Sorry, couldn’t refrain myself from the trilingual pun I thought about while awaiting maintenance to be completed — but hey, multilingual (how does one make a noun out of it? I guess I have to ask Language Log folks) is what we’re all about, n’est pas?

I came up with that title while meditating on Bill’s comment about a hiatus in captioning of videos from Change.gov. So I decided to lend some efforts to help our champions of accessibility (grwebguy captioned last week’s installment, damiano — this week’s Discorso di Sabato 22/11, cool!) Since it was kind of late after the maintenance, I just got one in, the latest weekly address, below.

Ah, science and technology, warms the cockles of my heart. Yours too, or you wouldn’t be reading blogs.

Speaking of which:

• Raise your hand if you thought “Al Gore” when Obama referenced to “inventing the Internet”.
• Raise the other hand when you realized that he actually was talking about Gore when he segued to the leadership part of it.
• Raise the third hand when he got to the “even when it’s inconvenient” part.

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P.S. Speaking of the pun in the title. Notice that Hebrew word that’s part of the pun? Well, internationalization is tricky stuff, and RTL is doubly so — but Overstream supports RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew fine.

P.P.S. Speaking of that pun again… As I was revising this post, I found out that I can’t claim the credit — Shahar Golan holds first dibs on it. Nice one, Shahar!

Obama’s weekly address was put up last night, and, as of this morning, of course, no captions — or even a transcript.

So I got to work… By the time I finished captioning it, however, the transcript was put up, depriving me of one reason for criticism… But still, it took about 12 hours for the transcript to appear, and I was done with captioning in about 30 minutes.

Here it is:

Washington Post calls Obama’s “The YouTube presidency“.

Unfortunately, it is lacking English captions — to make it accessible to deaf/hard-of-hearing communities, and captions in other languages — to make it accessible to both non-English speaking US constituency and to a world-wide audience.

Yes, transcripts are provided, which follows their commitment to accessibility. But reading the transcript is not as effective as watching a video.

Thanks to Bill Creswell for quickly captioning it. I suppose this is the true Web 2.0 way — users are generating content and filling in the missing pieces. But cool as it may be, when the content provider is the government, it would do well to provide accessible versions itself.

Here is the captioned version: