Universal Subtitles (a Drumbeat project) aims to be “Wikipedia for Subtitles” – they want to see every single piece of online video both subtitled (for the hard of hearing) and translated into multiple languages. To give you some idea of the size of this task, at the moment, 24 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube alone every minute.

They have a web client for subtitling, which I have just tried out, and I must report that it’s an absolute joy to use. You might imagine that subtitling a video properly would take hours and be really fiddly – but they make it a three-pass process (input, align and check) and the UI is really smooth. Each step is preceded by an instruction video, there are keyboard commands and intuitive drag controls. And it’s all built using web standards.

Sign up for an account and try it out :-)