Collaborative translation

Some people see the legal obligation to follow Web content accessibility guidelines – whether of the W3C or, in the US, of section 508 - as leading to boring text-only pages. Actually, these guidelines do not exclude the use of multimedia on the web, they say that multimedia should be made accessible by "Providing equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content" and in particular: "For any time-based multimedia presentation (e.g., a movie or animation), synchronize equivalent alternatives (e.g., captions or auditory descriptions of the visual track) with the presentation. [Priority 1]"[1] This is not as bad a chore as it seems, and it can be shared between several people, even if they are not particularly tech-savvy or endowed with sophisticated tools. Captioning with DotSUB.com Example: Phishing Scams in Plain English by Lee LeFever at http://dotsub.com/view/41ffcc22-6609-4780-bf9d-5bcf88d3197d [2] Here the video was uploaded to DotSub.com, and several volunteers did the captions in the different languages. The result can be embedded in a blog, a wiki or a web page. The captions also appear as copiable text under "Video Transcription", which is handy if people discussing the video want to quote from it. Besides, a text transcription of a video also tends to raise its ranking in search engines, which still mainly scan text. The only problem is that the subtitles cover a substantial part of the video.