Department of Energy and Climate Change

We were all very excited the day we heard we were going to be working with the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). The DECC web team use video a lot for news items, video diaries and so on. It's an increasingly sensible way to run a site - if, say, Ed Miliband or Joan Ruddock need to make a point or announce an initiative, not only is it quicker to for them to do a one-minute piece to camera than to write a blog post, it also makes for a much more involving and interesting news item.

Anyway, DECC were keen to make their videos accessible and of course we were keen to help. We've ended up captioning quite a lot of the DECC video catalogue, including all the DECC videos from the Copenhagen climate change summit in December 2009. (The captions are accessed via the button in the bottom-right corner of the player, in case you can't see them.)

For this project we also supplied plain-text transcripts of the videos. Transcripts don't provide true accessibility, so they're not by any means a substitute for captions. However they can be helpful for organisations whose content management systems or web policies demand a transcript, plus of course they can be invaluable as a search optimisation tool. We can supply transcripts for any captioned video at no extra cost.