The nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation has just launched an amazing new tool: Universal Subtitles. As the name implies, Universal Subtitles makes it ridiculously easy to add subtitles to practically any video on the web, including any HTML5 video, FLV, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip, Dailymotion (you can add subtitles to a video without having to host it yourself, and the same subtitle file can be associated with multiple copies of the video all over the net).

Why Universal Subtitles? Well, of course they’re useful for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, but they’re also a gateway to multilingual consumption of video (as a mostly monolingual anglo, I’m extremely keen to get a chance to follow along with all the fascinating videos made all over the world). Because Universal Subtitles hosts the subtitles separate from the video, it’s easy to collaborate with others to produce translations, comic remixes (this is the world’s easiest Downfall remix generator!) and closed captions.

Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing