Volunteer to Add Captions to Videos of John Holt So They Can Be Used by the Deaf and Digitally Translated into Other Languages.

Dear Volunteers:

Getting John Holt’s work out to new audiences has been a goal of ours for many years.

Mike Ridgway, formerly a member of Khan Academy's internationalization team, has approached us with software that makes it very easy to build captions for our YouTube videos so that the deaf and hard of hearing and even speakers of languages other than English can access these videos.

While a member of the Khan team, Mike came up with an idea for an editing interface to make it easier to produce captions than has been the case up to now.

Unable to persuade (or pay) other programmers to implement his ideas, Mike began teaching himself Javascript and PHP in January, the same time he started to build his app. JohnHoltGWS.com has agreed to give it a try to see if we can get some of our YouTube videos captioned.

Captioning not only lets deaf people view these videos, the text also lets automated translators use the video in their native language.

Here's a YouTube video of John Holt where you can see the captions that Mike produced, in part, using his captions editor. Just click the CC button in the control panel below the video window to display the captions.

We would like to do this for as many of our videos as possible and that's why we're turning to you.

The procedure for creating captions is easy to learn but it does take some time. However, if enough people step forward to help, we should be able to produce captions for many of our videos in short order.

Mike notes that the process of editing Google's machine captions, which, in his editor, involves listening to the speakers in the video and then reviewing Google's machine transcription looking for errors in need of correction, can be a great way for children to get practice in reading, spelling, punctuation and capitalization rules, grammar, and listening comprehension. Even if you're an adult, you'll probably be surprised at how much you get out of taking the time to edit captions in the course of watching these videos.

So we're looking for volunteers of all ages who would be willing to give this a try. You only have do just a few words; by crowdsourcing this we hope many hands will make light work. Please enter your email address below if you want to try captioning some John Holt video with Mike's assistance: