Helping the deaf and non-English speakers enjoy racing video

[thorobaseTRF]

[i:3b7e8k39]Apologies for the deletion of this topic yesterday. For clarification, http://www.thorobase.com is not a commercial website, it is purely a showcase for ideas and tools that are completely free.[/i:3b7e8k39]

Hello everyone, my name is Robin Howlett, I’d like to demonstrate an implementation of an idea I had and I’d be interested to know what you think.

I wanted thorobase to investigate the possibility of using crowdsourcing to transcribe the commentary from racing videos so that the deaf and hearing-impaired could enjoy them also.

Here is the result of my experiment: a YouTube video of Cigar’s 1995 Breeders’ Cup Classic victory with Tom Durkin’s commentary subtitled:

Crowdsourced commentary closed-captioning with auto-translation[/url:3b7e8k39]

Play the video to see it in action. If closed-captioning is not already turned on, click the upwards-facing arrow in the bottom right of the YouTube video frame, and click the “CC” button.

I also experimented with using automatic translation tools to provide the closed-captioning in Spanish also (disclaimer: I don’t speak a word of Spanish). The left-facing arrow on the left of the “CC” button allows you to select between the English or Spanish subtitles.

Read about how it was done here: Crowdsourcing Race Commentary Transcription[/url:3b7e8k39].

I would love to hear your feedback about this idea and demo.

[thorobaseTRF]

On the topic yesterday,

Robert99

made an excellent observation that annotations could be used to further improve the experience for hearing-impaired fans as the subtitles make it difficult to focus both on the race and the commentary.

This led to the idea of using YouTube’s "collaborative annotations" feature to allow multiple people annotate a YouTube racing video with a type of "comments-in-running".

If anyone is interested in exploring this idea with me, please send a PM.

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