Drumbeat/website/projects/UniversalSubtitles

Title

Universal Subtitles

Headline

An open and intuitive system that lets anyone create and view subtitles for any video on the web.

Short Description

Subtitles bridge linguistic and, for those with hearing and visual disabilities, physical barriers to video. Despite their indispensability, subtitles are not prevalent online. We think we can change that by creating:

• an open lookup standard that lets any video client find matching subtitles in online databases
• free and open source tools to enable users to easily create subtitles and translations
• a firefox extension that will look up matching subtitles and display them on the video that a user is watching
• an open community subtitle database

How does This Make the Web Better?

An easy way for people to create and translate subtitles for online videos would dramatically change the internet experience for all of us. For video creators, their work would reach more people. For people with disabilities, subtitles make it possible to experience video that would otherwise be unavailable. For all of us, translated subtitles open up content that we couldn't fully experience previously.

Subtitling is an outstanding opportunity for crowdsourcing and collaboration. We believe that people around the world will be excited to participate in creating and curating subtitles if they are given the right tools and incentives.

Tags

video, subtitles, open source, translation, standards, captions

Logo

logo is available to upload

Deaves: Can you link to the logo here?

Tools

The existing repository for the javascript subtitling prototype is here: git clone git@codebasehq.com:pybrew/mirosubs/mirosubs.git mirosubs-mirosubs

The code for the previous, non-embeddable prototype is here: http://code.google.com/p/felipesanches/source/browse/#svn/trunk/html5-subtitling

Participation

Partners: We are looking for organizations that are interested in an open system for subtitling creation. We want to make sure our tools match the needs of groups that are creating videos.

Contributors: In the projects initial stages we are looking for help with the following skills:

• Graphic design
• HTML / CSS skills

As the project progresses and we will also be looking for early adopters and testers.

Goals

We hope to have a working toolset within 9 months. Once our toolset is available, we hope to achieve the following within a year:

• Have at least 2 video hosting sites adopt the creation tools or lookup standard.
• Have at least 500,000 downloads of a subtitle Firefox extension
• Enable the creation of at least 50,000 sets of subtitles or translations

Challenges

Our biggest challenge is to design tools that are easy, engaging, and that will be widely adopted. Because part of our proposal is to create a new standard, we need to have broad adoption for it to reach it's full potential.

We hope to build a coalition of groups that will be testers, contributors, and early adopters of the system to ensure that we build a useful tool and to help bootstrap adoption of the toolset.

Audience

We have several audiences for this project, including video creators, organizations, and video hosting sites. However, the most important audience is every internet user. If we are successful, we will make a tool that hundreds of thousands of people can use to watch videos with subtitles and that will create thousands of new volunteer subtitlers and translators working together to make the web more accessible.

Background

The mission of the Participatory Culture Foundation, is to create tools that offer new ways of engaging with and sharing culture. We have a particular focus on video, which is one of the least open parts of the internet. The lack of subtitles online is a huge barrier to open accessibility of video for everyone.