STONE DEAF PILOTS – the deaf technology blog. A blog by Kathryn Hill about deaf technology, assistive technology, and tech-related accessibility issues faced by the deaf and hard of hearing.

In the past year and half, the popularity of YouTube has increased across the Internet. YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, share, view, watch, and rank videos on the Internet. The videos are displayed into Adobe Flash (.flv) format.

Many videos on YouTube do not have captions or subtitles, although there are a few that can be found. Most of them are foreign language videos with English subtitles.

On March 8, 2007, the Access Division of WGBH announced that they had created a component for Flash called CC for Flash that can be used to display captions in a Flash video player. This new technology will allow developers more ease in adding captions to Flash videos. In addition, millions of deaf and hard of hearing users will be able to experience Web-based video in Flash, and search engines will be able to utilize captions as search metadata for SWF content.

CC for Flash can be written into any SWF file and played back in Adobe Flash Player, which works on most recent Mac and PC systems. Both CC for Flash and Adobe Flash Player are free.

Taken from the press release:

CC for Flash: The Details

• Uses external files produced in the W3C’s Distribution Format Exchange Profile (DFXP) of the Timed-Text Authoring Format.
• Imports existing formats such as Apple QuickTime’s QTtext, with support for Microsoft’s SAMI format soon to follow.
• Exposes many of its internal functions through ActionScript™ language so that the author can control and customize many of the features.
• Can play back caption metadata that has been embedded in the video by tools such as Captionate.
• Can be linked to any video playback components in Flash or directly to Netstream objects in the SWF of the FLV file.
• Allows the author to set the caption display box coordinates and default text attributes, like background color, text foreground color, font face and size, opacity, etc., at authoring time. At playback time, any text attributes that are explicitly defined in the external caption file will override the defaults.
• Captions can be added after the video content in Flash is posted, allowing for flexibility across production and distribution environments.
• Allows captions to be searched.
• Comes with an optional player, ccPlayer for Flash, which allows those unfamiliar with Flash programming to embed video content in Flash into a Web page with minimal effort.
• Is compatible with Flash MX2004 (7) and 8 authoring packages.

I’m looking forward to seeing more captioned videos on YouTube.