No Closed Caption nor Subtitles in iTunes Movies ?!?

Handbrakes is a good idea however does not meet my needs tho. I do not have the DVD and would like to purchase or rent them online like this with iTunes or Amazon to ease things.

I doubt Apple is discriminating the deaf on purpose. This is more of a really really bad overlook that should have never happened in the first place.

About ADA, that would not affect this, nor will FCC. I do not think we should be making a blanket regulation over captioning internet videos. That is a dangerous path to go down. Image, someone wants to post a home movie of his children's birthday, but can't until he adds captions. Instead, we should ask FCC to modify the existing closed caption regulations to say that if the internet video's sources had closed captions, then it should be required that captions are also transferred to online videos. This regulation would be directly targeted at broadcasters and movie industry, who would be the only one that meets that clause, without upsetting other internet users.

bob

ADA does not require Apple or any private commercial to provide media with closed caption. You may be confusing ADA with FCC regulations/laws. It is FCC who enforces the closed caption, plus the regulations applies only to broadcasters, i.e. television. Internet media are not included in the law, and in my opinion should not be broadly included neither. We need to be careful to specific only certain bodies such as broadcaster when creating new regulations for Internet videos. After all you don't want to be forced to caption your vacation videos do you ?

There is no need to start a legal case for this, about iTunes - Apple has not broken any laws. What we need to do is create public awareness of what Apple (and any other online providers such as Starz, Amazon Unbox, etc) are doing, that they are not including closed caption from the original sources that already has them. The companies like Apple also needs to be make aware of this issue too. If you know of anyone who works deep inside Apple, please use your contacts to shake up Apple!

About ADA, you may be thinking of government accessibility such as FCC meetings posted on their website as online video. Yes they do have to caption them, and they already do. However, I can think of few who do not tho, like some of NASA's videos or NASA TV but this is slowly changing for the better (not fast enough for me tho). NASA also has some podcasts on iTunes, and even those are not captioned. I read somewhere that some of NASA podcast were supposed to be captioned, but I could not find them. In this case, we need to complain with NASA not Apple.

For more information on caption details, please see resources at Captioning Advocacy

Oops, forgot to add disclaimer - I am not a lawyer, so contact a lawyer if you need to. 🙂

Bumpy Bump
Yep, Apple, what do you say ? Are we getting CC or subtitle for the iTunes Video or even a comment about it ?

Regard above message about it not being true CC. Well, yes it is not true 608 or 708 style CC, however it is indeed truly CC, i.e. "Closed" caption. The text track can be hidden or shown at will therefore it is close-able. That is what i meant by CC.

That is a good question, something that Apple would have to answer if we want to get the real answer.

What I think is that Apple is not providing enough technical information to those providers to do captioning nor not encouraging them to do so. Someone needs to get on the ball to jump start this, guess who is best one to do it ? Yes, Apple is in the best position to jump start the trend of captioning. Many of those providers like ABC/Disney's video already have closed caption data. Apple could provide tools for trans-coding them into whatever is needed by Quicktime for iTunes.

Another thing to consider is caption needs to be able to turned on or off. This requires a menu item within iTunes. For this, only Apple can do it. They need to enable it at user level. At low level within Quicktime, the nuts and screws are already there, Apple needs to put them together to make it more accessible to providers.

We could also place the responsibilities on the providers too, but Apple needs to make it more accessible for them to do so. It would be nice if the providers could put pressure on Apple to do so.

I am sure Apple people probably do not really those messages, but I'll give it a shot anyways. So, Apple, what do you say, let's start something nobody have yet and lead them ?

bob