YouTube just released a new feature for video content generators: annotations. As you can see in this example video of someone jumping out of an aircraft the annotations show up whereever you want to put them on the screen and are time-based. You can even add links and hotspots to other videos and search results which means you can do interactive games using several videos.

Now this is all cute and nice, but what I’d want is API access to these annotations. This would allow us to provide not only captioning of the video for the hard of hearing but also information for blind visitors. I’ve written about this before, you can easily create an interface to have timed captioning on youtube but playing the captions back is trickier as you have no means of syncing the video (if the video buffers in between the captions and the video get out of sync).

Now, if YouTube came up with an API access to these captions that fires an event every time a new caption starts with the type of caption and its text value, it would be dead easy to update a hidden form field with that text (or an ARIA live region) to provide a poor man’s captioning and information for the hard of hearing.

YouTube could become both a larger consumer faced product by enabling more disabled visitors to gain access and a means of captioning video that is intuitive and easy to use.

I’d be happy to help out!

• check out youtube annotations

This is my presentation given at the BarCamp4 at Gcap in London, talking about my recent move to start doing more mashups again and what lead to it.

My mashup and accessibility fatigue

In a nutshell I have to say that I was getting tired of ethical hacking and mashups. Far too many people just create mashups for the sake of putting some information together or prove a technical concept but I just couldn’t see the use of what was produced. We create a lot of ideas, prototypes, proofs of concept, celebrate them as being cool and then never re-visit or turn them into projects.

I was also bored with the accessibility movement on the web. Instead of concentrating on solutions for people we ran in circles demanding technical solutions or implementation of standards that don’t make much sense in the real world. It was much more important to be compliant with something than to really deliver for the people who needed us to remove barriers for them. It is all about demanding things to be done rather than doing them. And I felt that I wasted my time trying to get something done in this surrounding.

Boost #1: The social innovation camp

That changed drastically when I was a judge at the Social Innovation Camp. The concept of the camp was brilliant: allow people who have real world problems to draft up an idea how modern technology like web sites and social networks could help solving or at least making these problems smaller. The entries were massive and ranged from simple things like sharing sites (rent a drill instead of buying one and let it collect dust) to personal growth/learning monitoring systems.

Boost #2: Enabled by design

The project that stood out the most for me was Enabled by design which is a showcase site for people with disabilities showing the world what problems they have fulfilling certain day to day tasks (say cutting food) and what tools are available to overcome these problems.

The second idea of enabled by design is that it should become a place where product designers and production companies could get information about what products are needed and then can start designing and producing those in more appealing ways. Most assistive technology and products are ugly, and they don’t have to be – actually that makes the person who just had to start to use them to fulfill tasks previously easy for them feel even worse. People get as excited about product design as we get about APIs and mashing things up – both of these great amounts of energies could be targeted to solve real-life needs of real people.

Boost #3 – Ability 2.0 conference and accessihacking YouTube

With my mindset of giving the accessibility world a swift kick up the backside I gave my talk Fencing-in the habitat at the Accessibility2.0 conference pointing out the useless energy we waste on technical solutions built to satisfy ourselves rather than making a difference for the end user.

One of the other talks that day was Antonia Hyde talking about the issues users with learning disabilities are facing on the web, especially in regards to online video. Well, I thought to myself, as YouTube has an API, and I’ve been playing around with it already, why not have a go at an accessible YouTube player. I’ve created a prototype and sent that out to Antonia and some other accessibility contacts and the feedback was awesome.

What confused me most was that I got feedback from schools and blind people thanking me for the player and finally being able to use YouTube. I liked that a lot – realizing that I helped far more people than I thought by tackling something I hadn’t tried before – thinking in detail about the needs of people with learning disabilities!

The player is going strong and I am now writing documentation for the 2.0 version which will feature a search, playlists created by bookmarking in del.icio.us and more features like zoom.

Question: What about the future?

Am I weird (don’t answer that out of context) or is there something in there? Are there more developers out there who are stuck in a rut mashing up data without ever really making a difference with it, or do I care to go there just because I have so much exposure to this world?

I am imagining (and already started) planning an event for exactly that – social and accessible hacking of currently used internet services. We could have a hackday weekend with spokespeople from different agencies explaining the issues that people with disabilities have to use for example flickr, youtube, last FM and so on and a bunch of hackers to have a go at building alternative interfaces based on the APIs of these companies. I would also like to get people from these companies there to learn about the hacks and maybe take on some of the learnings and put them in the live systems.

The question is: would that be something you want?

I just finished my sesssion at BarCamp Brighton about making online video more accessible by allowing for sensible, time-based commenting which could become a poor man’s captioning in a second stage. In general it is just showing off my hack of the YouTube player using their API.

One thing that has been annoying me for ages is that no video player on the web allows you to write comments for a specific time in the video that get displayed as plain text. Viddler allows you to comment at a certain time and it appears in the video, but the benefits of time based captioning both in terms of accessibility and SEO didn’t quite transpire to any video site maintainers yet. Edit: Darn, I hadn’t looked at Viddler for a long time, it actually does this now, well done!

Google just released a JavaScript API for YouTube which makes it dead easy to control a video with JavaScript. You can start, stop and jump to a certain time of the video but more importantly – you have events firing when something happens to the player. This made it easy for me to whip up a proof of concept how time-based captioning might work as an interface. Click the screenshot to see it in action.

Start the video and hit the pause button to add a new caption. You can delete captions by hitting the x links and you can jump back to the section of the video by clicking the time stamp.

Check the source for how it is done. In order to make this a service, all you need to do is have a backend script that gets all the form fields and store it in a DB.