Accessible Rhetoric
web accessibility, rhetoric, and new media

View the full movie (QuickTime format with open captions, no sound, 32 Mb). Captioning the 2009 Masters Golf Tournament
Transcript of captions
Captioning The 2009 Masters Golf Tournament
PART I: When captions are placed at the top of the screen

[00:00:00.00]
When captions are placed at the top of the screen,
[00:00:03.26]

[00:00:03.27]
the player’s score card is fully visible,
[00:00:12.06]

[00:00:12.69]
so are the putting [...]

Continue reading “Video: Captioning the 2009 Masters Golf Tournament” »

On February 19th, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) filed a complaint in California Superior Court against the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) alleging that the LSAC’s website is inaccessible to blind users (National Federation of the Blind v. Law School Admissions Council Inc., No. RG-09436691, Alameda Co., Calif., Super. Ct.). The NFB’s California [...]

Continue reading “Spreading the word: NFB v. LSAC” »

In “Virtually Accessible,” a short article published in the Spring 2009 issue of Access: The inclusive design journal, Diane Carr reports on protests that erupted in Second Life among deaf and hard-of-hearing users when in 2007 “Second Life’s developers added a feature enabling residents to speak verbally to each other using microphones.” What’s especially interesting about [...]

Continue reading “Having a voice in Second Life” »

Alex Reid has some interesting things to say about the “disposable” nature of web video. In a video response to a post by Paul Bradshaw at Online Journalism Blog, Reid considers the value and nature of web video at a time when anyone can create, store, edit, remix, mod, share, and delete video cheaply and [...]

Continue reading “The impact of disposable video on accessibility” »

I’d be interested in seeing the results (if any) of usability tests for NBC.com’s video player, which has built-in support for closed captioning on full episodes. Captions are displayed on the right side of the video player and automatically scroll either up or down. Rather than occupying a layer within (or on top of) the [...]

Continue reading “Captions on the side (literally)” »

I just finished an article-length webtext on accessible podcasting. The webtext 1) is a critique of the dominant approach to podcasting, an approach that assumes (mistakenly) that everyone involved can hear, see, and move well enough to manipulate a mouse, and 2) describes a set of solutions for making podcasts (both audio and video) universally [...]

Continue reading “Accessible podcasting — A preview” »

While browsing Hulu.com the other day, I caught a glimpse (on the site’s scrolling image bar) of what looked like a cochlear implant attached to the head of a contestant on American Gladiators. Because I have an ongoing interest in how deafness and cochlear implants are visually and discursively constructed in the media, I located [...]

Continue reading “Deaf American Gladiator” »

YouTube recently added support for video annotations and in-video links. Three types of annotations are supported: speech bubbles, notes, and spotlights. As Bill Creswell rightly pointed out a couple days ago, YouTube’s implementation is similar to what users can do with “bubbles” on BubblePly.com.
One key difference is that YouTube’s annotations do not fully capitalize on [...]

Continue reading “Support for video annotations on YouTube” »

On the subject of captioned programming on the Web, Closed Captioning Web suggests in a recent blog post that
More major network channels are setting up video players on their sites..and the good news is, the players show captions! More and more captioned programming is now available through Fox.com (read the review at Disabled in the Digital Age) [...]

Continue reading “Aggregating feeds to search for captioned web videos” »