Universal Subtitles is a huge step forward in helping to bridge languages and make the web more accessible for those unable to hear audio. Part of the Web 2.0 embrace has been to include more media with greater resolution and higher definition. Included in that is more video. YouTube, Vimeo, and every other site is embedded all over the place. Unless the company behind the player takes the initiative to include subtitles, most of us can’t do much about the problem.
To solve this problem across most different players comes Universal Subtitles. Universal Subtitles uses a little bit of Javascript to attach itself to a player embedded on a site and then plays the subtitles in the language of your choice synchronized with the video. In addition to the altruistic reasons for including subtitles, a video with subtitles is also reported to rank better in search engines.
The historic down side of subtitles has always been that it means the content creator also has to create the captions. As we can see with most instances, this doesn’t happen and content remains inaccessible except in Section 508 instances. Universal Subtitles crowd-sources the problem enabling it to get done wheresubtitles haven’t yet been created and by those that speak multiple languages.
To contribute to subtitling a video, you can visit the Universal Subtitles site and paste in the URL to an Ogg, WebM, FLV, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip, or Dailymotion video. There are a few straight-forward methods to adding subtitles. You can view the instructional demo video to see how.
Universal Subtitles also makes it easy for webmasters to include Universal Subtitles on all of the videos on their site automatically. You can just paste in a line of Javascript between the head tags of a web page and the Universal Subtitles will appear on all HTML5 and YouTube videos.
Check out UniversalSubtitles.org for more information on this tool, a product of the 501c3 non-profit organization Participatory Culture Foundation.