Inside the Little Plastic Castle

I've recently seen calls for volunteers to provide subtitling and captioning, e.g.,
http://blog.universalsubtitles.org/volunteer/

Volunteering is a wonderful thing.

Warning: rant ahead.

Would PBS rely on volunteers to provide audio for their news? Or handling the studio lighting? Perhaps the reporters should work out of the goodness of their hearts?

Subtitling and captioning require skill and time. Why should subtitlers/captioners not be compensated for their work? Why should professional TV production consciously exclude viewers for whom audio isn't the appropriate channel? In addition to people who can't understand audio due to deafness or hearing impairment, there's foreign language learners, people in bars, folks running on their treadmills at the gym, and (perhaps most important in this age) Google and other spiders who index and archive video via the caption info.

While some of the Amara projects are non-profit NGOs, others are HUGE corporations, e.g., Google. Yes Google, which has been displaying mostly inaccurate machine-translated captions (some video has been stripped of the professionally prepared captions).

You may have seen Google/YouTube announce the magic of auto-captioning last November.

Gee whiz, they even had a deaf programmer write the blog entry. Things are good, right?

Watch this Bill Moyers interview with David Simon on YouTube. It's got captions. They're automagically generated with voice recognition. Compare the audio tracks and the caption track and be stunned at the high level of errors. Notice that White speakers' words are around 80% correct and Black speakers' words more like 30% correct.

Yes, it takes time to make good on technology's promise. In the meantime, disabled people put up with sub-standard services—and often at premium prices. When they're perfected, they'll be generally available.

These bad captions are particularly frustrating because the original sources were already captioned! Since the 1980s all network PBS (US public television) has been captioned; the same has been true for all HBO (paid US cable network) productions since 1995.

Arghhh.