Let’s establish something first — auto-generated captions are a problem. They almost guarantee a WCAG failure and can leave users more confused (or offended) than when they started. YouTube creates the transcript from the closed captions of a video (the text that overlays the video, as opposed to burned-in or…
Over the last few years more and more conferences have started to provide live captions during talks. This is awesome and inclusive and great for the olds like me. It excites me so much that I even sponsored the live captions at a conference a couple months ago. While I…
One of the most trafficked posts on my site is not about web development at all: Changing YouTube Playback Speed While the ability to control playback speed has real value from an accessibility and usability perspective, mostly I was just sharing something which brings me a ton of value because…
This post originally appeared on the Algonquin Studios blog. YouTube gives users the option to modify the playback speed of some videos. This is particularly useful in the case of videos that you are obligated to watch (training videos, terrible fan videos, the occasional conference talk, etc.) and want to…
Yesterday Henny Swan asked a simple question on the Twitters: I'm curious to know, who uses subtitles on web content (X device) who's not deaf or hard of hearing? For example I did when breastfeeding.— Henny (@iheni) November 12, 2013 Adam Banks put together a Storify of the responses that…
You may recall from my post in February, WebM, H.264 Debate Still Going, that the H.264 video codec is considered patent-encumbered (which resulted in its dismissal from the HTML5 specification) and Google has argued that its own WebM / VP8 codec is made up of patents it owns, releasing it…
This photo represents some of the technologies (pint glasses) that HTML5 (t-shirt) is thought to encompass (drink). The horror of that concept is represented by the hands (defensive wounds coming).I had the pleasure of sharing some pints with Bruce Lawson and Chris Mills last week in London. While discussing what…
On February 2, Microsoft released a plug-in for Chrome on Windows 7 to allow users to play H.264 video directly in Chrome. In addition, Microsoft has said that it will support WebM (VP8) when a user has the codec installed. And so began the fragmentation of the HTML video model,…
W3C The W3C is pretty good about posting news when new HTML/CSS-related documents undergo updates, status changes, or generally move forward. On Friday the W3C HTML Working Group announced the publication of eight new documents. The brief release provides an even briefer overview of each, or you can see the…
If you pay any attention to the plodding chaos that is the development of HTML5, then you’ve probably seen the discussions around the video element and how best to encode videos. Over a year and half ago Ian Hickson gutted the video and audio portions of the HTML5 specification to…
Image of the captions in use on President Obama’s speech about the Chile earthquake. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while now then you may have noticed my post back in November titled YouTube Will Automatically Caption Your Video. In that post I talked about YouTube leveraging Google…
With HTML5 on the horizon, it is becoming far easier to embed video on a web page than it has been. Sure, you can drop some code copied from YouTube, but you have little control over the HTML or the video output. Once you do have your video, you also…