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Re: Linking to YouTube videos from course Web sites

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From: Christian Heilmann
Date: Apr 3, 2008 8:40PM

Jan Heck wrote:
> Increasingly, our instructors are linking to YouTube videos or Flash
> presentations from other sources. I know if we "built them" ourselves, we
> would need to caption them. In the case of linking to others' content, of
> course, we don't have the rights/permissions to caption and re-post the
> captioned versions of such content. Obviously, there's no audio
> descriptions for blind or visually-impaired students either. I'm pretty
> sure we also don't have the right to post a transcript of the linked video
> on our course Web sites (as perhaps the closest approximation to a
> reasonable accommodation when we don't have access to the video to caption
> it).
>
> So here are my questions:
> . My understanding is that all videos we produce must be captioned,
> whether the material is required or supplementary for the course.
> . How does this get applied when there's a plethora of good content
> available "out there," but we don't have control over whether or not it's
> captioned?
> . How accessible is the YouTube interface in general terms?
>
> I would love some input on this!
>
It is quite interesting, as Youtube just released an API that allows you
to access the player. I've been playing with it to write a captioning
interface, but haven't come around to building a player yet:

http://www.wait-till-i.com/2008/03/12/video-captioning-made-easy-with-the-youtube-javascript-api/

http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/accessihacking-online-video/

You could use this to at least build a time-based description of what is
happening in the video.