About Universal Subtitles
Universal Subtitles gives individuals, communities, and larger organizations the power to overcome accessibility and language barriers for online video. The tools are free and open source and make the work of subtitling and translating video simpler, more appealing, and, most of all, more collaborative.
The benefits of captioning and subtitling are immense:
- Captions make videos accessible for viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing
- Translations make it possible for all of us to watch video in languages that we don't speak
- Video creators get: better SEO, more views, access to a far bigger (potentially multilingual and global) audience, accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing viewers, and more
Universal Subtitles is composed of three main parts:
- A subtitle creation and viewing tool (aka the widget)
- A collaborative subtitling website
- An open protocol for subtitle search/delivery
Everything we do is available under the open source AGPL license.
Our Organization
Participatory Culture Foundation is a non-profit organization building free and open tools for more a democratic and decentralized media. Other projects of ours include Miro, Miro Video Converter, Miro Community, and Open Video Alliance.
Universal Subtitles is a featured project of Mozilla Drumbeat, and the Mozilla Foundation has provided development support. Open Society Institute and the MacArthur Foundation are also financial supporters.
Software development for Universal Subtitles is being done in partnership with
8 Planes.
What's Coming Next?
We are currently in the alpha stages of this website and the subtitling tool-- that means we're just getting started! But we've opened up the site so that we can begin testing and get early feedback. Many very important features are missing. Here's some of what we'll be working on in the coming months:
- Better support for non-latin character sets
- A volunteer page and request center, where people can ask for captions and subtitles
- Machine translation option once subtitles have been transcribed
- Better keyboard accessibility for site and widget
- Subtitle ratings and flagging
- Better community website features
- Better video browsing on our site, for finding interesting content
- Compliance with emerging timed text standards
Are there other features that are particular important to your use?
We'd love to hear from you.
Email us: universalsubtitles@pculture.org
Three Important Ways You Can Help
Universal Subtitles is an open source, non-profit project. We are volunteer driven and would love to have your help!
Here are three ways you can get involved:
- Want to help us test new versions of the software before it's released? Join the testers list and follow our testing guidelines to get started!
- If you are a developer, check out the development center and start with some 'bite-sized' tickets that are listed there.
- Help out new users! Take a look at the videos list and give positive and helpful feedback to people that have added subtitles to various videos.
- Are you deaf, hard-of-hearing, or an accessibility advocate? Please join our deaf/hoh discussion list.
Awards
Universal Subtitles has won several awards in recognition of our breakthrough platform for accessibility and translation.
2011 Tech Award
FCC Award Advancement in Accessibility
Intercultural Innovation Award
