Deaf Pagan Crossroads

In response to some questions that individuals have had in regards to the captioning services provided by Project readOn, here is a response from Jack Wood, one of the three individuals who helped to create this project. While the below can be found in the commentary section of the original post on Project readOn, I felt it worthy of its own post, so it is!

Hi everyone,

First off I want to thank all of you for checking out our site and for your feedback. Without your input we will never be as good a service as you deserve.

Secondly I wanted to comment on why we at Project readOn created the player that you have all seen.

Embedding text in videos is indeed not that difficult to do, however it is somewhat time intensive which I suspect is the reason why a lot of web developers do not engage in such a process. Captioning itself is a bit more complicated than just adding text to the video. Many view captioning as an art form so to speak. This is because there are subtle things in the file that you may take for granted, such as descriptions, timing (which is not so subtle), placement of the captions on screen to indicate who is speaking, what to italicize and when etc.

I can’t speak to exactly why more videos of a more amateur nature are not captioned, but I can tell you why most shows that you see captioned on TV are not captioned online. Pulling the caption file off of line 21, which is where the captions reside in your signal, and remastering to multiple media formats is an intricate, time consuming and expensive process. Each media format has its own distinct nuances which require different hardware for each to complete remastering of each file. I have never worked for a television network so I can only assume that time, labor and cost are the main reasons you don’t see captions for most online media.

This brings me to Project readOn. We simply put our heads together and brainstormed various ways to make this happen without having to go through all the steps normally required. What we have created may not be perfect, but it is simple and it is universal. It works with all media formats and across multiple platforms. In order to achieve this we had to keep the caption player separate from the media, which is why you have to synch from the beginning. Easy to do once you get used to it. We do not reuse captions already created, but start from scratch and caption everything on our own.

As you can imagine there are numerous legal reasons why we cannot repurpose the captions previously created.

This is just a brief insight into why we have done things a certain way, but I hope it helps.

Thanks!

Thanks to you, Jack! I’m sure we all appreciate your explanation. Project readOn may not be perfect, but it does give us access where we did not have such before. Let’s keep that in mind and continue to provide positive feedback and constructive criticism that can help to make the service even better for all of us.

Remember also that there is power in numbers. The more people who demand on-line captioning, the more the “powers that be” such as MSN, CNN, ABC, etc. will start to notice, hopefully get the message, and provide their own on-line captioning!