The Collaborative Video Subtitling Design Challenge is a joint collaboration between Mozilla Labs and the Participatory Culture Foundation (the folks behind Miro and the Open Video Alliance). Together we invite the wider community to join us in this challenge, develop concepts and submit them to our sites.
Please see the great write-up by the Participator Culture foundation for detailed results.
In the process the PCF will now be in touch with all participants to see how their designs and ideas can be incorporated into the actual product. If you are interested in the process, please make sure to follow the PCF and the Universal Subtitling Project on their blog.
For this Design Challenge we are focusing on finding creative solutions to the question: "Collaborative subtitling -- How can users quickly create a timed transcript of any video on the web?"
Participatory Culture Foundation and Mozilla are working to build a universal system for creating and collaboratively improving subtitles for any video on the web. We believe that many users would be willing to contribute and translate subtitles if there was an easy way to do so. And that we can use this energy to knock down language barriers for popular online video.
Concept:
Our vision:
However, the most important question to answer is also the least straightforward: what is the best way to solicit and facilitate the creation of high quality subtitles from viewers? Most subtitle interfaces, designed for highly committed professional users, have too high a learning curve and are too complicated to be helpful examples. And they aren't built to take advantage of multiple collaborators. For collaborative subtitling to work, it needs to be easy to learn, easy to use, and fast.
PCF has created a prototype that lets users create a transcript as fast as they can type, and create an aligned set of subtitles as they watch. Teams' work will start with data from user tests on the prototype and propose new designs to address these problems in the form of a mock-up and video. PCF will select winning ideas and integrate them back into the subtitling interface (teams will see the results of their work in action).
There are now roughly 25 million videos on the internet. The words in these videos are, of course, spoken in the hundreds of languages of the world. Subtitling these videos and translating the subtitles has the promise of opening up a whole new world for all of us, letting us peer into other cultures in new ways, explore otherwise inaccessible information, and enjoy the best creative content from anywhere in the world.
Subtitles bridge linguistic and, for those with hearing and visual disabilities, physical barriers to video. For many people subtitles are not an option for watching video, but a necessity. Despite their indispensability, subtitles are not well standardized or prevalent online. Individual video services offer varying degrees of subtitle support for their publishers, but this fragmented and incomplete approach has generated very little subtitle creation and therefore very little content that is accessible through subtitles.
Subtitling across languages and for accessibility is an outstanding opportunity for internet crowdsourcing and collaboration. We believe that people around the world will be excited to participate in creating and curating subtitles if they are given the right tools and incentives. Natural human desires to bridge cultures and support the disabled are very powerful and the results of subtitling are both tangible and of benefit to everyone.
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