, computer platform or content creator one is using. (Google video has one of the larger collections of captioned video, in part because the ability turn on and off captioning is a Google video proprietary feature. For more on this, see ProudGeek’s post from last year.) 

Instead it’s stuck, we’re stuck in a 1996 web metaphor. If you remember the browser wars, each web browser had a different toolkit so what you could see and do with Navigator was not the same as you could see and do with Explorer. Largely, those kind of proprietary differences have been eliminated.

I was okay with the slow adoption of captioning and creation of captioning standards when it was just mindless entertainment. But now, it feels like it is affecting my enfranchisement as a voter and informed citizen — then we have serious problem.

And perhaps an illegal one.

At what point is a network or campaign violating the ADA (as well as campaign laws)  if a specific video piece is only available online and without captions?

 

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UPDATE: Apparently, I can change the course of media over night (be sure to leave your suggestions and tips in the appropriately places, I will take requests on a first come/highest tipper basis) — YouTube announced support for subtitles and captioning. More at TechCrunch.