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Volunteer to Caption Videos

August 11, 2011, 3:00 pm

By George Williams

I’ve written a few times before about Universal Subtitles, a great web service that facilitates the crowdsourcing of captions for online videos. (See here and here, for instance.)

Earlier this summer they announced a new initiative to focus the crowd‘s efforts on specific videos: “We’re looking for volunteers to caption and translate videos on our volunteer team page. We’ve curated some fascinating videos from non-profit and educational partners that deserve a global audience. Even if you don’t speak multiple languages you can still help make the video more accessible by creating captions.”

You can donate your time by going straight to their volunteers page and getting to work. Captions make it possible for those who are deaf or hard of hearing to enjoy the benefits of videos, and–if they are translations–they help people who don’t understand the language being spoken in the video but who do understand the language in the captions.

Have you used Universal Subtitles? Alternately, have you used a different tool to caption videos? If so, please share your tips or details of your experience in the comments!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Gruenemann].

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  • Frank Lowney

    I prefer to work offline so a product such as Jubler fits that preference better.  I use Jubler (http://www.jubler.org/) to create SRT files and then use Subler (http://code.google.com/p/subler/) to create an internal subtitle track in MPEG-4 files. Jubler and Subler (different authors) are free but the commercial iSubtitle (http://www.bitfield.se/isubtitle/) is also good.  These are all MacOS X apps.  These apps also add chapter tracks and metadata so have additional pedagogical value. For commercial TV shows and movies, there are a lot of “fan-subbers” at work creating SRT files so one need not reinvent the wheel.  Some of those sites: Moviesubtitles.org, Podnapsi and TVSubs.net.
    Accessibility is not the only good use of subtitles.  They can be also used to alert students to specific portions of a video where a question is raised or provide analysis as in directors narration — lots of stuff like that.  
    Finally, the W3C is currently defining HTML 5 methods for both external and internal soft subtitle tracks, see: http://blog.gingertech.net/2010/04/11/introducing-media-accessibilit-into-html5-media/ So the Mozilla approach is but one of these.

  • http://ProfHacker.com George H. Williams

    Thanks for providing those links! The advantage of online services like Universal Subtitles is that they use crowdsourcing to get the job done.

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