Open Captions

[Updated with the latest status of Open Captions project]

I started building Open Captions for the Hackday TV hackathon at General Assembly.

Open Captions gives the viewers, the ability to search and view closed captioned YouTube videos. While watching the video, the viewer can select individual words of the closed captions and then see an American Sign Language Representation of the word on the screen. The viewer can also jump back to the previous caption showed on the screen. Whenever, a word is selected, the video automatically pauses when the ASL is showed on the page. The working prototype can be seen on Open Captions

Currently the project is a work in progress, and is susceptible to fail at a few places. Please feel free to email feedback, ideas, suggestions about Open Captions.

The ASL representation is just one of the use cases of Open Captions. This can be linked with Google Translate to find out words in other languages (very useful for people for whom English is not the first language). This can also be linked with say Wikipedia and children can learn about a word or a place spoken about on TV.

This idea of selecting words from closed captions also works for videos from Universal Subtitles, an initiative which helps create closed captions for videos on the Internet. Open Captions example with Universal Subtitles

Reference
The ASL representations are being scraped from www.cats.gatech.edu, which has around 25000 words shown in ASL in 25000 web pages.