Last week, actress Marlee Matlin visited the Googleplex to preview her new YouTube reality show, "My Deaf Family," and to talk about some of the challenges facing people who are deaf or hard of hearing. In addition to being an author and Academy Award winning actress, Marlee Matlin also serves as a national spokeswoman for closed captioning access on behalf of the National Association for the Deaf and other organizations.
Captioning is an issue that's very important to us, and we're committed to finding ways to make the 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each minute more accessible to those who face hearing and language barriers. Last November, we held an event at Google DC with advocates from the accessibility community to announce new features that make it easy to create captions from transcripts on YouTube videos, and we previewed a new feature that uses speech-to-text technology to generate captions automatically. This March, we expanded automatic captioning for all users, and these can even be automatically translated.
Software engineer Ken Harrenstien shares the full story of Matlin's visit on our YouTube blog, and you can see video from the talk below. And don't miss Matlin's new reality show on YouTube.