Captioning, subtitling-translation, and assistive systems help make online video a more inclusive medium, making many videos in available in multiple languages.

There are now roughly 25 million videos on the internet.  The words in these videos are, of course, spoken in the hundreds of languages of the world. Subtitling these videos and translating the subtitles has the promise of opening up a whole new world for all of us, letting us peer into other cultures in new ways, explore otherwise inaccessible information, and enjoy the best creative content from anywhere in the world.

Subtitles bridge linguistic and, for those with hearing disabilities, physical barriers to video.  For many people subtitles are not an option for watching video, but a necessity.  Despite their indispensability, subtitles are not well standardized or prevalent online.  Individual video services offer varying degrees of subtitle support for their publishers, but this fragmented and incomplete approach has generated very little subtitle creation and therefore very little content that is accessible through subtitles. A lack of open standards for video itself has compounded this problem.

What is needed are systems to identify and index multimedia content across platforms, search for subtitles in a multitude of languages, and enable users the ability to generate and publish subtitles that aren’t yet available. Open standards are a necessity for this process, guaranteeing universal access and facilitating peer production among video creators and viewers worldwide.

Video has become one of the primary modes of sharing information on the web. By harnessing the popularity of video and the contribution of diverse members of the international community, it is possible to achieve a comprehensive level of access sooner that you might think.

More info:
Annodex
Silvia Pfeiffer
Dotsub

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