As you know, we focus more on accessibility of online videos (while interpreting the concept of “accessibility” broadly — to overcome barriers posed by things other than technical “disabilities”, such as language barriers or literacy problems; but that’s a topic for another day…). But, of course, the very concept of accessibility in a more general sense is important to us.

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

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P.S. The title, unfortunately, is an untranslatable wordplay in Russian - “inaccessible” but also “impregnable” (as in, a fortress). So, if any of you professional translator folks out there with better sense of language than us, care to offer a better translation, please do!

US Congress is getting its own YouTube channel. Dear Senators and Congressmen: please follow the laws you passed (does Section 508 ring a bell?), and make your videos accessible. We also agree with ReadWriteWeb’s criticism of top-down nature of this development:

[Q]uite a few Senators and Representatives decided not to allow comments on their videos. We would hope that more of our elected officials would value comments from their constituents.

But while the legislators may disable comments on YouTube, they won’t disable comments for videos embedded in the blogs — or on Overstream.net, for that matter. Which would make the YouTube channels mere video repositories, rather than portals; the discussion will happen elsewhere. Thwarting the authoritarian, centralized, top-down model like only the Internet can.

And now, moving from D.C. to the Holy See: His Holiness is coming to YouTube. Since the faithful are all over the globe, it’s encumbent upon this Vatican 2.0 (couldn’t resist) to be accessible in multiple languages. ChurchCrunch wonders if a digital version of the 95 Theses is to be expected. May we suggest to the next Martin Luther that they come in a form of an Overstream? We’d set up a special Schlosskirche page just for that.

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Gaurav makes a case that “the future of online video [journalism] will be driven by translation.” We are in vehement agreement. But may we suggest that providing context is another important facet of Journalism 2.0?
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In other news, we have added support for high-quality YouTube videos. Enjoy.