“In today’s mass societies, it only takes one percent of the people making a dedicated choice – contrary to the mainstream’s choice – to create a movement that can change the world.” Mark Penn, Microtrends.
“A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead, Anthropologist
Today, CNN wrote an article, about Google’s engineer’s quest to caption the Web. Basically, it is an *inspiring* article about Ken Harrenstien who is now at Google, and he and a team of other engineers have created automatic captioning for a handful of educational channels on YouTube.
Kudos to Mr. Harrenstien, and his work is recognized by many of us.
But… something ain’t right…
Look at CNN’s website, www.cnn.com/video and ALL of these videos on that website are not captioned!
Why is that? We cannot use Harrenstien’s auto-captioning feature on CNN’s videos.
We just cannot, because they are not on YouTube!
Does that mean we are not THAT important? Look at the graphic, CNN… The chart below is a visual representation of people who can hear and people who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing. It says that U.S. Population who can hear consists of 91.4 percent, compared to Deaf and Hard of Hearing population in United States which is 8.6% (26.5 million) and a mere 0.2% of Deaf people using ASL (500,000 people).
Simon says,
YOU FAIL!
Readers, go to this link and write your thoughts/feedbacks you may have for CNN. Tell them to caption their online videos!
5 comments on “CNN : Captioned News Not!”
Dianrez
Along with Thumpaflash, Caption Action 2 and other bloggers such as myself interested in this issue, I am grateful for your mentioning this and adding an important link that could be used every day by many people to complain about lack of captions on news videos.
I sent my comment today. And will bookmark this link so I can mention specific videos that I wanted to be captioned in particular from time to time.
Peachlady
I have left a message with CNN! Thank you for providing a link! Keep up with good work!
joseph
Hi Amy – it’s true CNN sucks, but hold your horses – it’s not fair to accuse them of not taking advantage of a service that isn’t available yet to all videos – or is it? It looks like they’re still experimenting. At this point it seems like we should be making sure CNN hears about this guy and hooks up with him and his technology, OR that the government buys the tech and makes it freely available to all interested parties for use on their own websites (I can imagine CNN and other filmmakers want to retain copyright on their own work which is easiest done by maintaining stuff on their own websites.) -my two cents, Joseph
Jean Boutcher
Thanks for your blogpost. I have just sent my comment to CNN.
DEAF WORLD AS EYE SEE IT » CNN: Captioned News NOW! It’s the Law!
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