Captions on FB Live

Facebook has enabled closed captions on some live broadcasts. Some third-party software is still needed to use the feature, so most likely you will see it first on big media outlets instead of friend’s live broadcasts. If you have the Facebook Closed Captioning feature turned on, you will automatically see the text if it is enabled. Read more about the announcement here.

Lawsuit: Add Captioning at Pepsi Center

image KM Newnham

A class action lawsuit is asking the courts to make Denver's Pepsi Center include captioning on its video board and "provide interpreters for hearing-impaired fans at events when the video board isn’t in use." Read the full story from KMGH-TV.

School would rather take videos down than caption them

image: brainchildvn on Flickr

Many of UC Berkeley's educational videos don't meet ADA requirements, according to the Department of Justice. In response, the California school says that rather than caption more than 20,000 course capture videos accessible to the public, it would rather just take them down in order to save money. A senior is quoted in the school's student newspaper as complaining that Berkeley "does not adequately support its disabled students." Read more in the Daily Cal here.

One Billion Videos Captioned.. sort of

While YouTube is bragging about have one billion captioned videos, critics are pointing out that many of the automatically generated captions are wildly inaccurate. It's been eight years since Google added the automatic speech recognition designed to generate captions and the company says it's accuracy is up by 50 percent. But in the anouncement about the number of captioned videos, Google Product Manager Liat Kaver admits the program is not where the company wants it to be:

A major goal for the team has been improving the accuracy of automatic captions — something that is not easy to do for a platform of YouTube’s size and diversity of content. Key to the success of this endeavor was improving our speech recognition, machine learning algorithms, and expanding our training data. There were limitations with the technology that underscored the need to improve the captions themselves. Results were sometimes less than perfect, prompting some creators to have a little fun at our expense!

Read the full announcement from YouTube here.