Captioning of Internet Videos?

HR 3101 from LOC Thomas

There is always, for me, a week-long death march sometime during August.  Schools and school districts are starting up the new year, and often with a conference-style professional development day — and some out-of-town speaker to bring the word with a strange and exotic accent. Ya’ll know what I mean…  I leave in just a couple of hours for work in Minnesota, Florida, Georgia, and then back to Durham, NC.  So I probably shouldn’t be spending this time blogging.

But, in checking my e-mail, to see if I’ve gotten an upgrade yet (nope), I read through an e-mail from Jamie Berke.  I do not know anything about Mr. Berke, except that he seems to be championing a bill in Congress, HR 3101, that, in his words…

..takes the laws of captioning for television and applies them to the Internet. What this means for educators is, in the future when they give their students assignments like “watch this internet video and write about it” the students will not only be able to watch the video, they will be able to read captions, reinforcing their reading and language skills!

Berke continues,

..if the educator has a deaf student in the classroom, bonus! They won’t have to worry about whether that student will be able to do the assignment! Already, some teachers do assign internet video to students and deaf students in the class can’t do the homework assignment!

I typically do not chime in on legislation.  The issues are usually far more complex than they are often spun out to be.  But I’ll briefly voice some concerns here.

As someone who is pretty severely hearing-impaired, I can identify with the desire for captioning.  My father, whose hearing has recently started to decline, runs captioning on his TV all the time now.  I think that this bill is a wonderful idea — whose time has not come.

One of the greatest benefits of an increasingly networked and open information environment is that the ability to publish content has been incredibly democratized — not just politically, but economically.  Almost anyone can share or teach something on the Internet and we all have something to teach.

However, if we are required, by law, to also provide captioning for our video communications, then the ability to share becomes narrowed to only those who can afford the time, staffing, and the technology.  We go back to the publishing industry as the prime source of content — which I think is a huge step backward.

Again, I think that this is a wonderful idea — but would suggest that we wait until technology is available that could automatically handle the conversion.

My 2¢ Worth!

FYI

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7 thoughts on “Captioning of Internet Videos?”

  1. As a person with hearing loss, I can see both sides. I really can’t see the possibility of EVERYTHING being closed captioned, however, I would love to see things like CNN and FOXNEWS, which already caption their news on TV provide captioning on their on-line videos too.

  2. You said, “we wait until technology is available that could automatically handle the conversion.”

    But we do have software right now – several of them as a matter of fact – to add captions to the streaming videos (and often at low cost, too.) (YouTube now has the technology enabling users to add captions, for one thing.) So it doesn’t make sense to wait for the technology to be available for captioning abilities when the fact is we indeed have the technology right here, and it is quite available for any online video companies if they would just take a good look.

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