Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Project Readon

A friend of mine told me about Project Readon and I about fell to the floor in surprise.

See, I am Deaf and one of the challenges I face online with the increased usage of videos, pod casts, and audio files, is the inability to have equal access to them. There are exceptions such as if a site makes a typed transcript available for reading.

Enter Project Readon. Anyone can submit any video online from anywhere (most popular being You Tube) and Project Readon will make it viewable with subtitles on the bottom of the screen. The subtitles do not interfere with the video at all, and they use a black background with white fonts for ease of reading.

I've already submitted a few Ron Paul videos since there are not many on there. I also emailed the Ron Paul campaign and requested they seek out becoming partners with Project Readon. There are several other candidates who have done so, such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards.

I ask that anyone who reads my blog regularly, to please attempt to make use of Project Readon
and submit videos online to them for equal access. There are millions of hearing impaired people in the world who would certainly benefit from this and appreciate this service. I also ask that you help spread the word on this terrific site.

It costs you nothing but a little time to copy/paste the URL of a video to Project Readon. If enough people request it and popularity demands it, they will add subtitles to it and let you know by email when it is available.

The only drawback I see to this site is it's lack of organization. All videos are listed together and are not categorized. They do have a search feature, so that helps. They also do not seem to have a way of pointing to a specific video. Like if you want to add it to your site or blog, or provide a direct link to a specific video. They are relatively new, so that will hopefully change.

Perhaps as they grow and become more visible and popular, they'll improve in these areas. And they will only become more well known if more people spread the word about them.

Whenever you view a video online, please consider taking a few seconds to copy/paste the URL and send it to Project Readon. People like myself will deeply appreciate the increased availability of captioned videos online :-)


Mahalo,

Dolphin


2 comments:

  1. I Completely agree with you. I also want to thank you for opening up my eyes to PROJECT READON. I am now going to ask my company to get PROJECT READON, so that we can serve the requirements of all communitites and it be equal. Currently, we have a daily blog which you can view by going to www.truesecretsofwealth.com/tswsblog.html. As of this writing we have plans to take that blog and turn it into video for the deaf community and with the help of PROJECT READON make it acessible for many more people. Thanks again for the kind blog.
    Brian Scott
    VP Project Development
    True Secrets of Wealth Seminars
    www.truesecretsofwealth.com

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  2. Hi Brian!

    That's wonderful!

    I appreciated you stopping by and sharing your links and your comments on Project Readon.

    You'll be doing a great service and I hope it works out well for you :-)

    Thanks again Brian

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