One of the big names in genealogy education is Legacy Family Tree Webinars, and they have just made a big announcement saying that they’ve now implemented closed captioning to their webinars.
For those unfamiliar with the term “closed captioning” let me explain. I’m sure you’ve all been somewhere (the airport, a pub, a waiting room, or cafe), and the TV is on, but the sound is off, but you can read what is being said on the bottom of the screen – that is closed captioning. Wikipedia’s definition says “Closed captioning and subtitling are both processes of displaying text on a television, video screen, or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information.”
So what does this mean? It means that more people can now learn from the world’s best genealogy speakers as well.
Their announcement said the following:
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 1 May 2018. In addition, the most popular 50 webinars on the platform and all MyHeritage-specific webinars have been captioned, and Legacy Family Tree Webinars 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”.
To access closed captioning, firstly log-in with your annual or monthly webinar membership, then you can click on the blue CC icon in the lower right-hand side of the video interface.
A list of the 207 webinars already available with captioning is available here. Captioning is also available for free for select free webinars, such as all 24 lectures from MyHeritage’s recent LIVE 2018 conference which took place in Oslo, Norway.
You can read the full announcement of it here.
