Geek of the Week is a feature on The Big Blog from Seattle PI Blogs. Interesting geeks profiled thus far include Wendy Chisholm, Kathy Gill, Doug Ireton, Rachel Strawn, Brian Dorsey, Natala Menezes, Jenny Lam, Marty Stepp and more. Each geek gets the same set of questions to answer. Fascinating.
Make video accessible, localised, mobile and searchable by captioning from Henny Swan at iheni is an important overview of captioning tools and services. Before she gets into the details of the captioning tools she tested, she lists the benefits of captioning, which I think are worth repeating here.
Captioning benefits
Accessibility – this is the obvious benefit as you’ll be opening up your content to deaf and hard of hearing users as well as people find it easier to read rather than listen (or do both together). If you don’t have translated captions some non-native speakers may also find content easier to consume when reading captions.
Localisation – adding translations to your captions widens your potential audience massively. There are plenty of tools out there such as dotSUB that enable you to crowdsource translations and many hosts such as YouTube which support multiple caption tracks.
Mobile – users with mobile phones who may not have earphones or are in a noisy place also benefit. I do wonder how much can be visible on some small screens but certainly some people will find it useful.
Search – site indexing may also get a boost. For example YouTube supports video searching of caption data which also filters through into Google search.
Glamour Magazine, which I normally associate with nothing more than fashion and appearance, has picked some Women of the Year for 2009 and the choices are interesting. Among them are Marissa Mayer from Google, The Women of Iran’s One Million Signatures Campaign, and Maya Angelou.