Accessibility is the primary motivator behind Universal Subtitles. Our goal is to see an exponential number of videos become more accessible: to those with hearing and visual disabilities; across language barriers; and even around literacy barriers (via dubbed audio).

Under the headline of “accessibility” is a vast and complex group of issues. We are pursuing accessibility for Universal Subtitles across multiple levels. The following is a partial list of the accessibility goals on our development roadmap:

• Making our website and subtitling widget localizable (i.e. translating the tools into different languages)
• Adding support for non-western characters and languages
• Support for both captions and subtitles*
• Support for alternate audio tracks (i.e. dubbing)
• Ability to read subtitle text to speech
• Accessibility audit for the toolset and website (eg. navigation, keyboard interaction, etc)
• Computer assisted translation

If you have additional areas of accessibility where you’d like to see us focus, please be in touch.

Finally, we want to recognize the many people have been working tirelessly on these issues for far longer than we have and have laid important groundwork that makes our project possible.

* In the United States, ‘Captions’ refers to subtitles that include both words being spoken and descriptions of non-verbal sounds (music, sound effects, etc). Captioning is especially important for people who are hard of hearing. In many countries the word ‘subtitles’ or ‘HoH (hard of hearing) subtitles’ is used to describe captions.