Microsoft working to improve captioning for online videos

Watching online videos is now common but there's still room for improvement in terms of their presentation. One of the biggest challenges is offering captioning features for people who are hearing impaired or who simply want to read what's being spoken on screen.

In a new post on Microsoft's Internet Explorer blog, the company has announced that it joined an effort earlier this year to improve captioning in online videos. The efforts center on the Simple Delivery Profile for Closed Captions (SDP-US) profile specification, which is based on the Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) that's been in use by video captioning creators for sometime.

In collaboration with companies such as Adobe, NBCUniversal, Apple, and Netflix, Microsoft has added the SDP-US profile to the HTML5 element. This will allow for captions to be placed on an online video anywhere on the screen, along with colored and italic captions. The words can even be wrapped around in different colors.

Microsoft states:

Developers will be able to add captioning to an HTML5 video by providing a caption file that contains a styled text representation of the video dialog or actions and by using the element to render and display the contents of that file.

Microsoft is currently taking feedback from video creators about their thoughts and opinions on the new SDP-US profile.

Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft
Via: Winbeta.org