Miro Subs Alpha a project of the participatory culture foundation

Posts Tagged: subtitles

Testing — 1 Comment
17
Feb 11

Get involved and help us make Universal Subtitles better!

We’re working on a fresh release of Universal Subtitles right now and we need help with testing. You don’t need to know anything about programming to get involved!

As a non-profit and collaborative project we wholly depend on volunteers at every stage of the process. We already have a fantastic core group of testers, but in order to really get the ball rolling and develop Universal Subtitles to its full potential the project needs more participants. And the best thing is that you don’t need to be a genius programmer to get involved! Indeed, most of our testing scenarios can be executed from the comfort of your own browser and they do not involve much more than a few clicks.

For instance, here is a very easy yet very useful test to execute:

Litmus Testing

  1. Go to litmus.pculture.org and sign in or create an account if you don’t already have one.
  2. Select the recommended test run for Universal Subtitles
  3. Specify your Browser / OS configuration and start running tests from the groups that are listed.
  4. For each test that you run, please mark it pass / fail / unclear. Don’t worry if you can’t run all the tests.
  5. If you encounter an error, please file a bug and provide the bug number in the results and a quick description in the comment.

You can find more information about this test and others on this page, and anyone interested in helping us out should join our dedicated google group.

Accessibility — 11 Comments
20
Apr 10

A Note on Accessibility

We think this is so important, we added a permanent page to the site.

In the near future, we’ll go into more detail about why accessibility matters so much to us (and for the internet), but for the moment I’ve copied the text from the page here:

Accessibility is the primary motivator behind Universal Subtitles. Our goal is to see an exponential number of videos become more accessible: to those with hearing and visual disabilities; across language barriers; and even around literacy barriers (via dubbed audio).

Under the headline of “accessibility” is a vast and complex group of issues. We are pursuing accessibility for Universal Subtitles across multiple levels. The following is a partial list of the accessibility goals on our development roadmap:

  • Making our website and subtitling widget localizable (i.e. translating the tools into different languages)
  • Adding support for non-western characters and languages
  • Support for both captions and subtitles*
  • Support for alternate audio tracks (i.e. dubbing)
  • Ability to read subtitle text to speech
  • Accessibility audit for the toolset and website (eg. navigation, keyboard interaction, etc)
  • Computer assisted translation

If you have additional areas of accessibility where you’d like to see us focus, please be in touch.

Finally, we want to recognize the many people have been working tirelessly on these issues for far longer than we have and have laid important groundwork that makes our project possible.

* In the United States, ‘Captions’ refers to subtitles that include both words being spoken and descriptions of non-verbal sounds (music, sound effects, etc). Captioning is especially important for people who are hard of hearing. In many countries the word ‘subtitles’ or ‘HoH (hard of hearing) subtitles’ is used to describe captions.

Announcements — 18 Comments
13
Apr 10

Subtitles and Captions for Every Video on the Web

Update: Click here to subtitle your video >

Here’s the problem: web video is beginning to rival television, but there isn’t a good open resource for subtitling. Here’s our mission: we’re trying to make captioning, subtitling, and translating video publicly accessible in a way that’s free and open, just like the Web.

Our approach:

  • Make a simple and ubiquitous way to request, create, and translate subtitles for any video
  • Work with others to define open protocols so that whenever subtitles for a video exist, any website or video player will be able to retrieve them
  • Create a community space for people who subtitle video, to encourage contributions and facilitate collaboration

Tools we’re building

1) Subtitle Widget: We’re developing an incredibly user friendly interface for adding captions to almost any video on the web (without the hassle of re-transcoding or re-uploading). We’ll be launching a demo very soon, but here’s a sneak peek:

Universal Subtitles Widget

2) Universal Subtitles Protocol: A new open standard that will allow clients such as Firefox extensions, desktop video players, websites, or browsers to look up and download matching subtitles from a whitelist of subtitle databases when they play video.

3) Collaborative Subtitling Site: An online community for collaboratively subtitling and translating the world’s videos (like a Wikipedia for subtitles).  The site will have special tools for versioning, incentives for different types of collaboration, and all subtitles created here will be available in any context via our open protocol.  The site will exist to encourage dynamics like:

  • Formation of teams for subtitling a program, or a topic.
  • Tracking which subtitling or translation tasks are the most requested, and mobilizing volunteers.
  • Volunteers recruiting their friends for help transcribing or translating a video.
  • Splitting large tasks into smaller parts

Universal Subtitles Site

Together, our goal is for these and other compatible tools to enable a layer of collective action over all the video we watch, one that is working constantly to break down language and accessibility barriers.

Everything will be 100% free and open source, available under the AGPL.

Who we are

Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) is the 501c3 non-profit that makes Miro, the cross-platform, free software video player and downloader.  Universal Subtitles is now one of PCF’s core projects.  PCF’s work on Universal Subtitles has received seed funding from the Mozilla Foundation.

You can help us spread the word!

Get updates and find out first when we launch:

Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook

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Retweet Us! RT @universalsubs aims to make subtitling, captioning, and translating web videos easy and ubiquitous! http://universalsubtitles.org/

Bonus: Join the Collaborative Subtitling Design Challenge

Design Challenge
Mozilla Labs is helping us out by hosting the Collaborative Subtitling Design Challenge. While the challenge is primarily directed towards budding designers, anyone interested in design is welcome to participate. To get started, read the brief, check out our initial product concepts, make your own improvements/revision, and then submit your ideas and mockups.

The challenge will help us by bringing fresh thinking to our interface concepts and push us to take the subtitling widget to a higher level of usability. All the best work will be featured/honored by Mozilla.