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Re: [EXTERNAL] - YouTube's lack of support for detailed text transcripts

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From: Hayman, Douglass
Date: Sep 15, 2021 3:45PM

Laurie,

Those are a number of questions to delve into. I do know that my former office mate at UW, Terrill Thompson was part of a panel a few years ago where Google/YouTube and others took part in a discussion about media player accessibility. The Google peeps looked bad in comparison to Able Player and what that can do thanks to the efforts of a small group of dedicated people. It allows for transcript, audio description, break out ASL windows and a number of other useful features that Google/YouTube surely has the funds to imitate or exceed as far as accessibility features.

What exactly do you mean for custom text transcript? I know that you can copy/paste a chunk or better results, double-spaced text into YouTube and have it sync that to be the closed captions but maybe you're meaning something more?

As for your #2 I think that is where good audio description comes into play and Able Player and perhaps other media players can provide that as an added feature so that the player has both a CC control but also an AD control. This takes some thoughtful pre-production work to allow for enough space to insert that if done post-production. Also good to have scripts that minimize the need for that like, "As you can see in this pie chart one third of our visitors used Firefox, fifty percent used Chrome and the rest a variety of other web browsers."

Doug Hayman
IT Accessibility Coordinator
Information Technology
Olympic College
<EMAIL REMOVED>
(360) 475-7632 (currently working remotely and don't have access to this phone)