Obama Videos Get Closed-Captioning

[Ethelk2044]

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/obama-videos-get-closed-captioning/

Web video is helping all sorts of people get connected to the political process — but some have still been left out. For the deaf and hard-of-hearing, YouTube hasn’t really done a whole lot of good — until now.
Nine of Senator Barack Obama’s web videos have now been outfitted with closed-captioning, thanks to Project readOn, which created a special player to display captions alongside a Web video (make sure you turn off your pop-up blocker when you try this out).
Several of his videos are directly linked to on Project readOn’s homepage, and you can search for his name to find all of his captioned videos.
Project readOn isn’t a contractor for the Obama campaign. They create “user-requested captions,” explained Mateo Gutierrez, a co-founder. Users can submit the U.R.L. of a web video, and “we will caption it as soon as we can,” he said.
After Project readOn made captions for an Obama video requested by one of its members, according to Mr. Gutierrez, the campaign asked to have the captioning widget on all of its videos. Other than agreeing not to attach any advertisements to the campaign’s captions, he said, Project readOn made no special accommodations. The campaign had to become a member of the site, submit the other eight video requests, and wait its turn.