It's an uphill battle. Accessibility is a hot topic these days, but
online streamed video and audio access by way of captioning or
subtitling for the Deaf / hard of hearing is very poorly implemented.
Even the big sites crowing about how their websites meet and even exceed
accessibility guidelines still don't have captioning available with
their video or audio clips. It could just be an honest oversight on the
part of the site developers, or it could be a management decision based
on resource availability issues, or ??.
A dream of mine is to see the development of reliable, high-quality
speech to text technology built into QuickTime, Real, Windows Media
Player, etc. so that captions are created "on the fly" that users turns
on through user preferences within the application.
I have submitted feedback requests to many of the news sites (CNN,
MSNBC, etc.) but have not heard or seen any responses.
I doubt the FCC could enforce such a thing as licensing. They don't
have jurisdiction across the entire Web. I don't even want to think
about the implications of "licensing" requirements. UGH. I already
have a headache....
Leslie
But on the subject of streaming -- I find that very few streaming
broadcasts use captioning. Most television broadcasts have closed
captioning as mandatory and the ability to transmit text with radio
broadcasts is being used (although, more as an added feature). I
imagine the wild-west unregulated state of the web makes such
enforcement difficult at best.
I am sure there would be howls of protest if some licensing, such as an
FCC license for broadcasting, would be mandatory for the web -- and
perhaps there should be some "citizens band" version of the web (which
the spammers will overrun) and a "professional" version. Interesting
thought...
----
Dwacon
www.dwacon.com
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