AOL leads the way with subtitling
Being an ex-AOL employee I will be watching this with great interest to see how well they do it, its a fantastic step in the right direction.. Kudos AOL.
Part of AOL’s ‘Agenda for Accessibility’
London; Wednesday, 21 August: AOL today announces the launch of its subtitling service trial, supported by ITFC who have been selected as the subtitling provider for AOL.
The scheme allows users of www.aol.co.uk to enable subtitles on a variety of AOL produced content across the site, including the Music Channel’s impressive collection of AOL Sessions (music) and AOL Unscripted (film) interviews.
The web portal is the first to launch such an initiative in the UK, and as part of AOL’s ‘Agenda for Accessibility’ the subtitling service is aimed at assisting deaf people or those with hearing difficulties along with those who do not have English as their first language.
Tom Morgan, Head of Live Events & Digital Media Operations, AOL UK says, “As video becomes more and more prevalent online it is essential that the industry makes every effort to ensure content is accessible to everyone, including people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. Subtitling will also add value to a mass audience who as with television, would rely on subtitling to learn the English language or those who might watch video in a noisy environment such as a cyber café.
The 3 month trial and associated survey will seek to evaluate not only the functionality, look and feel, user preference on video genre but also those operational challenges that would be involved in rolling out this functionality across our service.â€
Users can go to info.aol.co.uk/subtitles to discover everything they need to know about subtitling on AOL. The page contains all the information about the trial, FAQs and a full list of all the content that can be viewed with subtitles.
Chris Higgs, MD of ITFC said, “Critical to this collaboration is ITFC’s wide experience of subtitling for many different media formats and content genres, coupled with our ability to provide extremely quick turnaround of completed captions using digital technology.â€
As the first web portal to trial subtitling in the UK, AOL has included a feedback section which allows users to work with the company to suggest improvements to the service. Subtitling is available free to all users and does not include a registration process; simply click the ‘CC’, (which refers to the US term ‘Closed Captions’) button that accompanies AOL produced video and the subtitles will appear.
Tom ends, “Following on from the announcement made last year by AOL in the US on subtitling, this trial is the first step in helping AOL in the UK better understand the user ‘needs’ and those operational challenges in providing a comprehensive subtitling service to our end user.
Historically, supporting ‘online’ subtitling has been cost prohibitive and technically unfeasible for content distributors and it should be the combined responsibility of the content owner and the content distributor to agree how we can operationally support this need in a way that is financially viable for all parties. “
3 Responses to “AOL leads the way with subtitling”
Leave a Reply
It is a step in the right direction for AOL to provide subtitles for the hard of hearing, but their implementation of video in general leaves something to be desired in ter,s of accessibility. I tried to watch a video with subtitles and was informed I required an ActiveX plugin. While it is possible (apparently) for me to get this as a Firefox/Windows user and Opera/Windows users can make their browser act like IE in order to view the videos, Mac and Linux users are unable to view the video content at all, let alone subtitles.
AOL will have to step away from proprietary Microsoft technology before they can be considered “leading the way”.
Hi Phil,
Thanks for your positive comments on the subtitle trial, were you able to submit your feedback through the form on AOL as your comments would go along way in helping us improve our service…
http://video.aol.co.uk/video-subtitles-trial/article/20070723121009990007
Many thanks!
Kind regards
Tom
Tom,
Thanks for that link… I will go and make my opinion known through that form too.