YouTube adds video captions for the deaf

YouTube has made a move to add video captions for the deaf to its massive library of clips.

The automatic captions employ Google’s speech recognition routines to transcribe English audio into text with the click of a button.

There’s also an option to translate the English captions into other languages, so foreign users can use the text to understand what’s being said.

That’s the theory, at any rate. In practice, even though the technology is live on the site now, results vary a bit as the system is still in beta-testing.

Some clips are captioned accurately, but we noticed that others are quite errant and nonsensical in places.

Still, that’s only to be expected, and YouTube certainly has to be commended for beginning the process of making its content more accessible to the hard-of-hearing.