As someone with a hearing impairment, I have stated in the past my frustration at the total lack of captions in the online world. Although network channels and television stations are required to provide closed captioning as per FCC regulations, online video is completely free of this requirement… which leads to many interesting videos with no captions. 
I’ve blogged about this in the past, and at that time closed captioning for online content was in a sad, sad state. NBC, for example, had poor captioning only for selected content and no captions for some of my favorite shows like The Office. Luckily, this has changed! Heroes, which once displayed their captions to the side and in a poor sync with video, now displays captions just like on T.V. Further, I have yet to come across a show on nbc.com that I watch that doesn’t provide captions! 
But it doesn’t stop there. One of my favorite online shows, Dr.Horrible, provided captions… and many are following the trend. Hulu, Veoh, and Youtube have closed captioning available if the content provided desires to provide it. Score one for the hearing impaired crowd!
Unfortunately, a lot of the video online that I really enjoy has yet to provide captions. TED currently does not provide captions for their talks, yet if this job posting is any indication they will have closed captioning in the very near future. YouTube may provide the ability for closed captioning, but many of my favorite technically themed videos (specifically, Google Tech Talks) still do not provide captions.
Overall, today things are quite a bit better than they were last year, and it seems that it will continue to improve. I’ll be really happy when TED talks provide captions, and even happier if Google Tech Talks begin to provide captions as well. The pushback is that it can be difficult to get a full time captioner to caption user generated content… it can be quite costly for businesses or providers that don’t have the resources to devote to captioning their videos.
What I’d like to see in the future? Perhaps an optional “Community Provided Captions” for online content… if the content provider is unable to provide captions, a youtube or hulu user can opt for captions provided by the community at large (while knowing these may be a little inaccurate). While not ideal, and frankly it’d be better to just display delayed transcripts for the captions, it’d still help open up content for the hearing impaired.
I’m very enthusiastic about closed captioning for online content in 2009… last year, I was very pessimistic. 
Hi James,
Have you heard of elearning provided by Industrial Logic?
Majority of the videos have captions. You can take a look.
Regards,
Alex
I am posting this everywhere I can think of:
My wife has a hearing problem, like many of our senior population and the thousands of hearing impared people of all ages.. We use closed captioning on almost all programs so that we can enjoy television. Lately we notice that on many programs the closed captioning is not available for the first ten minutes or so. For example, we watched ‘Without a Trace” which was broadcast Sunday at 9 PM. We timed the delay at ten minutes after the show began for the closed captions to appear. During this time, plugs for future shows, credit lines for writers, producers, actors, etc. preempted the space at the lower edge of the screen where we would expect to see the closed captioning text appear. This is only one example– we have seen this happen on shows on all networks and on some local shows.
Obviously, it is very difficult to understand the plot of a story if you can’t understand the dialog for the first ten minutes.
I am at a loss to understand why this is allowed– the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 mandates that all sets manufactured thereafter contain circuitly to allow closed captioning, but since it applies to manufacturers, it allows broadcasters to do whatever they can to defeat the intent of the law. This sounds self-defeating to me since many viewers won’t spend time watching what they cannot understand. I doubt that problem orginates with the local TV stations or the cable companies, but, since these are network programs, it must originate with them or the producers of the shows.
Just for the record, we get most of our tv from a cable company, but we also get digital HDTV from our outdoor antenna. This problem exists on both.
I note that the FCC has issued proposed rules (not yet effective) concerning closed captioning, but I can’t wade through the legalize to see if this problem is addressed.
@Alex is this availble in the other albums? I only currently have access to the Welcome album (I used to have full access to all of them, but I guess our license expired) and haven’t seen any captions. Definitely a feature that would be great to see!!
@BillTraxler Maybe it’s the television set? From time to time I too have seen poor quality when it comes to captions. For 2 weeks in a row during 24, Season 5 I had to wait for transcripts to become availble for the episodes because the captions were timed wrong.
My major annoyance right now is that the latest episode of Heroes on NBC.com, “The Eclipse Part II”, has the last episode’s captions.