Closed Captioning Blog

YouTube now recognizes the need for online videos to be closed captioned and for that we say, “Hooray!” However, it is becoming increasingly clear that while their new automatic voice recognition software allows their videos to be quickly captioned, the technology still has its bugs and its accuracy leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, the actual errors are so great that it has now spawned tons ...

On the 20th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, 348 members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted for HR 3101, the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. This act will require closed captioning on all Internet video information and will help millions of people have access to these videos. This act will also provide up to $10 million annually for specialized communications equipment for low-income ...

YouTube and Google are now indexing videos for text that is contained within each video’s closed captions and/or subtitles. Therefore, ensuring that your video is closed captioned will certainly lead to increased views given that your video will now rank for any words that are contained within the closed captioned text. This text will assist the search engine and will help with indexing and ranking for certain key ...

Looking for a dream job? Certified realtime stenographers can set their own schedules, work from anywhere in the world and can make six figures a year. Mirabai Knight, a stenographer in New York, composed a six part article on her website entitled “What Is Steno Good For?” It’s an insightful look into the career of stenography and the challenges that steno students face. In “CART, Court, and Captioning,” ...

Aberdeen Captioning has been qualified as a “YouTube Ready” vendor by DCMP. As a DCMP “Approved Captioning Service Vendor,” Aberdeen is committed to providing quality captioning in multimedia formats, now including your YouTube videos. This allows your YouTube video to be captioned according to DCMP guidelines and with a customer satisfaction guarantee. Aberdeen offers different choices for your YouTube video and will work closely to establish a package ...

On June 20, 2010, New York Times reporter Brian Stelter wrote an article that criticized the lack of captioning available for Web videos. He states that advocates like Marlee Matlin have been fighting for captions on popular sites like CNN.com and Netflix. Many sites that contain videos and entertainment clips such as CBS.com, NBC.com, and MSN.com all lack captions or are inconsistent with their captions. With a growing trend ...

The Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau reported an increase in closed captioning complaints since the transition to digital television in June of 2009. To combat this, in February 2010, the FCC implemented a new closed captioning complaint rule. This allows consumers to file their closed captioning complaints directly with the FCC. Closed captioning complaints (captions that are missing, delayed, too fast, garbled, or unreadable) must be filed within ...

The statistics are astounding: 42 million American adults are illiterate and 50 million are unable to read higher than a 4th-grade reading level. Studies show that frequent reading improves reading proficiency, although sadly, according to the “Washington Post,” only one in four Americans actually read a book in the past year. Instead of reading books, the average child in America watches 20 hours of TV each week. How ...

Just wanted to send out a reminder to everyone producing Spanish captioning programming.  The FCC mandate requires that 100% of all Spanish captioning programming be closed captioned in Spanish for the deaf and hard of hearing.  You can find the complete mandate here: http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/closedcaption.html: Here are the specifics from the FCC's website: Spanish Language Programming Because captioning is fairly new to Spanish language program providers, the FCC allows them a longer time ...

True EIA-708 captions can be achieved without the use for an external HD captioning encoder that can cost well over $8000 (US) by using a new captioning work flow.     What You Need   You need Final Cut Pro 7, an AJA Kona card (3, LHi or LSe), and the most recent Kona drivers.  Of course, you will also need a special caption file created by a closed captioning service like ...