Inaudible Nonsense

The time is right for an explosion in captioned online video.

The web video “airwaves” are not a government entity so it would be hard to mandate captioning like was done with CC in 1970s. We are (as every news magazine has reminded us) in a New Decentralized Paradigm(TM). Its going to have to be a grassroots, net-community level effort.
As such, the value of captioning is going to have to be made apparent to groups of people outside of the deaf/hh communities. Let me such number one: watch online video at work without bothering your cubemates/alerting your boss. I’m sure there are others. Once someone can make the argument compellingly and a service like YouTube or Vimeo makes it easy to add captioning to a video and to turn it on and off. I think this could be something that further differentiates one from the another. YouTube is Flash-based, so seemingly the captioning could be done as a layer that could be toggled on and off. Perhaps voice recognition software would add the captioning automatically (for those that didn’t want to add it themselves.)

Meanwhile, I’m feeling strangely left out of the whole Web-based video movement. And it’s because deciphering the audio is not worth the time it takes for me. Which is too bad. Every week there is something I’d like to see. Like the prequel to the new Wes Anderson movie, or this piece on early graf in Philly. So let the drumbeat for captioning begin in. Three. Two. One.