Closed captioning for webinars
For more than six years now, The Legal Genealogist has been very proud to be a presenter for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
From my very first webinar for Legacy in 2012 — Building a Family from Circumstantial Evidence — to the most recent one as part of the Joy Reisinger Series of the Board for Certification of Genealogists in October — The Discriminating Genealogist: Telling Good Evidence from Bad — I’ve been proud of the work I’ve done, and my lasting relationship with Legacy.1
And at no time have I been prouder than I am now.
Because, now, those webinars are available to a whole group of people who couldn’t have made full use of them before.
And that’s because — as announced yesterday — Legacy Family Tree Webinars is now adding closed captioning to its webinars for the benefit of all those who may have difficulty hearing the spoken word or with understanding spoken English.
The announcement, on Legacy’s blog, explained that:
Implemented as a full human-curated transcription via synced subtitles, closed captioning is now available as an option for all live and members-only webinar recordings released since May 1, 2018. In addition, the most popular 50 webinars on the platform and all MyHeritage-specific webinars have been captioned. Legacy will add captioning to all new webinars going forward.
“We are committed to providing the best genealogy and DNA education for all, including people who are hard of hearing,” said Geoff Rasmussen, founder and host of Legacy Family Tree Webinars. “Captioning is an excellent way to make online education more accessible, and is also a benefit to non-native English speakers who struggle with spoken English but have an easier time with written English”.
Legacy has exciting plans for 2019, which include the hosting of webinars in non-English languages as well as the translation of English captions to select foreign languages.
“When we acquired Legacy last year, we promised to invest resources to improve the webinar platform and increase its reach, while maintaining its high quality and unique character”, said Gilad Japhet, founder and CEO of MyHeritage. “The addition of closed captioning makes good on this promise and, with translated captioning coming up soon, will help make the webinars accessible to millions of people in Europe and other countries, true to MyHeritage’s goal of making genealogy and DNA testing available to huge consumer audiences worldwide”.2
This subscriber benefit is now available for 207 webinars on topics ranging from DNA to methodology, and on select free webinars including all 24 lectures from MyHeritage’s recent LIVE 2018 conference in Oslo, Norway.
Kudos to Legacy Family Tree for expanding the reach of genealogical education!
SOURCES
- Truth in blogging disclosure: I am paid by Legacy Family Tree Webinars when I present, and I get paid a royalty when people tune in to one of my webinars at any time. However, other than simply being a presenter, I get no benefit if you click on any link to Legacy Family Tree Webinars in this blog–these aren’t what’s called affiliate links; I only get a personal benefit if you actually watch or buy one of my presentations. ↩
- “FamilyTreeWebinars.com Adds Captioning to Hundreds of Genealogy and DNA Education Classes,” Legacy Family Tree News blog, posted 6 Dec 2018 (https://news.legacyfamilytree.com/ : accessed 6 Dec 2018). ↩
This is wonderful news. Speech to text has improved over the years, but there are still glitches, especially with technical terms — for instance, centiMorgan comes out as a woman’s name Sandy Morgan. I can figure out some of them but not all. Human curation is a big investment, and I for one am deeply appreciative.
I’m sure there will still be issues — humans make mistakes too — but it is a huge step forward.