Comments on: Accessibility of Web 2.0 Video

By: Cynthia Curry

Cynthia Curry — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:06:28 +0000

Thank you, Josh! These are great leads. I’ve checked out both and these are my thoughts as related to MLTI -

I like Overstream because it gives the control of the captioning to the user. One disadvantage is that most (if not all) of the host video sites are blocked in most schools (e.g. YouTube, MySpace,…). Many school filters are tightly controlled, and in many cases, teachers are unfortunately given very little power to bypass a blocked site.

Project Read On, however, seems to have a lot of potential. Many teachers will like the fact that captioning is done for them. The MLTI laptops are equipped with Safari and Firefox (IE is no longer available for Macs).

Thanks to you I’ve sent an inquiry to PRO, asking how schools are using their service.

Again, many thanks!

Cynthia

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:58:57 +0000

Overstream http://www.overstream.net/ allows you to actually caption a video yourself, edit the timing etc. Basically, pull in the video stream from You Tube, and over lay the captioning. From there, you can either stream the video from the site or embed it in another site.
There’s also Project Read On, but last I knew they weren’t optimized for Internet Explorer. With this site, you would give them a url and they’d caption it. Then you could watch is from their site, or embed the player on your own site.
Anyhow, some other good options.
Enjoy.

By: Cynthia Curry

Cynthia Curry — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:34:59 +0000

Nancy,

I agree with you – I think it’s simply lack of awareness.

As a related example, my husband teaches middle school science and some years ago had a student with a sensory disability. As an accommodation for her, her classrooms were equipped with a sound amplification system. One day, this girl was absent from school, so my husband started class without using the microphone. The students erupted in dismay – they wanted the mic on! Indeed, research has shown that sound amplification improves all students’ ability to receive information and attend to class discussions.

The student for whom the system was installed has now graduated from high school, but it was never removed from my husband’s classroom. To this day he uses it.

Cynthia

By: Cynthia Curry

Cynthia Curry — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:27:37 +0000

Ryan,

Thanks for your comment as well as your e-mail. I sent a reply this morning that details some possibilities for adapting your product as a teacher-friendly video-caption-creator. I also included suggestions for ways to promote Omnisio as a teacher/student video annotation tool (to be offered on a separate site dedicated to education, of course!).

Cynthia

By: Nancy

Nancy — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:24:04 +0000

Our daughter (now 30) is hearing impaired so we had a captioner while she was growing up. Now that she’s gone, we still have the captioning on and do the same at hotels, etc. I’ve always been surprised that schools don’t use it more in regular classrooms as a literacy tool.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 05:49:59 +0000

Thanks for checking out Omnisio! The company was actually founded with the goal of improving online education, although we have since (obviously) broadened our scope.

We are definitely looking into how we can make our technology more suitable for the use case you describe.

Kind Regards,

Ryan Junee
CEO & Co-Founder, Omnisio