I'm Reid, the person lucky enough to be shown in the video talking about closed captioning and my Doom3[CC] mod. I've been thinking about web video subtitling for a while now and Craig is right, there is no standard. There's a website I think has a lot of potential, but seems to be dead in the water right now. http://www.opencaptions.com/ I really like this idea of letting users caption the videos themselves, only because I fear it will take years of legislation to get commercial developers of video content to caption their videos for the web. We've already fought this battle in the 70's and 80's with TV captioning standards. Funny how history repeats itself.

Anyway, great work – and honest too – highlighting how far there is to go. Thank you!

Barrie Ellis, CEO http://www.OneSwitch.org.uk

Your question about closed-captioning web video is absolutely fair. We hope to be doing more to make our content widely accessible.

Our TV broadcast of the story is closed-captioned and our web version is not currently captioned. The reason (though not an excuse) is that there has been a standard & process for TV closed-captioning for many years, but no one standard for closed-captioning web video across various formats (Quicktime, RealMedia, Adobe Flash, etc.) has emerged.

Your comment motivated me to do some more research yesterday and there has been progress in this area just in the last few months, even after we launched the show. I did find a promising example at:

http://www.popview.com/demos/popcast/captions/

which demos some new captioning capabilities in the newly-released version of our Flash software. I look forward to experimenting with these new features, as soon as I can.

I also learned that there are 3rd party services that will assist in the captioning, though pricing may be an issue for us as a non-profit. I'll have to see.

http://www.automaticsync.com/caption/webcaption.htm

I would welcome any help or advice on solutions that yourself or others are using in the interim until such standards can be adopted.

Respectfully,

Craig Rosa, QUEST Interactive Producer

Touching on an issue we covered recently, QUEST TV tackles the issue of making games more accessible to hearing impaired or quadriplegic players. The program follows a father and son's DIY efforts to make their gaming more accessible as…

I find it ironic that a video segment about making video games accessible to the disabled community, especially closed captioned games for the hearing impaired, is not closed captioned. Yet the broadcast version viewed on the TV is. Why is this?

Thanks

I wanted to post a correction to a bit of narration in our segment:

XBOX 360 is by Microsoft and Playstation 3 by Sony, not the other way around, as we unintentionally stated.

Enjoy!

Gabriela

Gabriela Quiros
Segment Producer