First I tried thanking diariests on blogs when they posted transcripts of videos. My complimentary comments seemed to go down the memory hole as the diarists followed up with videos with no transcripts or even a summary to explain what was important about the video.
But last week, after No Quarter received a number of donations, Larry Johnson put up a post thanking all for the donations. At the end was a comment that he didn't realize so many people were still on dial-up and that the blog would strive to post transcripts.
So I made a donation and added a comment that it isn't just dial-up readers that need transcripts but hearing impaired readers as well.
Well, down the memory hole it seems. I guess dial-up readers are worth more than hearing impaired ones.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Accessibility on the web - a technical issue
The biggest rage in blogging is the video clip. The only problem is that (1) many laptop computers do not have powerful speakers; and (2) some of us are hearing impaired.
I am hearing impaired and use a laptop computer. Even if the speakers on my laptop had a higher volume at max, I still couldn't hear video's very well. Since many of the videos on political blogs are taken from television news programs, companies that have software to produce digital videos should be designed to pick up closed captioning. It may be too expensive to run the captioning simultaneously with the video. From my point of view, a simple dump of the captioning into a text file to be used as a transcript would be like heaven.
Media Matters exports their video with an attached summary, which is the best option I've seen so far, and I'm grateful to them for making this type of video available.
Too many blog posts put out a title and an embedded video with no explanation. I understand their trying to get information out in a timely manner. I understand also that blogging is a labor of love and commitment, especially political and that bloggers need time for their private lives. I appreciate the citizen journalist value that they provide to people like me.
While I could wish that bloggers would do more to meet the needs of people with disabilities in their posting, the truth is that it would be more efficiently done at the transfer of the capture from dvd/tape to the internet video recording. Providing the technology at that level would make it easy to provide transcript services
I am hearing impaired and use a laptop computer. Even if the speakers on my laptop had a higher volume at max, I still couldn't hear video's very well. Since many of the videos on political blogs are taken from television news programs, companies that have software to produce digital videos should be designed to pick up closed captioning. It may be too expensive to run the captioning simultaneously with the video. From my point of view, a simple dump of the captioning into a text file to be used as a transcript would be like heaven.
Media Matters exports their video with an attached summary, which is the best option I've seen so far, and I'm grateful to them for making this type of video available.
Too many blog posts put out a title and an embedded video with no explanation. I understand their trying to get information out in a timely manner. I understand also that blogging is a labor of love and commitment, especially political and that bloggers need time for their private lives. I appreciate the citizen journalist value that they provide to people like me.
While I could wish that bloggers would do more to meet the needs of people with disabilities in their posting, the truth is that it would be more efficiently done at the transfer of the capture from dvd/tape to the internet video recording. Providing the technology at that level would make it easy to provide transcript services
Commenting Frenzy
The new "safe, secure" commenting systems that are out there today are causing me havoc. They are not easy to use. I have created so many user ids because I can't replicate the original sign in experience.
Here's what happens: I go to a site and there is a post I want to comment on. I find that you must have a certain type of id in order to comment (Blogger, OpenId). It gives you the option of creating an id. So I create an id. The next time I come to that blog and want to post, I can't recreate the id, even though I've saved all the id information. So I try creating another id - OpenId. I think I do this successfully, but when I try to post, I get an instruction that requires more work than it's worth, considering that the next time I come to this blog, I'm not at all sure that it's going to let enter the user id info again.
It happened to day at Anglachel's Journal.
Please, please. Can we institute something simple that can be replicated again and again. My userid/password capture program is on overload.
Here's what happens: I go to a site and there is a post I want to comment on. I find that you must have a certain type of id in order to comment (Blogger, OpenId). It gives you the option of creating an id. So I create an id. The next time I come to that blog and want to post, I can't recreate the id, even though I've saved all the id information. So I try creating another id - OpenId. I think I do this successfully, but when I try to post, I get an instruction that requires more work than it's worth, considering that the next time I come to this blog, I'm not at all sure that it's going to let enter the user id info again.
It happened to day at Anglachel's Journal.
Please, please. Can we institute something simple that can be replicated again and again. My userid/password capture program is on overload.
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