SEO Meets Accessibility For The Deaf

TechCrunch announced yesterday that it has enabled video commenting, so that instead of writing a comment, you can just look into your webcam and say what's on your mind. It makes sense that people would like this, cause writing can be pain sometimes (no typos on webcams! but make sure you don't have spinach in your teeth). Still, this post on ReadWriteWeb, explaining all of the reasons that it might not work.

Personally, I hate the use of online video when text would suffice. Unless it's an interview with someone whose personality is just dazzling, please let me read the transcript instead. Otherwise, a video should have music or graphics or something other than just words, to justify itself. Blog comments aren't likely to qualify, so just a warning: anyone that wants me to read their comments anywhere, better effin' write them, cause I ain't sitting through your video. And as RWW points out: there's no way to link with video.

Another big problem... search engines can't scan them (at least for now, and probably for a long time to come), so all that content just goes into a black hole of un-findability.

But I did hear something interesting today while listening to the CNET conference call. CEO Neil Ashe, in talking up a new web video venture, noted that it would be close captioned for the hearing impaired. That's cool, and that also means search engines can crawl the video! Sounds like a clever marriage of accessibility with SEO. That doesn't necessarily make a business case for CC-ing every video that a company puts out, but it's a little bonus.

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