I'm Teresa Schultz, a scholarly communication librarian at the University of Nevada, Reno. A lot of what I do involves promoting open access. Find me on Twitter at @schultz0.
Why promotional videos?
Because they're the area I've been working in recently.
My university has placed a strong emphasis on making sure that our online content is accessible to all students (yay!) The first training I received when I started here was in online accessibility, including providing closed captioning for our videos. So when it came time to create some online resources on open access, I started realizing just how few videos were out there on the subject that actually included proper closed captioning.
But what about YouTube's closed captioning?
Yes, YouTube is great at providing automatically generated closed captioning for your videos, and you'll see it on a lot of the OA videos out there. But they're not very good. They're actually pretty bad. Shocking, I know. The automatically generated captions do not include any grammatical marks, such as periods or commas, and it's not uncommon for it to just get words completely wrong. The system has an obvious bias toward the American English accent as well. Woe to the person with any other accent!
Fortunately, several factors have made it relatively easy for me to add edited closed captioning to these videos: 1) Most of them are licensed CC-BY, which allows me to download the videos and upload them to my own account (don't worry, I give attribution), and 2) Although YouTube's auto-generated CC is far from perfect, it does provide a good starting point (so I don't have to type it all out by hand) that allows me to edit the CC. Because of this, I've been able to find videos I wanted to share and make sure they're at least accessible to those who can't hear the audio.
So why do I have to help?
Although the overall process for adding edited Closed Captioning to videos is easy, it's also time consuming. I would estimate it takes about twice as long as the time of a video to do the editing. For a 2-3 minute video, that's not bad. But there are a LOT of videos out there on OA, and a lot of them are 30 minutes to an hour. As much as I would love to edit all those closed captions, I just do not have the time for it.
That's when I got the idea for community-edited CC. This is another area where YouTube rocks - it gives me the ability to let others edit the CC for my videos. So while I don't have the time to edit all of them, I'm hoping that by having lots of people do a little editing here and there, we can greatly increase the number of OA videos with understandable CC.
I also see this as a way of providing a go-to resource for people to find OA videos that already have edited CC. That's why I've created two YouTube play lists - one for those videos that need editing and one for those that have been edited.
Shouldn't we be more concerned with whether actual OA items are accessible?
Yeah, I won't argue against that. We definitely need to ensure Word docs, PDFs and other files are formatted in such a way that they're accessible to all. And yes, there are even other videos that are OA but aren't necessarily about OA that could use CC editing. But that's a truly monumental task (although you can help by making sure the public can help edit CC on your own videos and encouraging others to do the same). Besides, these videos are part of the larger OA world and they just happen to be the one small area I started tackling. I'm open to expanding this project (I think presentations on SlideShare might be my next area of attack) and would love to hear ideas from you. But expanding it will really depend on just how much community support I get, so help out!
This is great, but CC still doesn't make the videos accessible to all.
Again, I won't argue. There are still areas of concern. For instance, all of these videos I've included already are in English. Doesn't much help non-English speakers. Translations could be another area this project explores, but I would also encourage you to see how we can best address this issue. I'm a one-woman band, people.
Why promotional videos?
Because they're the area I've been working in recently.
My university has placed a strong emphasis on making sure that our online content is accessible to all students (yay!) The first training I received when I started here was in online accessibility, including providing closed captioning for our videos. So when it came time to create some online resources on open access, I started realizing just how few videos were out there on the subject that actually included proper closed captioning.
But what about YouTube's closed captioning?
Yes, YouTube is great at providing automatically generated closed captioning for your videos, and you'll see it on a lot of the OA videos out there. But they're not very good. They're actually pretty bad. Shocking, I know. The automatically generated captions do not include any grammatical marks, such as periods or commas, and it's not uncommon for it to just get words completely wrong. The system has an obvious bias toward the American English accent as well. Woe to the person with any other accent!
Fortunately, several factors have made it relatively easy for me to add edited closed captioning to these videos: 1) Most of them are licensed CC-BY, which allows me to download the videos and upload them to my own account (don't worry, I give attribution), and 2) Although YouTube's auto-generated CC is far from perfect, it does provide a good starting point (so I don't have to type it all out by hand) that allows me to edit the CC. Because of this, I've been able to find videos I wanted to share and make sure they're at least accessible to those who can't hear the audio.
So why do I have to help?
Although the overall process for adding edited Closed Captioning to videos is easy, it's also time consuming. I would estimate it takes about twice as long as the time of a video to do the editing. For a 2-3 minute video, that's not bad. But there are a LOT of videos out there on OA, and a lot of them are 30 minutes to an hour. As much as I would love to edit all those closed captions, I just do not have the time for it.
That's when I got the idea for community-edited CC. This is another area where YouTube rocks - it gives me the ability to let others edit the CC for my videos. So while I don't have the time to edit all of them, I'm hoping that by having lots of people do a little editing here and there, we can greatly increase the number of OA videos with understandable CC.
I also see this as a way of providing a go-to resource for people to find OA videos that already have edited CC. That's why I've created two YouTube play lists - one for those videos that need editing and one for those that have been edited.
Shouldn't we be more concerned with whether actual OA items are accessible?
Yeah, I won't argue against that. We definitely need to ensure Word docs, PDFs and other files are formatted in such a way that they're accessible to all. And yes, there are even other videos that are OA but aren't necessarily about OA that could use CC editing. But that's a truly monumental task (although you can help by making sure the public can help edit CC on your own videos and encouraging others to do the same). Besides, these videos are part of the larger OA world and they just happen to be the one small area I started tackling. I'm open to expanding this project (I think presentations on SlideShare might be my next area of attack) and would love to hear ideas from you. But expanding it will really depend on just how much community support I get, so help out!
This is great, but CC still doesn't make the videos accessible to all.
Again, I won't argue. There are still areas of concern. For instance, all of these videos I've included already are in English. Doesn't much help non-English speakers. Translations could be another area this project explores, but I would also encourage you to see how we can best address this issue. I'm a one-woman band, people.