Welcome to the official blog of the TV review team for WordPress.tv
We approve and publish all videos on WordPress.tv as well as help WordCamps with video post-production and captioning and subtitling of published videos.
We use this P2P2“P2” is the name of the theme the blogs of make.wordpress.org use. When asked to post or view something “on the p2” by a member of the WPTV team, that usually means you’re asked to check https://make.wordpress.org/tv. to post our progress, status reports, and occasional geeky video debates. Use the “Subscribe to Blog via Email” widgetWidgetA WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. to follow along!
Want to help us?
Video Editing — You can see what videos we have that need editing in this spreadsheet. No special credentials are needed, just download the raw video file, and use your favorite app to edit.
Subtitles/captions — You can help us extend the reach of of WordPress.tv by adding captions or subtitles to any published video. Just find your favorite video, and follow the steps here to create a caption/translation file and submit for review.
Weekly meetings
We use Slack for real-time communication. As contributors live all over the world, there are discussions happening at all hours of the day. We have weekly team meetings every Thursday at 17:00 UTC, and they are open to the public!
Earlier this year I made my first contribution to WordPress and joined the subtitling team for Contributor DayContributor DayContributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.. It was a great way to get involved and I enjoyed working friendly and focussed team, aiming to submit our captions for review by the end of the day.
As someone with fairly good typing skills, I thought it would be easy to subtitle a 12 minute video, thinking that I could do maybe two or three videos in the day. I was surprised that it took the entire day to do this. Other people had problems too:
Friends in the WordPress, Media, and #Deaf communities. Know a great resource for quickly providing subtitles for videos?https://t.co/HQAunc8L0k is brilliant and free to use, but it took me nearly 6 hours to caption a 40 minute talk at the @wordcampbristol contributor day
Now while Amara is a fantastic free resource, the following considerations need to be met:
The reading rate shouldn’t exceed 21 characters
You need to lengthen duration, reduce text or split the subtitle.
The “beginner” mode in plays 4 seconds, then pauses.
You have to do this while being aware of subtitle limits
After editing you have to line up the subtitle with the video in the timeline editor.
This process is generally straightforward but sometimes you need to go back and split the subtitle so it reads more naturally.
You have to be aware of typos and adding off camera indications such as laughter or a second person talking.
One of the good things about Amara is that it easily allows alternative language subtitles to be done too, multiple people to be working on subtitles of the same video, and the possibility to pick up an existing transcription if a contributor gets stuck.
Investigation into AI tools.
Subtitling is important for accessibilityAccessibilityAccessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), but also for search, user experience, and learning. WordPress TV have a campaign running on subtitling- some subtitling work can be done by automation, but this still needs human involvement.
Videos hosted on YouTube already have access to an excellent auto-captioning library available in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. While YouTube are constantly improving their speech recognition technology, automatic captions might misrepresent the spoken content due to mispronunciations, accents, dialects, or background noise.
Therefore, allowing YouTube to automate 80-90% of the captioning process could form a good starting point for the transcription as time stamps would have been created allowing the final ~10% to be reviewed and properly transcribed. The downside is that the automated versions would likely not be as intended creating all sorts of implications, and publishing responsibilities.
WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. videos on YouTube are being uploaded from January 2018 and up.
Doing a quick search on GitHubGitHubGitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ also reveals hundreds of open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. libraries for “Speech-to-text” implementations. Mozilla is actively developing a speech to text implementation called DeepSpeech
DeepSpeech is an open source Speech-To-Text engine, using a model trained by machine learning techniques based on Baidu’s Deep Speech research paper. Project DeepSpeech uses Google’s TensorFlow to make the implementation easier.
https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech
I managed to install DeepSpeech locally with Docker and to my excitement was able to output some text via the terminal from a small English/American audio clip. The process is quite prone to error as you need to have all the required libraries installed but I will be investigating this further.
Ideally, DeepSpeech would be installed on some globally available server with an interface to upload audio files and download text. However, the bottleneck would still come from create and reviewing the ttml file.
While the video file can be downloaded from WordPress TV, isolating the audio file needs to be done manually.
Existing resources
The transcripts from WordCamps, speakers providing their notes, some of the text versions produced by STTR and tools also contribute to making subtitling easier. In addition, subtitles broaden the usage of videos and make them easier to translate / be used by people who can not access the recorded language.
Dublin did a lot of testing on this to produce materials which could help the community and this is being put together. The more that people subtitle and correct automated transcripts, the better the tools will become at learning different accents, words and dialects.
