Saturday, August 28, 2010

Come On, Google, Do The Right Thing!

Google has jumped into the web series biz, producing its own web series, Google Beat. Google Beat is about search engine term popularity, and has a human host. Google Beat is on YouTube of course - but they are using the inaccurate automatic captioning. (For instance, in the picture below, are they talking about what we are eating for breakfast, not what we are hearing for breakfast?) Google knows that the automatic captioning is not that good, and that's why they have the YouTube Ready Program so companies can have professional options that can be used in conjunction with YouTube automatic captioning.

It is critical that we convince Google to use professional help to caption Google Beat. If we can't get Google to do the right thing, that makes it that much harder to get others to do the right thing too.

How can you help? You can help by:
  1. Go to Google Beat on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/googlebeat
  2. Go down the page until you see the "Send Message" option

  3. Click "Send Message."
  4. Sign in using either your Google account or YouTube account
  5. Tell Google that the automatic captions are not acceptable, that they should use Google's own YouTube Ready Program at http://youtubeready.dcmp.org/

Google is a wealthy company and can certainly afford the pittance it costs to closed caption through their own YouTube Ready Program! Shame on Google for not doing the right thing from the very start with their own web series!

Join Caption Action 2

Join Caption Action 2 on Facebook!

1 comment:

  1. Hi Jamie,

    I work on video captioning for Google and YouTube. Thanks for following our videos!

    We do provide captions (not just auto-captions) for Google's videos, but we aren't always able to post them immediately since most of our captioners use the live version of the video on YouTube. Please check back in a bit. This video will have captions soon.

    You can also report accessibility concerns with Google products (and our videos, too) by clicking the Feedback link at http://www.google.com/accessibility.

    -naomi

    ReplyDelete