This is less useless than you think. Captioning video could allow for video to become searchable as easily as text is now searchable. This could lead to far better search results for video and a leap forward in the way people produce and consume video content.
Not really directly relevant to this, but YouTube makes captioning videos as painless as I can possibly imagine it being, and provides incredible automated and manual tools for doing so. I caption all of my videos on YouTube because it's the right thing to do, and I would do it even if it were more painful than it is, but I specifically use YouTube for everything because they make it so easy to add good captions (they also allow you to download the captions which can be converted to other formats and such).
I don't know what kind of tools UCB could make available on their videos...but, the technology exists to community source the video captioning.
Sounds like the videos need closed captions. Not a particularly difficult task to add them. It can be frustrating to go back and do this with older content, but captions make the videos accessible to a lot more people. Automated captioning software is also very high quality these days. There’s really no reason not to do it these days.
Most of these videos are already being captioned. What's needed in large part is just higher quality captions. Nobody is shutting anything down for the mere lack of a better captioning system.
You could use the YouTube captions instead of downloading the video and processing that to get text for a good number of videos that are just one person talking.
Hmm... I have to disagree with you here. There is a title and a subtitle above the video. Those two elements provide enough information for the user to determine if they want to watch the video. Captions would still be a plus, though.
Doesn’t it feel bad if a large portion of viewers are scrolling past your video because they are unable to hear or understand what is being said in the video? If you don’t add captions to your content, this is what happens.
Many researches have shown that adding captions to the content improves memory and makes it easier for users to pay attention to what is being said in the video.
In this article, we’ve discussed 5 key points why adding captions is very important for your video and how it can help gain more visibility for your channel.
What's important to remember, I think, is that we should not compare YouTube auto captions to human made captions, because auto captions were not created as a substitute for human made captions - if it wasn't for auto captioning, all these videos wouldn't get any captions at all. They may never be perfect, but they're not designed to be, they're creating new value on their own. And IMO they crossed the threshold of being usable, at least for English.
It's not clear that there's really that much demand for captioning. There's a CA law that's created a perverse opportunity for aggrieved individuals to try and extort money out of public institutions who put content online; it's not clear to me that they represent a bona fide constituency in need of captioning. (I'm sure that such a bona fide need does exist, but I don't think the people pushing Berkeley in this case are it.)
Transcribing every video might be a terrible use of resources, unless there are other benefits of the transcripts (which might be the case; search would be a nice side effect).
A better solution would be to allow a user to request a captioned version of a video and then have it farmed out to volunteers. It would be a much more reasonable amount of effort (with some ratelimiting to prevent asshat behavior or scripting) and you'd be sure to transcribe the content that users actually want first. By chunking a video up, you might be able to transcribe it quite quickly, too. If I did need video captioning, I'd much rather have a system like that, vs. hoping that some multi-year effort to transcribe everything has hit the one video I need today.
However, it's not clear that such a solution would actually help Berkeley, because of the asinine way the laws are written.
> Uploading a video is trivial while captioning still requires significant effort.
No, actually it doesn't. You start with the automatic one that youtube creates and then edit it.
It takes about twice as long as watching the video (i.e. about 2 minutes for each minute of video).
Source: I've started doing this for videos I upload.
Yes, if your audio quality is bad, and youtube can't understand anything so you have to start from nothing it would be significant effort, as you say. But if your audio is clear, it's really not that hard.
If you want perfection (line breaks in logical places, not too much text at a time on the screen, captions synchronized perfectly with the speaker), the time goes up to about 4 or 5x, which is still not "significant effort".
reply