Scribe Collective is excited to announce our entry as a provider of closed captions for YouTube. Because of our ongoing mission to drive down the cost of access for the deaf and hard of hearing across a broad range of media, we were quick to recognize the need for affordable online captioning. YouTube and Google made access an important goal back in 2008, releasing an automatic captioning tool. However, this quickly flopped because automatic speech-to-text technology has been at a plateau for many years and is nowhere near good enough to be able to create accurate transcripts. There's a reason captioning companies still exist! Instead, YouTube rolled out the "YouTube Ready" program, a list of qualified vendors that provide captions for YouTube. While an important step towards the goal of increasing access, most of these companies turned out to be well-established television captioning providers, which are both high-quality and high-cost. Unsurprisingly, the cost of captioning video on YouTube approaches that of broadcast television, typically around $7/minute. The result has been that, although there is clearly pent-up demand for online captions, many potential customers simply cannot afford to provide it. And so online closed captioning remains in its infancy. As Scribe [...]
