So, last night, President Obama called out my home county — beautiful Forsyth County, NC — as a place where students are chasing the American Dream. But, beaming with pride though I was at the mention, it made me start to wonder about other people’s hometowns. Not so much the Winston-Salems or Omahas of the world, but the Bizertes, the Moscows, the Atbaras. While I watched the speech’s captioning intently on my screen, I wondered: what do foreign language speakers do if they want to see programming like this? Is this content less accessible to those who don’t speak English? Well, of course the answer is yes, it is less accessible. I’d guess that there were many Sudanese, Tunisian, Russian, and Spanish-speaking individuals who missed the references Obama made about their respective homelands. And that bummed me out.

Enter Universal Subtitles

But, thanks to Universal Subtitles and PBS NewsHour, I don’t need to be bummed out for too much longer.  They’re harnessing the power of the community to create multiple translations of the State of the Union speech into foreign languages. (See the post on PBS NewsHour) Yay! Universal Subtitles posted the video online, and within two hours, efforts were going towards subtitling the speech into German, Spanish, French, Korean, Indonesian, Dutch, and Chinese. How’s that for a call to action?

Getting from “Hello” to “Bonjour!”

Before you think to yourself, “oh, subtitling a video is so hard, time-consuming, and complicated.” view this video below to learn how this access solution for other people is within our reach.

You see, we don’t need to be tech experts, 150 word-per-minute typists, or have formal training in translation. For a 5-minute video, a beginner can expect to spend 20-25 minutes subtitling. Then of course, as you become more experienced, you become faster! It’s a community-driven service; if there’s an error or typo in the subtitle file, you can jump in and fix it. Perhaps there will be trained translators out there who will help clean up the translations, too. Just like Wikipedia. No need to wait for someone else to fix it.

Ready to give it a try? Check out the demo!

How YOU can help.

I love Universal Subtitle’s statement on their website. Plain and Simple. (The way it should be):

The lack of captions and subtitles on video is a major obstacle for people with hearing disabilities and a huge language barrier for the whole world.

We want to give individuals and communities the power to overcome these barriers. The tools we’re building are free and open source and will make the work of subtitling and translating video simpler, more appealing, and, most of all, more collaborative.

I had the great privilege of meeting with the founder of Universal Subtitles, Nicholas Reville, earlier this week. It was a breath of fresh air to hear about his passion and commitment for increasing access to video. In addition, I loved learning about these kind people out there who believe in helping towards this cause; one volunteer had subtitled hundreds of videos. (To no recognition or credit…this person has a heart of gold!)

Accessible Travel Videos…in multiple languages!

At Keen Guides, we’re excited to implement Universal Subtitles to our website and eventually mobile applications. This will greatly help us and smaller video providers get their content accessible and into the hands of more people. Just like we want to make cultural tourism accessible to people with disabilities, visitors from other countries deserve a similar experience! Will you help us subtitle these videos? We’re counting on you!

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