http://www.captionedmediaforobama.com/

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Thanks for your comment. It’s appreciated to know the Obama campaign is working towards making it so all videos will be released with caption at the same time the videos are first released, instead of deaf people being forced to play catch up.

There however is one thing you guys need to work on: shunting us off to a separate page that’s badly organized is NOT inclusive. Even if you made the page organized, it’d still not be inclusive because deaf people would be forced to go to that page instead of just watching the video anywhere they’re embedded.

Would it be possible for you to make it more inclusive by having all videos have a button that’d turn on/off captioning, and embed that video as the default for all articles/pages? I know Hulu.com does it, so it should be very possible.

Jeff, thanks for commenting on the article, by the way! Your feedback is certainly appreciated!

But thanks for your comment, and your efforts!

Along with deaf advocates Howard Rosenblum and Karen Peltz-Strauss, I serve on Obama’s disability policy committee. We agree that it is best to have the videos already captioned when they are first released, and there are efforts underway to connect the campaign with the best available resources to make this happen. The goal is to have captioning options that will provide full and effective information to all viewers as these videos are made publicly available.

Please feel free to visit Obama’s Americans with disabilities blog: http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/dahome/ and post your comments or questions. Likewise, I can be directly reached at jeff_rosen@comcast.net.

Thanks for your comments on the issue. Your support helps us all move forward together, in keeping with Obama’s vision of an inclusive society.

Jeff Rosen

It’s how Bill Creswell has captioned the videos so far.

http://www.overstream.net/

So all they need is to hire a captioner, train the person in how to use overstream, and that’s it. Problem solved. Best part? The only thing that cost them is the captioner himself.

Edit: I’d like also to add that it’s also possible to add text to flash; it isn’t that hard, I’ve done it before. It’s also possible to make it so if a viewer clicks a button (CC), the flash video would then start reading from a text file containing the captions. If they set it up via the button and text file way, then from that point on, all a captioner would need to do is open a text file, and put captions there in a specific format. There’s many, many ways to accomplish them.

What’s preventing them is simply laziness and the desire to avoid having to pay a captioner to do the captioning in the first place.

One thing project readOn didn’t mention is that no Republican candidate took them up on their offer.

1) It would enlighten us on our knowledge about our candidates (yes this comment goes to anybody who’s a possible candidate for presidency)

2) It may score them some votes. ;p

Grant

As for the attention; I suspect no self-respecting giant media company would issue a C&D order to you just for captioning their trailers. It would look very, very bad for them.

But on the other hand, if you were to caption entire movies and redistribute them, then that’d be a whole another story. Although if you were to caption movies, sell them, and pay royalties to the media company, I suspect they would be just fine with it. As long as they get a cut of the money, I don’t think they would care.

But yes, I agree with you, it’d be definitely fun to do the legal tango with a giant, especially when they aren’t in the right.

Probably $100-200? I would think in politics, that would payoff.

(As for legality, I’ve wondered how much attention I might be able to get, if some giant media company wanted to take down my captioned movie trailers! Wouldn’t that be fun!)