Posted by Milo Medin, Vice President of Access Services

Earlier today, the Federal Communications Commission adopted proposed rules that -- if finalized later this year as planned -- will implement a 2012 recommendation of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and put spectrum to better use for broadband.  The proposed rules include some of the most forward-thinking spectrum policy anywhere in the world, and the FCC should be commended for moving aggressively towards implementation.

The key idea is that modern database technologies will allow commercial use of spectrum that historically has been dedicated to federal purposes, when and where the government doesn’t have immediate need for it.  Additionally, this new model allows flexible commercial use of the spectrum, where the database can mediate between protected operations like cellular LTE, and unprotected operations (which could be WiFi-type devices), without the government having to pick one or the other.  

The government will also benefit from having commercial devices in their bands.  Federal users will be able to buy lower-cost and higher-performance equipment based on consumer smartphone technologies.  It’s a win-win approach that lets government agencies continue to use their spectrum and take advantage of the commercial ecosystem, while also helping meet the growing demand for mobile broadband and device connectivity.  

Google has long advocated for more efficient use of spectrum through sharing technologies.  We operate an FCC-approved Spectrum Database that enables the use of vacant TV broadcast channels for wireless broadband.  And, we’ve built a prototype Spectrum Access System that is in use at our headquarters in Mountain View, California.  We believe spectrum sharing can unlock huge consumer benefits compared with traditional approaches of clearing existing users to make way for new ones, which can take as long as a decade to implement when it is possible at all.

It also is important that the FCC continue pushing hard to allow flexible use of spectrum in multiple bands. Different radio frequencies are suited to different applications.  For instance, the 600 MHz TV broadcast spectrum that Congress designated for voluntary recovery is especially useful for longer range services that provide excellent coverage, while higher frequencies (like the 3550 MHz band that’s at issue in today’s FCC rules) are ideal for quickly and affordably scaling up capacity in densely populated areas.  In these bands and others, federal policy should maximize the availability of spectrum that’s usable for broadband under a variety of business models.

Google welcomes the new FCC rules as a major step forward.  We’re committed to continue to work with the FCC and other federal agencies to make shared commercial access a reality, while ensuring federal operations are safeguarded.

Posted by Naomi Black, Technical Program Manager, Accessibility

Over the past few months, my colleagues and I have worked closely with advocacy organizations for the blind to improve our products. We have had a number of meetings with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and American Council of the Blind (ACB) to discuss planned updates, to involve their members in early product testing, and most recently at the end of August to discuss our progress. This summer, Alan Eustace, our Senior VP of Engineering, was invited to speak at the NFB’s national convention and he thanked them for sharing their constructive feedback with us. At the CSUN conference in March and the ACB conference in July, we held focus groups to better understand blind users’ experience with assistive technologies and how our products could be improved. In August, we launched a survey with the ACB to study computer usage and assistive technology patterns in the blind community.

Last month, we announced some accessibility enhancements, including improved keyboard shortcuts and support for screen readers in Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Calendar. We also hosted a public webinar to discuss how our product updates might affect users in business, government and education settings. While we hope these enhancements make it easier for people who rely on assistive technologies to work and collaborate using our products, we recognize that our work isn’t done and we remain committed to making our products more accessible.

We’re grateful for the early and supportive feedback we’ve received from our colleagues at the advocacy organizations. In a statement posted on the National Federation of the Blind’s (NFB’s) website, Mark Riccobono commented that the NFB “is pleased that Google has been actively engaged with us in their work to solve access issues... Many improvements still need to be made before Google applications are fully accessible to blind users, but the enhancements that we have seen demonstrated indicate a commitment to accessibility by Google.”

“We are pleased to see the amount of progress that Google has made over the summer to these apps,” said Eric Bridges, the Director of Advocacy and Governmental Affairs for the American Council of the Blind (ACB). “We expect to test even more improvements in the coming months. Thousands of ACB’s blind, visually impaired, and deaf-blind members are eager to take advantage of the convenience and flexibility that cloud-based applications like Google Docs, Gmail, Calendar, and Spreadsheet offer. Our goal is to insure that our members don’t get left behind.”

In the coming months, we’ll continue to collaborate with advocacy organizations to improve our products for blind users. We believe that people who depend on assistive technologies deserve as rich and as productive an experience on the web as sighted users, and we’re working to help that become a reality.

For more information on our accessibility enhancements, how to send us feedback and how to track our progress, visit google.com/accessibility.

Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

Bending, walking, breathing, hearing, seeing and sleeping are simple things that are often taken for granted, as are thinking, learning, and communicating.

Twenty years ago today, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law. This milestone legislation bans persons or companies from discriminating against anyone with limited abilities. It’s hard to imagine a world in which the right to participate in activities commonly enjoyed by the bulk of the population are denied or inadequately accommodated, but that was the case before ADA.

The efforts of the advocates who came to Washington two decades ago to rally for their civil rights has transformed so much of the modern world around us. As someone who’s worn hearing aids since I was 13, for example, I very much appreciate that most television programs and DVDs or Blu-Ray disks are captioned. On my way home, I might pass through a door that I know is wide enough for a wheelchair -- because the ADA set the building codes that require it. I see service animals on the DC Metro, accessible checkout aisles at my grocery store, ramps on sidewalks, and designated parking in movie theater lots: all there because of the important provisions included in the ADA.

Whereas the ADA set legal standards for ensuring equal rights for Americans with disabilities, Google is keenly aware that technology can help all users better enjoy the world around them. From opening millions of titles of printed content to persons with visual impairments through Google Book Search, to providing ready and easy-to-use captions on YouTube, to including a built in screenreader and a text-to-speech engine in Android, to introducing new extensions on Chrome to make online text easier to read, we’re serious about honoring our mission to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. You can keep up with our progress at www.google.com/accessibility.

Congratulations to all those who work to make the ADA a living, breathing reality; for all the years I’ve been working on policy in Washington, it’s still rare to see a law that has had as positive and fundamental an influence on our lives as this Act. There still is work to be done to meet the goals of ADA, and we are committed to doing our part.

Posted by Hiroto Tokusei, Product Manager

(cross-posted from the Official You Tube Blog)

Tens of millions of people in the U.S. experience some kind of hearing impairment and recent studies have predicted that over 700 million people worldwide will suffer from hearing impairment by 2015. To address a clear need, the broadcast industry began running captions on regular video programming in the early 1970s. Today, closed captions on video are more prevalent than ever. But generating captions today can be a time-consuming and complicated process.

Making video easily accessible is something we're working hard to address at YouTube. One of the first steps we took was the development of a caption feature in 2008. In November of last year we released auto-captioning for a small, select group of partners. Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google's Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer. The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version. Viewers can even choose an option to translate those captions into any one of 50 different languages -- all in just a couple of clicks.

Today, we are opening up auto-captions to all YouTube users. There will even be a "request processing" button for un-captioned videos that any video owner can click on if they want to speed up the availability of auto-captions. It will take some time to process all the available video, so here are some things to keep in mind:

• While we plan to broaden the feature to include more languages in the months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken.
• Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can't be auto-captioned. President Obama's speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions.
• Auto-captions aren't perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they're accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient -- our speech recognition technology gets better every day.
• Auto-captions should be available to everyone who's interested in using them. We're also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you're having trouble enabling them for your video, please visit our Help Center: this article is for uploaders and this article is for viewers.

For content owners, the power of auto-captioning is significant. With just a few quick clicks your videos can be accessed by a whole new global audience. And captions can make is easier for users to discover content on YouTube.

Twenty hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Making some of these videos more accessible to people who have hearing disabilities or who speak different languages, not only represents a significant advancement in the democratization of information, it can also help foster greater collaboration and understanding.

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Managing Policy Counsel

UPDATE 11/24/09: Full-length video of our announcement event in Washington, D.C. has been posted to YouTube and is embedded at the bottom of this blog post. We have included English captions using our new auto-timing feature. Enjoy.

Today, here in D.C., we announced the preliminary roll-out of automatic captioning in YouTube, an innovation that takes advantage of our speech recognition technology to turn the spoken word into text captions. We also announced that if you have a transcript of your video, you can upload it to YouTube and we'll time the captions for you.

This is useful for anyone who is deaf or hearing impaired, but it will have broader effects as well. For example, YouTube captions can be automatically translated, making video more accessible across languages. And while we've had the ability to manually caption videos for a while, automatic captions and automatically timed transcripts lower the barriers and, we hope, helps open YouTube to everyone.

Indeed, with 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, captioning YouTube through purely manual means would be very difficult. That's why we're excited about today's announcement. Please note that only 13 YouTube channels will feature automatic captions at this time so that we can gather feedback, but all video owners will be able to upload transcripts and automatically time them. Ken Harrenstien, the software engineer who led this project, describes today's announcements in more detail on the Official Google Blog.

Visit our Picasa photo album for more pictures from the event.
This morning's introductions were also exciting because over 60 accessibility leaders from the National Association of the Deaf, Gallaudet University, AAPD and other organizations joined us to be the first to learn about these new features. We made the announcement in our Washington office, in fact, just so that they could be here to give our engineers their direct feedback.

Have a look at the video below to learn more about what was announced today, and check back here tomorrow for full video from the event. You can bet it'll be captioned—we'll be uploading the transcript of the event to YouTube, which will turn it into captions that are timed just right.