The Translanguage Project is a partner of Overstream.net and relies on our technology to add cross-language subtitles to videos.

The Translanguage Project is ready to expand to cover more languages and cultures, and is currently looking for volunteers to staff our sites and contribute overstream translations. If you feel excited about making a culture accessible to the world, this is the project for you. You will become a part of an international multilingual team and will collaborate with others to expand the Translanguage Project and organisation.

Ideally, you need to have mastery of international english and at least one other language, and have an interest in world culture and music, arts or comedy. You also need to be willing to contribute a few hours each week to the project.

If you are interested, please send an email to alexkierke@gmail.com and tell a little about yourself. You might be exactly the kind of person we are looking for!

This is the future not merely because of internationalization, or accessibility. Just like taking notes in a live lecture helps retain material even if you don’t ever look at the notes again, students who also read a text version of the video retain more vocabulary and specific details than they would have otherwise.

Consumers with disabilities find many E&IT products to be inaccessible. A sizeable un-tapped market for universal design products and services exists. However, few companies appreciate the size of the market or know how to tap its potential.

[...]

Designing with access in mind can significantly increase the size of targeted markets for electronic and information technology (E&IT). Good business practice dictates that designers and engineers avoid unintentionally excluding large populations of consumers from accessing and using the E&IT they develop and manufactur

Additionally, According to National Captioning Institute, “66% of viewers of captioned TV are more likely to buy a product that has a captioned commercial; 53% will actively seek out products advertised with captions; and 35% will switch to brands that use captioned ads.”

And not only does accessibility provide increased ROI, the I (investment) part can be minimal, leveraging . The great Jamie Berke writes about how tax credits can help businesses make themselves accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people.

And, finally, for those relying on video for marketing, consider that a “study even showed that the mere availability of subtitles could increase viewership by 40% and increase duration viewed by 38%” (h/t 3playmedia).

The good

• President Obama Signs U.N. Convention On Rights Of Disabled Proclamation
• We joined the Deaf Twitter Group

The uncertain

• COATAccess (of which Overstream is a member) and Jamie Berke (whom we are reading) are doing a great job in getting HR3101 to pass.
• The House of Lords recommends video embedding recommended for Parliament videos — we need to make sure captioning is included.

The amusing

• To our Russian-speaking readers, we’d like to point out a great blog run by an Overstream user and dedicated to translating comedy sketches from around the world: http://sketch-comedy.blogspot.com/

• The nature of blogging and Twitter is such that Twitter Tools in the Twitter-to-Wordpress direction don’t make for good reading. Although some improvements can be made here:
  • Some ad hoc (yet laconic) syntax hints that some words plus the accompanying link should be translated to an <a href=”link”>text</a> structure in the blog.
  • Some sort of querying the URL shortening service for the original URL (because some die-hard verbose bloggers hate this part of Twitter and refuse to click on some obscure URLS. I can’t say that I necessarily blame them.
  • An option in Twitter Tools to make Twitter digest go into a draft instead of a published post.
  • This was not helped by my ill-fated decision to pipe the feed of newly created Overstreams right into our main Twitter account. The noise was, well, deafening, pardon the pun.

  So, at least until the above-made WIBNI (”wouldn’t it be nice?”) suggestions for blogging/Tweeter integration are done, we’ll tread carefully and will:

  • @Overstream on Twitter is still the Tweet Stream from the Overstream Team. The feeds with latest Overstreams, updated many times daily, are now available from @captioned on Twitter for those that want it — and we see that quite a few of you do!
  • In general, render unto Twitter that which is tweeted, and render unto WordPress that which is… well… more coherent.

So we are happy that we could use our site to bring those of you who share this interest several stories about accessibility (or, rather, sadly, lack thereof) elsewhere.

Today, we bring you a few stories from Russia (they are embedded below).

Moscow Wheelchair Action in the News I

Moscow Wheelchair Action in the News II

One of the featured participants (look for her at 01:31) is a noted journalist and activist Irina Yasina. If you can read Russian, do check out her take on this over at LiveJournal.

Credits

We’d like to credit LiveJournal users who brought this to our attention:

• yasina
• drugoi
• mkay422
• o-umi

These services (Subtitle Authoring Service and Subtitle Playback Service) are intended for clients who would like to host their videos at a location of their choice. The client is provided with their own private instance of the Overstream Server on which they can create an unlimited number of users.

• The Subtitle Authoring Service’s interface can be integrated into the client’s backoffice.
• The Subtitle Playback Service includes a subtitle-enabled, fully customizable video player which can be localized into any language of client’s choice.

The Overstream Client Services include a flexible on-demand monthly payment plan that ensures that the client only pays
for the actual service use. Custom code modifications are also available.

If you are interested in Overstream Client Services, please write to
for more information.

• A very touching Overstream Review and Tutorial (by closedcaptionboy)
• An Overstream Tutorial (by DigPartyProductions) including instructions on how to import the subtitles into your YouTube video

Thanks a lot, guys and girls, for helping others to use Overstream!

The Internet Archive is a an Internet Library of free videos, text, audios and other digital data. As they put it themselves:

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.

And now hopefully the video portion of it will (with your help!) be available with subtitles, further broadening the usefulness of the Internet Archive-provided data to users from all over the world.