I’m working on a longer post about the accessible web inspired by Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards, Second Edition when what should pop up on my Twitter feed?
“CaptioningSucks.com. Now let’s fix it” from none other than Zeldman himself.
In Designing with Web Standards, Zeldman lays out an incredibly strong case for accessibility in Web design. He’s not Deaf. He’s not Blind. He’s just a Web designer and business person that understands that ignoring even a small part of your audience is bad business strategy.
Captioning Sucks! makes this even more explicit for the Deaf. Under the heading “Deaf People Settle for Crumbs!“:
Time after time, deaf people – and other captioning viewers – settle for not enough captioning or lousy captioning. Or they file lawsuits and complaints against companies and, after all that trouble, they settle for exactly the same thing.
Captionioning Sucks! is exactly what it seems, a call to arms to web developers and programmers to fix captioning in web video by the creation of the kind of programming standards that Zeldman has been evangelizing for years. If you are reading this now in an RSS reader or here at WordPress, you are at least partially familiar with the standards-based web design. It’s cross platform and accessible (if done right).
Check out the site for more information about this project and promote the heck out it. I’ve already added a banner over there to right. It’s time we stood up on this. Web video is becoming ubiquitous and leaving far too many of us out.
[UPDATE: So although Zeldman is promoting Captioning Sucks! I realized by reading Daring Fireball that — not unsurprisingly — this is a project by Joe Clark, who Zeldman singles out in his book as the godfather of accessibility. So credit where it is due and more on all of this in a future post.]
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Pingback on Jun 21st, 2008 at 18:55
[...] Accessible Web Sites by various authors. A quick word on Joe Clark, who I mentioned in my post on CaptioningSucks.com and the Open and Closed Project. Joe is to Web accessibility as Zeldman is [...]
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3 April 2008 at 6:25
I was just about to say that. Joe Clark has been writing about that stuff for a while, though I haven’t seen any updates for quite some time.
3 April 2008 at 7:47
Well, me thinks this is the update. This project has just been launched. It’s a new call and its spreading amongst the standards and web design community, we as Deaf/HoH bloggers need to get on board and spread the word too.
3 April 2008 at 21:11
“Web video is becoming ubiquitous and leaving far too many of us out”
Surely noone is going to make a law that web videos must be captioned? Seems the legislature needs to first focus on making it usable for the majority, like enacting laws stating that the videos have to make sense.
What good is captioning if the video doesn’t is incomprehensible anyway?
13 April 2008 at 18:41
I think it’s terrrible that the worlds largest video site does not have built in captioning functionality. Google video has a cool CC function, but youtube, their purchase, is missing this basic functionality.
It would be cool to have a youtube api, that would let you overlay timed captions to you youtube videos from a wiki site.
Between Greasemonkey scripts and Youtube’s new open api, someone should be able to add it.
http://billcreswell.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/lyrics-for-youtube-music-videos/
17 April 2008 at 12:14
@Bill: I completely agree. I think that CaptioningSucks.com is coming from the same place that W3C did in the 1990s — to create a set of standards, and then push really hard for their adoption. Captioning should be easy and it should be handled similarly wether you are using Vimeo, YouTube or whomever.
I saw this at the Open&Closed Project’s website (Joe Clark’s project that is behind Captioning Sucks). I think it sums it up well:
The Open & Closed Project is a new research project headquartered in Toronto. Our main goal is to improve quality by setting standards for the four fields of accessible media – captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. We’ll develop those standards through research and evidence-gathering. Where research or evidence is missing on a certain topic, we’ll carry it out ourselves.