All the new locations will commence closed captions with systems such as CaptiView and audio description. On top of these seven locations, ten existing locations will have their accessibility increased.
The new closed caption system has just been introduced at Event Cinemas at Parramatta, George Street Sydney and Maroochydore. You can still book movie tickets online for closed captioned movies, but on arrival at the cinema, you will need to visit the box office and collect a CaptiView unit.
While only a limited number of Blip.tv series have captions at the moment, those that do include some of its most popular shows, such as the science fiction series Red vs. Blue. Captions are uploaded to Blip.tv by the program creators, and activated by viewers via the ‘CC’ button on the media player.
Blip.tv programs can be viewed in Australia.
Google, which bought YouTube in 2006, has been working to improve the service, but the article highlights the huge challenges it faces. To be accurate, the software must be able to recognise a million words, the different ways they can be pronounced, and their different sounds according to context (whether a person’s voice is raised or not, for example).
It must also distinguish between speech which needs to be captioned and background noise, and the audio quality of many videos posted on YouTube is very poor.
