Best Practices In Online Video Captioning

Shooting, posting, and serving video are relatively easy. Even editing video is easier than it used to be. But captioning has never been easy and has not gotten any easier with the advent of multimedia.
Even if you know how to caption a videoclip or program, it’s technically difficult, and sometimes expensive, to add the captions to the video. We must be aware that we need to be catering to the broader handicapped audience as much as the standard visitor.

Multiple players, video formats, and text-file types bring about incompatibilities. Your chosen video format may limit what you can do with captions, and in any case your viewers will need a player that can run your video and the captions. This is particularly cumbersome with many divx caption formats. However, of all the captioning techniques, the divx is among the best.

The form of captions – typography, placement, chunking, speed, identification of non-speech information, and other factors – varies widely according to player type. Yet captioners are, at the same time, surprisingly limited in their options for captioning form; authors have much less control than in other captioned media. Of particular interest is the complete absence of fonts that are designed for online captioning and proven to be legible, readable, and usable by viewers.

Authoring tools are hard to use, sometimes unreliable or expensive, and inaccessible to people with disabilities other than hearing impairment. (No captioning software is known to adhere to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, for example.) The Youtube captioning service provides a pretty good interface, but still involves much manual labour that needs to be resolved.

Web authors who wish to provide captioned video in order to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines may find that certain other browser incompatibilities cause them to violate the Guidelines in some other way. Also, the Guidelines permit Web developers to provide simple transcripts rather than actual captions.
Online captioning is almost exclusively an English-language phenomenon. Which is why, when sites like www.ted.com have multilingual captions, you must stand back in awe! Captions in other languages are hard to find; character encoding can be unreliable.

There is no easy way to convert captions into transcripts or Web pages with semantic, valid XHTML or similar markup. This has implications for the reuse of captioning in a learning repository.
Most online captioning is closed, using video players’ own formats and functions to hide captioning inside or alongside the video stream. Closed captioning replicates the model used nearly all the time on TV, on video and DVD, and at the movies, but may be unnecessarily complex and expensive much of the time in online captioning.

Why Labor Has Won The Online Election Over Liberals

There is a general consensus that the Australian 2010 Federal Election is going to be decided by swinging voters. Given this, would it not be prudent to ensure that your online presence is up to scratch? Surely, even the most outdated politician can gather that traditional scare campaigns such as “The Facts” TV and viral campaign by the Labor party and similar discreditation campaigns by the Liberals only serve to confuse and anger the general voting public. Obviously, most people wanting to find out what the parties stand for go to the net! So why are both Liberal and Labor party websites so poor?!

Let’s start with the better of the two: The Labor Party

The Pros:

1. Loads very quickly: you do not want to keep potential voters waiting to load content. The ALP website loads in 2.96 seconds according to official web loading speed testers. Though I have found that it is much faster than that. The fact that the Labor party has only 12 other websites on the dedicated server also contributes to this good loading time.
2. Modern Look at feel: Labor certainly has a modern site by most standards. Adhering to a generic “WordPress Inspired” like Web2.0 theme. It uses good colour combinations, icons and sliders to create a familiar and “expected website” look and feel.
3. Basic optimisation is there: good title and description tags, good use of social media etc etc. Small SEO elements missing, but over all, not a bad effort.

Cons:

1. What I really hate about the labour website is that it is difficult to navigate to crucial pages that a potential voter may want to visit. Say a “policy” page. That would be nice! Julia Gillard has been widely criticised in the media for having “no economic plan”, so it would have been good to see “Economic Plan” somewhere in the main navigation under say a “Policy” heading and similarly a link somewhere from the homepage. Instead what you get (as shown in the image below), is an “Agenda” menu item with “more policies” submenu item with heaps of drop down pages. Not to mention the fact that the menu overlaps with the slider item. This site could definitely use a usability review!

Labor "Agenda" navigation with many submenu items!

2. The site is way too long and busy. The use becomes lost and looks to the top menu to try and gain some sort of navigational clarity. But to no avail! Whilst the “Connect With Labour” second half of the site may be an important tool in the election, it would not do much good to swinging voters who have not yet made up their minds!

3. Internal pages such as the Agenda Page abuse images. Searchability is important. Not just from the search engine perspective, but also from the users’ perspective. Bombarding visitors with an array of stupid images with smiling people and text laden images is definitely a poor decision. When I visited that page, all I wanted was a clear hierarchy of relevant pages, and what you see below is what you get! Smiling gits that do not fool anyone.

Image bombardment by labor

4. No image use?? Make up your mind labor website administrators, either you are going with the theme of cute icons and images or your are not! The Health Reform page was a horrendous usability fail! Which could have definitely used some nice sliders such as the one on the home page, icons, and videos to break up the monotonous text!

Overview: Very disappointed at the poor structure of the site. Navigationally, the Labor site really failed. Also, some of the design elements of the site were a bit dated, given that you can generate text on top of images with a neat CSS trick, that could have definitely helped the above Agenda page to say the least! But, page speed and relative modernity (to the Liberal site) means that I would grade this site 6.5/10.

Now let us turn our attention to the Liberals!

Pros

1. Dedicated server to a dedicated site. But keep reading because this still did not help the page speed!
2. Generally good SEO basics such as meta title and description etc. are pretty good!

Cons:

1. The most annoying thing about this site, which made me very angry and actually forced me to leave the site was the terrible loading speed! According to most website speed tools, the site loads in over 3 seconds. However, on several machines that I have tested, the site takes 7-10 seconds to load!! Now the site is not that heave at just over 40kb, but something is slowing it down majorly. Maybe the server is old, and is unable to cope with web traffic or modern code! Maybe there are plugins and database issues that need to be sorted out. Yes, Tony Abbot is an economic conservative, but come on Tony, invest in a better server and website!! Not only is the page speed slow, the site keeps trying to load something continuously even after the page has loaded! On this point alone, the site fails.
2. Design: What also really annoyed me about site is the stupid, and I must say, patronising background graphic of the heavens opening up. To me, this image exacerbated the anger that the slow loading time of the site has ignited. This allusion to religion, only diminished the modernity of the site and further helped to support Abbotts’ poor reputation as being out of touch with modern values! The colour scheme was pale, and the home page banner image should have been a slider or an interactive widget of some sort, but definitely NOT an image of Abbott with his mouth in a semi open state! Smile!

3. I became really excited to see “Policies” in the main navigation menu. This quickly faded when I had to wait 10 seconds for the page to load, and faded even quicker when I realised that all of the internal links were in PDF format!!! Was it that difficult to hire an admin person to simply transfer all of the PDF data from the cumbersome PDF files into simple text and add some images??! Another fail! Also, Tony, considering that the elderly are likely to vote for you, try and make your website easier for them to navigate and don’t confuse them with downloads of PDFs!

Overall: The Abbott website is most definitely a fail due to the extremely poor usability due to slow loading speed and prolific use of PDFs. Overall score: 3/10.

Matt Cutts speaking plans for 2010

Last year I tried to limit my travel but still ended up making about ten (!) trips in 2009. This year I’ve resolved to travel less for work. Right now, here’s my current speaking/travel plans for 2010:

March 2-4, 2010: SMX West, Santa Clara, CA. I’m doing a “Ask the Search Engines” panel.

May 19-20, 2010: Google I/O conference in San Francisco. I’m doing a site review session.

June 8-9, 2010: SMX Advanced in Seattle

November 8-11, 2010: PubCon in Vegas

I was gone last week (February 9-13) for the TED conference, but that was attending, not speaking.

Chrome support for Greasemonkey

Back in December, I happened to click on a Greasemonkey script in Chrome and was shocked that it just worked. At the time, I wrote a note within Google that said

Whoa. I just clicked on a Greasemonkey script in the latest dev version of Chrome (4.0.266.0 on Linux). Chrome offered to install the GM script, so I said okay. The script ran perfectly in Chrome with no changes at all! I don’t know how many Greasemonkey scripts will run in Chrome unchanged, but at least some will.

Last week brought that news as an official announcement. My guess is that scripts that don’t use specific Greasemonkey APIs should be fine.

(Side-note: I found a good post from November that claims that ~60% of Greasemonkey scripts don’t use any sort of special API calls at all. The top API calls appear to be GM_getValue and GM_setValue (16.5% of Greasemonkey scripts), plus GM_xmlhttpRequest (15.5% of Greasemonkey scripts). It’s unclear which of these functions might be worth supporting. Some could have security implications (GM_xmlhttpRequest). Others like the get/setValue functions could be done by using other ways to store data.)

So this is cool. There’s a good chance that your favorite Greasemonkey script might just work in Chrome. Personally, I recommend the dev channel version of Chrome. It gets all the cool features early, and it’s been very stable/fast for me.

Blog to Book?

I recently went looking for some software to make a blog into a book. Here’s what I found:

- Lulu will take PDF files for a book. Blogbooker.com will try to create a PDF from a blog. Unfortunately, my blog made BlogBooker choke (I have 991 posts from my blog) — even when I excluded comments.

- Blurb.com will try to create a book from a blog, but it only supports blogs hosted on WordPress.com, not other WordPress blogs. That will help some people who want to print their blog into a book, but not everyone.

- I had the best luck with FastPencil. In order to reduce the size of your exported blog, you’ll first want to go to your comments section, click on the “spam” link and clear out any spam comments by selecting all the spam comments and clicking “Empty Spam”. Then you can export your WordPress blog (from the Dashboard, click Tools, then Export) as an XML file that you can download to your computer. From there, FastPencil lets you upload the .xml file and then select which blog posts to include in the book. You can also filter by time, which I had to do. Even my blog posts (no comments) from the last year and a half still made a 350+ page book, and FastPencil choked on turning my entire blog into a book.

FastPencil did a few things well. Included images were imported, and some formatting such as bold made it into the PDF. But other formatting, such as code formatting and newlines/spacing between paragraphs didn’t make it. Embedded content such as videos or polls were likewise empty. Trying to import my entire blog also didn’t work. But all in all, I was impressed with FastPencil. They also have nice collaboration tools (e.g. you can designate editors, reviewers, co-authors, and project managers to help in writing/polishing the content). The site also works through your web browser instead of as a downloadable program, which appealed to me. If you’re used to WordPress, FastPencil won’t be too much of a change.

It’s still not a point-and-click affair to make a nice looking coffee table book out of a blog, but it’s getting closer. Right now, the “make a book” niche feels like the early days of recordable CDs. Back then, CD-R discs were expensive enough that I would spend time to make sure that I used all the free space on the CD. Eventually prices dropped so much that you didn’t feel bad about burning a half-empty or not-perfectly-polished CD.

If you’ve tried other blog-to-book services or websites, let me know your experiences in the comments.

The Flash website and SEO consequences

Are you about to embark upon the new and exciting journey of getting your website done, redone or undone. Are you hoping to avoid the latter? You want style, you want usability, functionality, reliability and aesthetic quality….right? Let me guess..on a budget ? You may be considering flash, and why not, flash makes websites look ‘flashy’; amazing animations, cool effects and funky navigation. No match for regular dynamic ASP, PHP or HTML website right? But what about the search engine side?…

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Google Relevance

The Google Ballyhoo – Yahoo and MSN relevance.

The Google ballyhoo, as I would like to call it, has created a somewhat deceptive illusion that Google is the most relevant search engine. It is true, that at one point in time, Google was the best search engine, providing quality, fast and honest results. However, several changes in algorithm, the realization of the power of search, and the ‘Google Currency’ (see my previous  blog) have, in my honest opinion, changed Google for the worst. This however, is not to discount the efforts of Yahoo and Live (MSN), I believe that these search engines, particularly Live, have been quietly, yet quickly learning from their competitor, and, as such have caught up, and arguably overtaken Google in search result relevancy.

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Changing nature of the internet

By now, almost everyone is familiar with the terminology of Web 2.0, a term loosely used to describe the internet in the 21st century. But how is Web 2.0 different from the previous web and how will it specifically effect your business?

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Smart Search

How does a search engine know that the search results are relevant to the search term entered?

The answer to this question lies at the heart of search engine competition, and is the main reason for Google remaining the leading search engine. A search engine uses a number of different factors to provide search results to your browser within split seconds after the query has been entered. One of the factors taken into account is the number of links.
Links work in a similar way to word of mouth promotion. For instance, if you like your local website design company, you may recommend them to you friends and acquaintances. Linking to a website, is ‘virtually’ the same thing.

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Internet Marketing Tips

Premature launching may have a nasal spray solution in real life, but a premature website launch may cost you more than the odd grand it would cost to get your site properly checked before hand.

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