+ AOL now testing closed captions for streaming news content from CNN that will enhance the online media experience for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Captioned CNN video content will be available throughout the AOL network, including the AOL service, the free AOL.com Web portal ) and the AOL Video portal. AOL, which is the first consumer Internet service to provide captioned online videos, has offered closed captioning since 2003 for select content on its KOL service for kids aged 6 to 12. AOL also offered synchronized text transcripts for CNN news updates that were limited to the text of a news anchor’s script. Now, content from CNN, including videos for the day’s headlines, current events, new stories, entertainment, and more will be manually captioned to ensure all of the audio in a video stream is completely accessible. AOL plans to provide closed captioning for additional video content over the coming months. Learn more here/demos.

+ “Early-stage Experiment” from Google Labs: Google site to aid the blind
See Also: Speakwire has been around for a couple of years and allows users to enter in any RSS feed and have it read to them using synthesized speech. Also, Speegle (from the Speakwire team) has been around for a couple of years and also allows Google results to be spoken. In fact, you can set Speegle to determine how much is spoken (Title only; URL and Description; URL, Title, Description). Finally, Speeglebot is experimental tech (like the others) where you can have a conversation with the database.

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