Online Subtitles
I'm Andrew Strachan and I'm responsible, within the Usability & Accessibility team, for the delivery of access services for the Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer.
Since joining the Ö÷²¥´óÐã in 2000 - as a hearing-impaired graduate myself - I've taken a personal interest in the research and development of a top quality subtitling service for our online content, through subtitling trials on both bbc.co.uk (Dec 2005 and Jan-Mar 2007) and the iMP Content Trial (Oct 2005-Mar 2006).
The principal objective behind this work is to make sure that the sensory impaired community is always included, and has the opportunity of an accessible and enjoyable video experience on bbc.co.uk.
I'd like to thank the users who have participated in those trials for their invaluable feedback which has helped us to shape the access services for iPlayer.
Subtitles are now widely available for many downloadable programmes on iPlayer: look out for "include optional subtitles" within the programme information page, and please see the for more information on how to get the best subtitling experience.
Currently we have been able to provide subtitles for downloadable, non-live "pre-recorded" programmes, through the development of a facility to repurpose pre-recorded broadcast subtitles (EBU-STL) files into the subtitling formats for different online media players. This development has been complicated because each media player currently has its own proprietary format for timed-text, such as format, format, and format. Through our subtitling trials, we have gained experience in ensuring that we can deliver the same quality of subtitling output as for TV on each different media player, and the iPlayer download subtitles are the latest result of this work.
Unfortunately, some of you have experienced problems with the incorrect labelling of some programmes as having subtitles when they have not. We have identified this as bug in our current labelling system, which only happens when a programme is a repeat which does not have subtitles. We are in the process of fixing this and expect to have this fix go live in the next iPlayer release. We'll let you know when this happens.
Our next step is to ensure that subtitles can be delivered for the , the new player which is being rolled out across bbc.co.uk to replace our old diversity of media players with a consistent, quality player.
The process of delivering subtitles for the Adobe Flash-based EMP has been made much simpler by the EMP team's choice to use the from the . This significant development will allow us to deliver one subtitle format for Flash video which can be made accessible on many different browsers and operating systems (including Apple Mac).
That's to come. In the meantime, we hope that you enjoy the subtitling service for iPlayer downloads.
Ceefax subtitling being prepared using a Palantype keyboard
Andrew Strachan is a Content Producer for Ö÷²¥´óÐã Future Media & Technology.
Comment number 1.
At 23rd May 2008, Ed Lyons wrote:Whether Flash is using an open standard for subtitling is irrelevant here though. Even if it was using it's own proprietary system it would still work on any browser and any OS, just like Flash does...
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Comment number 2.
At 24th May 2008, dennisjunior1 wrote:Andrew:
thanks for your reporting skills @ the Ö÷²¥´óÐã...
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Comment number 3.
At 27th May 2008, Sue_Aitch wrote:All very good: please would you ask Ceefax to update page 697 to include all the access services on the platforms -DTT, D-CAB, D-SAT and i-Player as not everyone reads Read Hear?
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Comment number 4.
At 29th May 2008, flintfred wrote:Its disappointing to note that all of the focus appears to be on subtitling for IPlayer and no mention of enabling audio description to be available. on it This is just as important for visually impaired people as subtitling is for the hearing impaired so are there any plans to ensure that all programmes broadcast with audio-description also have this available on their IPlayer versions?
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