Ken Harrenstein Helps Bring Captions to Online Video

Those of us who aren't deaf probably wouldn't think about this, but very few online videos come with captioning. As you may well know, closed captioning is required for most TV programming, per the Federal Communications Commission, but the same requirement doesn't exist for the Web. As CNN reports, Google engineer Ken Harrenstein wants to do something about that.

Harrenstein, who's been deaf since the age of 5, used to be at MIT and worked on the project ARPANET, a predecessor to the Internet. He also helped develop Deafnet, one of the earliest online communities for deaf people. At Google, he's worked on a technology that was launched this past November, which "works by interpreting the sound on a video clip, translating that data into text, then adding the text on top of the video at the appropriate times."

While Harrenstein admits the technology isn't perfect, since it does mess up some voice-to-text translations, he sees it as a big step in achieving a Web that's "equally accessible to all people." In addition, Google's working on improving the ability for people to do their own caption uploading.

The article reports that every minute on YouTube, 20 hours of video is uploaded to the site. While a lot of this is filled with cute pets and babies, people hurting themselves in various ways, and other video that doesn't necessarily require captions, it doesn't mean that captions shouldn't be made available.

Amazingly, broadcast companies weren't ordered to caption a majority of what they broadcast until 1996, and considering the Wild West aspects of the Internet, it's hard to say if any sort of similar regulation would ever come to the Web. Therefore, it's great to see someone like Harrenstein doing what he can to improve the online experience for deaf people around the world.

Screengrab courtesy of Google via YouTube