Print
(http://www.insidehighered.com)

Vimeo - Still Not A Viable Web Video Solution For Higher Education

Submitted by Eric Stoller on February 6, 2011 - 8:00pm
Blog: 
Student Affairs and Technology [1]

I remember when I first watched a video on Vimeo [2]. The video player was aesthetically pleasing and there were all sorts of wonderful videos to watch. I even purchased a Vimeo Plus account (enhanced features for a minimal fee) and started uploading my own videos to the site. I was, and still am, a fan of Vimeo as a great place to find fascinating web videos.

However, there is a major flaw with Vimeo and it has to do with accessibility. Vimeo does not offer any type of closed caption solution for uploaded videos. According to a 3-month-old post on the Vimeo forums, captioning is on the way [3], but a deadline has not been released. I'm skeptical. Vimeo has been without a caption/subtitle solution for a very long time. In fact, when I wrote about their lack of closed captions in 2009 [4], their response was less than stellar.

How is this relevant to higher education? Well, for starters, accessible videos are an ethical mandate [5] for all who create video content. We owe it to our various constituencies to create content that all can access. This means embedding videos that have captions.

When Brown University [6] launched their new homepage design in September 2010, they used Vimeo for their featured videos. In December, I noticed that Brown University had switched from using non-captioned Vimeo videos to a more homegrown / captionable solution using the popular JW Player [7]. Brown did the right thing [8] by switching from Vimeo to an accessible solution.

Similar to Brown, Portland State University [9] has started using Vimeo for video features on their homepage. It is my hope that PSU will follow Brown's lead and switch their videos to a web video solution that allows for closed captions / subtitles. To be fair, I didn't notice that they were using Vimeo [10] until January. Perhaps PSU is looking into alternatives to Vimeo.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to using Vimeo. The JW Player that Brown uses is a great solution. YouTube offers terrific captioning functionality.

I truly hope that Vimeo will deliver captioning / subtitle functionality to their users this year. We've been waiting for a very long time.

Do you tweet? Let's connect. Follow me on Twitter. [11]

Source URL: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/student_affairs_and_technology/vimeo_still_not_a_viable_web_video_solution_for_higher_education

Links:
[1] http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/student-affairs-and-technology
[2] http://vimeo.com/
[3] http://vimeo.com/forums/topic:4072#comment_3963440
[4] http://ericstoller.com/blog/2009/10/12/vimeo-and-closed-captioning/
[5] http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/student_affairs_and_technology/do_you_youtube_don_t_forget_to_add_captions
[6] http://brown.edu/
[7] http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player
[8] https://twitter.com/#!/EricStoller/status/10849522259329024
[9] http://www.pdx.edu/
[10] http://twitter.com/#!/EricStoller/status/30362181916696576
[11] http://twitter.com/ericstoller