Audblog & Captioning

February 28, 2003 - Posted by André Restivo
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Audblog & Captioning

I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, but pure audio
blogging discriminates against deaf people. Don’t get me wrong,
it’s a great idea; hearing the sound of someone’s voice is a great
way to make a more personal connection. (Only a dozen of my 4,000
daily readers know what I sound like in person.) But any audio
content needs to be supplemented with a simultaneous text
transcript.

It’s not only the deaf people that make me think audio blogs (like
Audblog) won’t work without
some kind of text support:

  • You can’t search the web for an audio post
  • You can’t translate entries using href="http://world.altavista.com/">the fish
  • No RSS feeds
  • Now way of skimming through a site looking for usefull things,
    you have to ear it all.
  • Bad sound quality makes it hard to understand
  • …

Posting by SMS or using some kind of speech-to-text technology, now
that would be cool.

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3 Comments

  1. Mark says:

    Poor sound quality is an implementation issue, but the others
    are all design flaws. Transcription would solve all these problems,
    even just abstracts, but it’s very difficult to automate and very
    labor-intensive to do manually.

    ... on July January 1st, 1970
  2. Andre Restivo says:

    IMHO, good sound quality will always create a lot of bandwidth
    problems (it might be suitable for low traffic sites). Judging from
    the example sites at audblog sound quality is still very bad.

    ... on July January 1st, 1970
  3. rystic says:

    P.S. My email is temporarily down.

    ... on July January 1st, 1970

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