Sign Tube

Okay, so virtually everyone has been to You Tube at one point or another. If not, then they've watched one of their videos embeded in a news story or blog (such as this one). Though You Tube recently added captioning, its not widely used by video producers. One limitation of the You Tube method is that only the person who uploaded the video can add captions to it.

There's now a video site out there for those who are Deaf, Sign-Tube. Funded by the UK based Deaf Enterprise Partnership, it is for "deaf people or those who wishes or involved in Sign Language or in the deaf community to share the news, information, events and even fun with people across the world."

It looks like the site is fairly underused, as there are only 500 videos listed currently (as opposed to YouTube which has 10 hrs of video uploaded to the site every minute and has hundreds of millions of views per day). A quick search on You Tube for Sign Language gets 42,000 videos.

Sign Tube is an interesting idea, especially as it intends to develop community as part of it. I'm not sure if there's a need for it, as YouTube seems to be hosting a significant amount of sign language videos, but that's what is nice about the internet, you can always put something out there and see what sticks.

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