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UPDATE – March 10, 2010: Yes, it is true. Google has announced that the “automatic captioning service” first detailed in November, is now available to all accounts (channels). It appears that, for now, you have to “request” the service (although it appears they automatically had captioned my latest video which was posted several months ago), and they will eventually get to all of them. Pretty cool. More on the announcement. Directions on how to caption

I recently heard the news about the new “automatic captioning” that Google is providing to certain YouTube accounts. According to the “Official Google Blog:”

…we’ve combined Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they’re off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.

Apparently, Google is rolling this out with a select group of partners and on specific channels. My understanding is that Google will simply start captioning videos in these groups using this new automatic system.

Anyone who knows anything about captioning knows that automatic systems are fraught with problems. It seems the best captioners are still human beings. And, well, I’m guessing Google is not interesting in hiring half the population of the planet and training them to become transcriptionists. Cause that’s what it would probably take to get enough human power to deal with the zillions of YouTube videos out there.

But if you can’t wait for Google to automatically caption the home videos of your kids opening their Christmas presents, you can use another, lesser-known, and equally free service called CaptionTube. It is not clear from my reading if CaptionTube is a service that Google Labs developed themselves or whether is was acquired through some kind of company merger, but in any case, the price is right. I’m still playing with it so I don’t have an official opinion yet. If you are a master user, send me a comment or an e-mail.

I have, for a year or so, been also playing around with an application called MovCaptioner that runs on the Mac OSX. SynchriMedia, the maker of MovCaptioner has been promising a Windows version, but I’m thinking CaptionTube might be the right product at the right price. MovCaptioner costs $39.95 for one license which provides free updates. Multiuser licenses are also available for a discount.

Both MovCaptioner and CaptionTube work essentially the same way. You load your video (in the case of CaptionTube, you can work off an existing YouTube video that has already been  published). As you play back your video in the application, you can stop (marking the time code automatically) and type in what the people on the video are saying. It is not really easy to do, so I have developed an new affinity for the people who do this work professionally. People do not talk in nice tight sound bytes, so you will quickly find it is hard to “stop the tape” at the appropriate spot and add the caption. You also have to have pretty good listening skills. You will end up often repeating the clip to get the wording correctly. Again, it’s not easy.

After you have created the text for your captions, you click some buttons, uploading the caption file, and check back in a little while and see your YouTube with captions. In the case of MovCaptioner, you have a number of options for saving and publishing your video. MovCaptioner has the advantage of saving a file that can use it with, or converted for use with any media player, not just the Flash media player that YouTube uses.

Both captioning systems appear to use an “closed caption” method meaning the caption transcript is kept separate from the video file (not embedded like subtitles in old movies). It can be turned off and on by the user, and the transcript itself can be saved and used separately – with or without the time codes. This is a nice option.

I’ve made this all sound very simple; it’s not. But, it is not all that difficult either. Like anything, it is an acquired skill.

I am hoping this new automatic service from Google takes off and become universally available soon. At the very least, Google could first provide this as a service for folks who need to get their videos captioned now (e.g., educational institutions, governments, etc.). Maybe even open it up with invites like they did with GMail and GoogleWave. I’d be happy to be a beta tester.

Anyway, a solution to finding a quick and inexpensive way of captioning short videos is coming closer to fruition. Exciting times. Stay tuned!

One has to wonder after reading these articles from yesterday’s ZDNet…

In their article, Report: Malicious PDF files comprised 80% of all exploits for 2009, ZDNet reports:

A newly released report shows that based on more than a trillion Web requests processed in 2009, the use of malicious PDF files exploiting flaws in Adobe Reader/Adobe Acrobat not only outpaced the use of Flash exploits, but also, grew to 80% of all exploits the company encountered throughout the year.

The other blog, Adobe plugs more gaping holes in PDF Reader, ZDNet reports that Adobe has released a new patch for the Adobe Reader yesterday.

This morning, both of my Windows XP machines lit up with an announcement that there was a new version of Flash Player available and urged me to install. I did despite the fact that I manually updated them all last week when the first stories appeared that the patch was released.

Perhaps the scariest conclusion noted in the ZDNet article about report from ScanSafe was that:

Therefore, the increasing use of malicious PDFs can also be interpreted as the direct result of the millions of users using outdated and exploitable Adobe products (emphasis mine), with the only preference a malicious attacker could have in this case remaining the incentive based on the 99% penetration of Adobe Flash on Internet-enabled PCs.

I guess the adage, “you have no one to blame but yourself” comes to mind, but clearly, people have come to expect that the people who make the stuff that they run on their computers ensure that their stuff is safe.

So the message here folks is: when you get a notice that there is a new version of your software available, drop everything and install it.

The good folks over at WebAIM have announced the availability of a new Dreamweaver extension that tests for the accessibility of web pages while still under construction. Using the architecture of their popular WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool, the WAVE Dreamweaver extension is installed inside of the Dreamweaver application and resides as a toolbar. When activated, the extension will review the currently opened file for basic accessibility errors but does not provide an explanation of the errors or necessarily how to fix them. Some knowledge of accessible web design is thus required.

I have been using the WAVE tool for years to do quick and dirty reviews of web pages for others and always use it to check my own work once it has been published to the web. The advantage of this new extension is that I will now be able to check the accessibility of my pages before publishing them live on the web.

The WAVE Dreamweaver extension (still in Beta) is free and works with Dreamweaver CS3+.

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Under the “in the works” category is none other than Microsoft’s Office 2010 purported to be release sometime in June of this year. Already out in Beta, one of the features garnering my attention is the inclusion of a new “document Accessibility Checker.”

Direct from Microsoft’s Office Engineering blog they state:

To solve this problem in Office 2010 we created a document Accessibility Checker (like a spell checker, but for accessibility issues) as a core feature of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

We started by examining the most common accessibility problems in Office documents and bucketing them in terms of their severity – we ended up with three categories:

• Issues where content is unreadable. For example, a picture missing alternative text (alt text provides a text based representation of an image) is unreadable to a person who is blind.
• Issues where content is difficult to read. In general, these issues are less severe than unreadable content – for example, if an author has created a data table and used complex formatting to alter its presentation (i.e. using blank rows or columns, or merged and split cells), then a person with a disability might have difficulty understanding content in the table.
• Issues that may or may not make content difficult to read. In our explorations, there were a set of issues that potentially cause users with disabilities difficulty for which we don’t have a high confidence, automatic way to determine whether the issue is really a problem. For example, knowing whether or not the reading order of objects on a slide or cells in a layout table is optimal for a particular reader falls into this bucket.

Based on these three categories, we came up with a set of issues our checker looks for (described in more detail below) – when presented to the user, they are bucketed into “Errors”, “Warnings”, and “Tips” – these buckets correspond to the above three descriptions.

As you know from reading this blog, the best solution to ensuring all documents on the web are accessible is to ensure that ALL documents – wherever they are – are accessible. This includes all word processor, spreadsheet, presentational and desk-top-publishing documents. PDF documents, often the most controversial of all web documents – in terms of accessibility – are best made from documents that are already accessible. This new tool will be a big step – I hope – in making that happen.

From the description provided by Microsoft, it appears the new document Accessibility Checker will be a “voluntary” wizard that users must choose to activate and use. It is not clear if it can be made to be “involuntary” and require authors to review and fix their documents before saving them. But that’s probably asking too much. Microsoft’s angle on this is:

For organizations that are concerned about compliance for employees, we’ve provided several group policy settings that can be used to customize exactly which accessibility violations are checked. Administrators can also increase the visibility and emphasis of the Prepare for Sharing information when there are errors or warnings. Finally, IT departments can leverage Office 2010’s UI extensibility to enforce a workflow that requires users to run the checker – this will help many corporations reduce the risk of employees creating inaccessible content and increase the amount of accessible information available to people with disabilities.

I’ll be interested in seeing this feature when it comes out. Stay tuned.

I’ve gotten tired of my Joomla! template for jebswebs.com and had contemplated getting a new one. I’m in the market because one of my clients needs a new one, but I decided to see if there was a way to tweak this one. The current template is called Weblogic from JoomlaShack, and while I was looking over the JS site, I realized that there were a number of ways I could tweak Weblogic to make it look – almost – new.

The easiest thing to do was to simply change the font-family style element from Georgian/serif to a san-serif. That has made a tremendous difference. Let that be a lesson to you; a simple font change can make your whole site look completely different.

There are still some font elements I don’t like, but I gotta search out the code to find where the CSS for that particular code is hiding. Always fun trying to crack someone else’s code.

Next, I need to work on getting/creating some new graphics for the site. With my new HP Pavilion Elite, crunching graphics is a breeze. So, stay tuned.

It may not be spring (look at the photos I just posted of the New Years Storm of 2010), but it is the New Year and change is in the air.

~j

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Image licensed by Creative Commons

It seems this is a controversial subject…

A client of mine asked about this topic and, in doing my homework, I am learning that this is something where there are no easy answers. It seems that there are general issues with most if not all of the standard (free) WordPress (WP) themes and there may even be some issues under the hood. A Google search leads to a couple of folks who are claiming their theme meets the standards.

Our friend and colleague Dennis Lembree, of @AccessibleTwitter fame, is apparently also seeking the Holy Grail and wrote about his quest this past summer on his blog. In the responses to his query, there were several free WP themes suggested. I have just switched to one of those and am testing it out. Until I have reviewed it completely, that’s all I’ll say on the topic.

But this is a good time to again mention something I am fond of repeating. You can build the best content management system in the world – one that is completely accessible out of the box – and one user can ruin the accessibility with one simple action like failing to add ALT text to an image or creating a hyperlink using the words “click here.” You simply cannot rely on the software to ensure accessibility. Vigilance is the key.

As I continue my search, I’ll keep you posted. Feel free to comment.