By Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues
Disclaimer | Digesting grass | Digesting videos | Video and text | Read-Write culture and tools | Universal Subtitles | Copyright hits the fan | Lessig’s plea | Other obstacles |Solution?
Disclaimer
Non scientists should refrain from using scientific concepts as metaphors. I am fully aware of this, and actually, when a sociologist or other humanistic scholar thus hijacks terms or phrases like “black hole,” “big bang,” “DNA,” etc., I skip his/her text if possible.
Nevertheless, what little I understand of how the cellulase enzyme works for ruminants has been very instrumental in my first perception of how captioning videos helps all users digest their content, and underlies what I have written here so far about captioning. Hence the decision to come out explicitly with this subjective and uninformed perception of it.
Digesting grass
Cows can digest and assimilate the grass cellulose because they ruminate it, but not only: humans could chew and re-chew grass for hours and hours, yet they would still excrete its cellulose whole without assimilating any because we lack something cows have: the cellulase enzyme that chops up the molecules of cellulose into sugar types so that they can be assimilated Continue reading
Filed under: Accessibility, Multimedia | Tagged: Accessibility, Captioning, cellulase, cellulose, copyright, ice, Lawrence Lessig, Lessig, text, Video, WIPO | 1 Comment »