Universal captioning of videos on the web, television, in the movies and everywhere else video can be shown may still be a long time coming, but it is definitely on its way. Propelled by a combination of new technology developments, political advocacy, legislative action, court rulings, and the marketplace laws of supply and demand, universal captioning of videos is inevitable. The movement, which got its first big push in the 1990s when the Federal Communications Commission required television broadcasters to provide closed captioning, has recently gotten a burst of new energy. When the government was slow to regulate the explosion of digital video on the web, the momentum for captioning stalled for a while. But now a new wave of advocacy, aided by Google’s desire to extend its web search technology to every nook and cranny of the globe, is making the dream of universal captioning come true. Here are some of the driving forces:
- Advocacy: Thirty-six million hard-of-hearing Americans are making their voices heard. Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, who has been deaf since she was 18 months old, has been a ceaseless, vocal equal rights advocate throughout her career. Recently, with organizations such as the National Association of The Deaf, she has been rallying the forces of change with appearances at FCC and Congressional hearings and constant communication to her 45,000 followers on Twitter. She has also recruited Hollywood friends like Ashton Kutcher (five million Twitter followers) to the cause as well. All the commotion has resulted in the kind of visibility that motivates change: this week The New York Times, which sets the agenda for both Wall Street and Washington, D.C., did a major feature on the momentum behind universal captioning.
- Legislation: Congress and the FCC are considering new rules making all broadband and internet content accessible to hard-of-hearing people, which could mean required captioning on everything. The latest push is in the House and Senate, where a combined bill — “The Equal Access to 21st Century Communications Act” — is being readied for a vote. It would require all internet videos, including movies and TV shows available on the web, to be captioned. It would also require all devices capable of displaying web video, including cellular phones and other mobile devices, to be capable of displaying captions.
- Legal Action: Advocacy groups have been suing in state courts for years to require movie theaters to provide closed captioned movies. A recent significant federal court decision ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires movie theaters to show closed-captioned movies unless doing so would constitute an “undue burden.”
- Technology and Market Forces: Google recently introduced new technology that automatically captions videos on the web. This is the kind of technology that’s been around for a long time but has rarely been deployed. The reason Google got it ready for its search service is simple economics: because Google’s web search algorithms look for written words, searchers will be able to find video content more easily now that it is tied to the captioned audio content on the videos. That means more Google searches, extending Google’s dominance of its market. Because Google is the global standard in search, expect other search engines to follow suit and captioned video to become a de facto standard on the web, regardless of government regulations.
In her FCC testimony, Marlee Matlin spoke to the frustration millions of hard-of-hearing people have in not being able to understand what’s being said on TV, in the movies, or in web videos. Recalling her first starring role at seven years old as Dorothy in a production of The Wizard of Oz, she spoke about her recent bitter disappointment when Netflix live-streamed the movie on its 70th anniversary. She sat down to view it with her five-year-old daughter for the first time…and Netflix failed to provide captions. The lack of captions was doubly insulting because, 20 years before, Matlin had lobbied to have The Wizard of Oz movie captioned for the first time. But when when she inquired of Netflix, they told her it was simply too difficult to provide those already-available captions on the internet video stream:
I was told the technology was “coming” and that I had to be “patient and wait.” Well as you’ve heard from my brief history, I don’t take things lying down and I did some investigating….Eventually I found out that there was actually no problem in the technology. In fact, the technology exists to stream content with closed captions. What it came down to was the same issue I encountered 20 years ago – a lack of understanding and a lack of will and desire by broadcasters, content providers and equipment manufacturers to provide full access by passing through closed captions for programming already captioned.
She’s right. The technology does exist, and with more advocacy, more legislative action, and more push from the market, we will start to see it come on line sooner rather than later. She’s also right that none of us should be told to be patient or to wait. The time for universal captioning is now.
Richard says
It’s amazing that there are approximately 28 million Americans who are deaf and that they are virtually shut out of the online video revolution through no fault of their own.
The internet has been transformed from static pages, to multimedia. Everywhere you turn there’s some type of video on a website. In addition to Youtube, there are now hundreds of social networking sites, with more springing up every day. All without captions.
I did find http://www.writteninvideo.com, they’re trying to fight the good fight.Keep up the good work!