Monthly Archives: December 2009

Hulu Adds Caption Search

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Posted by maxporter on December 29, 2009 – 11:48 AM
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This is late because I was caught up in the holidays. I hope everybody had, or is having, a good holiday season.

About a week ago, Hulu announced on its blog that it has a beta feature: Searching captions.

It’s like it says on the tin: there is a search engine that searches the captions of material on Hulu for the text that the user wants to find.

I think this is a very good example of how everybody, not just deaf people can benefit. My first concern is for deaf people, out of personal bias and out of a social justice perspective.

But I learned an interesting lesson a few months ago when Eli Clare, a disability-rights advocate who is also trans came to speak at a nearby school. He said that one tactic to use when advocating for accessibility rights is to focus on how a particular accommodation benefits multiple groups, not necessarily only the target group.
For example, everybody uses curb slices to push grocery carts or baby strollers onto the street; this doesn’t just benefit people with wheelchairs. Gender-neutral, single-user, bathrooms benefit people with medical conditions in which the person would benefit from a larger, private bathroom (such as using a wheelchair or having a colon bag) in addition to benefiting people who don’t feel comfortable in either sex’s bathroom.
I am very strongly focused on getting the rights that a given minority asks for, rather than on trying to fit the majority’s mold or trying to appease the majority. For example, deaf people shouldn’t have to act hearing in order to get equal rights – if an individual feels more comfortable acting in a “hearing” manner, that’s fine, but it shouldn’t be compulsory to get equal rights for the deaf.

However, it’s an unfortunate truth that most politicians are hearing, and that a lot of them are concerned with Hearing issues.

So, although it should be a basic right to have accessible media, a lot of people have thick skulls. One way to break through that wall is to show how closed captioning can benefit hearing people as well as deaf people.

This is actually the tactic that the Hulu blog takes – it doesn’t mention deaf accessibility at all; it mentions how great it is that the user can search the database. I think that they should have dropped some mention at the very least.

It’s an interesting tactic. What do you think?

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High Contrast

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Posted by maxporter on December 13, 2009 – 5:49 PM
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So in my last post I talked a little bit about Deaf cinema.

Today I was watching a video on Youtube, and I stumbled across a video named “Audism.”

Here it is:

Overall it’s a good piece, and I liked it.

But I had a major problem with it: Poor contrast.
If you fast-forward to 3:46, there is a white woman with dark hair and a black long sleeved shirt.
I found it almost impossible to understand what she was saying because I couldn’t see her torso or her arms. A lot of people think that ASL is completely in the hands, but that’s not true at all. The body and the face are such vital ingredients to understanding ASL. For me, it was like trying to read an English sentence without articles (a/the) or punctuation.

A lot of the time, when people sign publicly, such as in a film or when interpreting, they wear clothing with high contrast so that it’s easier to see the hands. It depends on your skin tone – if you watch this video, there is a black woman who wears a white shirt because that is what contrasts with her skin most.

So these actors were just following convention by wearing black clothing because that is what contrasts with their white skin most.
And, normally, that would be totally appropriate. And it probably looked perfectly fine when they were filming – the background could have been dark red or something that would contrast with the black if there was color.

But when it got translated into black and white, all of that was totally lost.

It is an important reminder to be mindful of every aspect of filming when presenting a visual language.

If I had to go back and re-film, I would have made the background gray. Therefore it would contrast with the white skin, the black skin, the white shirt, the black shirt.

I also would have lit up the background. I learned this in my intro to film class this semester… When you are filming against a background, you usually shine a light on the background to make it look more separate and 3D from you. Otherwise it is flat: the person almost blends in with the background.

I don’t mean to say so much negative about this film. Overall it was pretty interesting. And I really really appreciate seeing a Deaf centric perspective. But a lot of the message was lost in the poor filmmaking.

I’m going to end this post with an example of Deaf-centric Deaf filmmaking that I liked: You Neutral? It turns out to be a campaign film, but it’s a really good example of what Deaf people face in terms of audism. And the signing is clear in almost every frame!

(A subtitled version can be found here.)

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Deaf Cinema

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Posted by maxporter on December 9, 2009 – 8:43 PM
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Now for a little bit of a break from audism and accessibility.

There are some deaf theorists who talk about cinema theory and how to create films with a uniquely Deaf vision.

An example that I found on a Light Kitchen, Deaf filmmaker’s website, was a video named Le Rose Cut, which discusses HMH (hold-motion-hold). Hold-motion-hold is a linguistics theory and to be honest I don’t understand the theory well. But it’s interesting; check it out if you’re interested.

One thing that I was wondering about was: What would a voiceover look like in Deaf cinema?

I have to admit that I enjoy voiceovers sometimes. I like seeing something onscreen and contrasting it with what the offscreen speaker is saying. For example, let’s say you have an unreliable narrator talking about how good he is to his wife and children, and saying that he is the most perfect and doting man. But the image on the screen is a shot of his wife non-consensually bound and gagged. The viewer can contrast what is being said with what is being shown.

I thought about how I access the content. I watch the subtitles.
I can’t hear human speech. I have a hearing loss well over 120 decibels – most human speech is an average of 60 decibels.

So then, would a silent film with subtitles on the bottom of the screen be an acceptable way to present a voiceover scene?

I think it’d be an interesting experiment. I personally think it’d work well. It’s how I watch a voiceover scene. If a hearing person thinks that subtitles ruin the aesthetics of the image, well, that is their problem.

I recently made my first film, which was 4 minutes long. I haven’t completely mastered subtitle technology so I used intertitles. In my opinion, it interrupted the action a little bit.

But what if you want to create a film completely in ASL that is not tied to the English language?

See, the problem with many films that use ASL is that a lot of them were made by Hearing people. So they do not always include the signing in the frame but instead rely on subtitles[1] or even a hearing speaker to translate the signing[2]. So I can definitely see why somebody would want to create a film in ASL with NO English unless it’s in the form of optional subtitles.

How would you do a voiceover?

Is this just something that wouldn’t come up from a native ASL speaker because it’s not relevant to strong Deaf culture?

Overall I think that Deaf cinema is very important to encourage and I want to see more of it.

[1]Universal Signs
[2]Children of a Lesser God, The L Word, etc.

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Vimeo

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Posted by maxporter on December 1, 2009 – 11:38 AM
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Yesterday I signed up for a vimeo account.

Today I will be deleting my account.

The reason? Vimeo doesn’t support subtitles.
I uploaded a short film I made. Approximately half of it is in American Sign Language so I would like to have an option for native signers to be able to turn off the subtitles, but I also would like to allow the hearing world to watch my film.
I looked for a place to upload my .srt file to. Nothing.
So then I replaced my video with a copy that I had muxed my subtitles onto.
Still no subtitles.
The only option is for me to burn the subtitles onto the film, which I don’t want to do.

Vimeo has a large portion of “artistic” videos – budding filmmakers upload their videos for others to watch and critique. This is why I created my account – I am more than happy with my Youtube account, but I have many personal videos on there and I would like to create a display area for my films that is more professional.

For a video hosting community that is truly international in scope, subtitles must be available for everyone. Otherwise, how is the native Spanish speaker in Mexico going to appreciate the native English speaker’s film? The lack of support for multi-language subtitles creates an insular community in which most of the members are the same.

And, of course, there is the accessibility issue.

Vimeo doesn’t seem to care though.

In a request for Multi-Language Subtitle Tracks, a staff member says “This is obviously a useful feature, and we may be able to develop it in time, but contrary to the comments about how “easy” it would be to implement, we do not currently have any developers available to build this feature.”

Well, if you don’t have any developers, find some! This is a vitally important issue that could mean the difference between the life and the death of your service!

In a forum post that asks when will closed captioning be available? they again say, “Soon. Don’t worry.” A user named internetsubtitling has a very good comment that I agree with:

***
“Blake, I appreciate it’s a big project. But it’s also such an important core element of any video hosting platform that it makes desktop uploaders and iPhone support look like fluff, trivia, irrelevances. From the general public’s point of view it looks very, very ugly that when allocating developer time you are so happy to discriminate against deaf, hard-of-hearing and foreign-language speaking viewers in favour of those with an iPhone. As a declared fan of your service, it makes me wince. I really hate having to apologise to my clients on your behalf – “Yeah, I know they seem to be massively discriminatory, but they’re good guys really. No, really.”

Support for multi-language subtitles and closed captions should have been on your road map since the day you first coded your player. They clearly were for YouTube, blip.tv, JW, Adobe and all the other options facing your prospective customers. For goodness’ sake, even Microsoft is way ahead of you on this.

And the fact there are “higher priority features in the queue” only serves to show that your priorities are morally, ethically and commercially wrong. Please, please, please, be as awesome as you say you are and do the right thing here.”
***

They say “Sorry if we caused offense.”

The message that I get from vimeo is, “Shut up, we like our site the way it is. We don’t care about your needs. Go be quiet.”

So I am deleting my account because they clearly do not care about people like me, or, indeed, the majority of the global community. I don’t think I would get the feedback that I desire from such a self-centered community!

Edit: I signed up for blip.tv and it allowed me to add a .srt file to my video. The interface is a little confusing at first but eventually it’s easy to navigate. My blip.tv name is moonspark if you are interested.
Also, most sites ask you why you are deleting your account so that they can improve that feature in the future. Not the case with Vimeo. They just say “Are you sure you want to go? Please don’t go!” Yes, I am sure, and I wanted to tell you why! Grr.

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