This morning I was thrilled to learned about a website called Project readOn, a website managed by Rhino Moon Captioning, that will caption videos and podcasts from anywhere on the Internet. We’ve all seen debates on how we can make the web more accessible through advocacy but in the meantime, the deaf community falls behind further and further each day as thousands of new videos are added to the Internet.

While major corporations and major network televisions have no excuse for not captioning corporate web videos or online television shows such as “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” on their websites, there are millions of videos on the Internet where regular people either do not have the time or resources to caption their videos. That’s where Project readOn comes in. They’re willing to caption any video that you submit to them, for free! In light of the recent debates on captioning in the deaf blogosphere, I also wonder if this company can also caption ASL vlogs.

I’m impressed by the professional appearance of the website, and the captions are relatively easy to use. When you click on a web video, you will be taken to the website where the video is located and a pop-up will appear above the video with the captions on it. There are some timing issues that they need to resolve, sometimes the captions will begin before the video starts or an advertisement will disrupt the timing of the captions. They will soon add captions for multiple languages which will definitely expand their customer base.

At present, they only offer a limited amount of choices for viewing. The web videos that are currently captioned by Project readOn range from politics, (such as banned President Bush interview with a news station, an interview with President Clinton, and an interview with Barak Obama), to commercials (including the Super Bowl Blockbuster advertisement with the Guinea Pig “clicking” on the mouse and several Bud Light commercials), clips from TV programs (Saturday Night Live), celebrity gossip (an interview with Jennifer Aniston about her exes), cartoons (Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the same cartoon that shut down Boston a few months ago due to LED displays placed around the city), football (an interview with Tiki Barber about life after football), and even a popular YouTube video about a guy describing how his identity was stolen by a person in France just to woo a girl he met online.

This is the Project readOn mission statement:

Our mission is to be at the forefront of the online video revolution by empowering people in the deaf and hard of hearing, and foreign language communities. Gain access to the content that YOU want to enjoy whenever and wherever YOU want. We have three key tenets to our mission. One, Empowerment: We believe that the captioning model today is essentially broken because the consumers of the product have no meaningful involvement in the process. We believe the community should choose what they want captioned, not the other way around. Today people who want captions have to lobby and petition to get captions on the content that they want to enjoy. With Project readOn that model is completely reversed. Now you have the power to not only advocate but to decide exactly what you want captioned and get it! Two, Community: We are real people doing real work watching, transcribing, and captioning online video content at the highest quality levels. We don’t require users to pay to view our caption player. Our website is designed for you to interact, think about, request, discuss and most importantly view the content you want to see captioned. We rely on your generous support in the form of sponsorships to be able to pay for our ability to do this. It’s that simple. Three, Technology: We have developed a caption player that takes full advantage of browser technology and sits completely outside of the content itself instead of the traditional format of laying captions over content. This allows us to be completely universal in our application of captions. We can caption anything anywhere on the internet without touching it and without encoding or player issues. This powerful solution also protects the creative integrity of the content itself, never blocking out the viewable space. Please let us know about your experience here and give us the feedback we need in order to provide you with the content that most interests you. At this point we are wide open. This service is for you and will be driven by your needs. Tell us what interests you and we will head that direction.

If you’re like me, your frustration grew exponentially over the last several years as you fruitlessly searched for online videos that were captioned. Not many companies or individuals were willing to step up to the plate and provide a widely needed service – but now that we have one with Project readOn, we all need to show our our unified support for this marvelous initiative. It is also rare to see a captioning company give back to the deaf and hard of hearing community, so I am grateful to Rhino Moon Captioning for making this service possible. I hope that they live up to our expectations.

My main concern is that the Project readOn may be understaffed to handle the tremendous amount of requests that will likely pour in during the next few months (from people like me). For this reason, I strongly urge all captioners, or people with the ability and willingness to caption web videos, who want to help our community gain equal access to web videos to contact Project readOn and offer their assistance (although I do not know if this company will accept help).

And the rest of us can submit our favorite videos or videos that we feel should be captioned to expand on the variety of Project readOn’s current offerings. Additionally, if you can, blog about Project readOn or tell your friends about it!