The Tech Awards laureate 2011: Universal Subtitles

YouTube description:

"Uploaded by TheTechMuseum on Nov 2, 2011.
Category:
Katherine M. Swanson Equality Award

Country:
United States
http://www.universalsubtitles.org/

Problem: Many videos are inaccessible because of the prohibitive cost and difficulty of creating captions and translations.

Solution: A simple, open, and collaborative way to subtitle videos.

Impact: 25,000 videos translated in the first 9 months, with 100,000 more expected by the end of 2011. Used extensively by media during recent global events, including the Arab Spring and Japanese tsunami. (...)"

My name is Aleli Alcala and I'm here to represent Universal Subtitles

We realized that

Video was fast becoming the most proliferate content on the internet. It delivers content

like education, politics, health,

and because of language barriers

or if someone was deaf or hard of hearing

They would be excluded from participating in the world they live in

How can we ensure that each and everyone will subtitle their caption?

We looked at Wikipedia, and how the power of volunteers enabled that almost impossible tasks to happen

And so we created the technology that combines the power of volunteers

with the power of the internet

So that each and everyone of us can participate in making sure

that every video on the web is subtitled

and captioned

The video can live anywhere and you can pull it in to Universal Subtitles

subtitle it, and then upload it back where it lived before

There's an eight year old little boy who wants so badly to share a video with his grandmother who does not speak English

So, he subtitles the video into Spanish

So that it can then be shared with his grandmother

And that's the power of this type of technology

Our dream, our vision and our passion is that every video on the web

is subtitled and captioned

Which would allow all of us to participate fully in the world we live in