At risk of committing the eternal developer fallacy of attempting to fix cultural problems with technology: is there anything we, as a hacker community, can do to help?
As brother to a profoundly deaf sister (whose nerve-deafness and age make her ineligible for the cochlea implant), the most obvious opportunity is the poor accessibility of online video as you mentioned under "Screencasts, talks, and video tutorials". It seems that YouTube is making great progress in this area (c.f. http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about and the simplicity of the transcript format at http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...); is it just a case of contributing more transcripts and bringing this functionality to all video?
I vaguely remember some other efforts in this area, it'd be great if there was some painless way to transcribe arbitrary video (such as screencasts) and be able to wrap a player with caption support.
As brother to a profoundly deaf sister (whose nerve-deafness and age make her ineligible for the cochlea implant), the most obvious opportunity is the poor accessibility of online video as you mentioned under "Screencasts, talks, and video tutorials". It seems that YouTube is making great progress in this area (c.f. http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about and the simplicity of the transcript format at http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...); is it just a case of contributing more transcripts and bringing this functionality to all video?
I vaguely remember some other efforts in this area, it'd be great if there was some painless way to transcribe arbitrary video (such as screencasts) and be able to wrap a player with caption support.