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On the computer screen, young David sways drunkenly, his one remaining front tooth poking his bottom lip as he talks. "I feel funny," he moans. "Is this real life?"

The YouTube video of a disoriented child feeling the drugs from his dental surgery got a lot of attention earlier this year, but plenty of people didn't get the joke - captions for David's existential ramblings were not available to deaf and hearing-impaired users.

That's about to change, and it's a development that goes beyond access to videos of drugged children, Kanye West behaving badly, or pirated episodes of Top Model. Google announced yesterday that it will incorporate automatic, machine-generated captions into all English-language YouTube videos. Although captions have been available on the site since 2006, they had to be provided by the video's owner. Now voice recognition technology can insert captions.

"Every minute, 20 more hours of video are uploaded. More and more is coming in and ... only a tiny percentage of that is captioned," Google software engineer Ken Harrenstien, who is deaf, said in a telephone interview through an interpreter. "We're trying to address this very difficult problem of scale."

Google knows the voice recognition technology is glitchy and prone to typos. It announced another technology that should help. Normally, a transcript must be typed up and with times recorded for when each bit of text is spoken. Google software can now do this automatically: In a plain text document, the algorithm can put captions in.

This feature is exciting because it has potential beyond YouTube, said Judy Brewer, director of the Web Accessibility Initiative at the World Wide Web Consortium, an organization working to make the Internet more accessible to people with disabilities. For example, businesses are encouraged to caption audio and video content on their websites, but there is resistance.

"There's a perception that it's difficult to produce captions and therefore they think it shouldn't be a requirement," Ms. Brewer said. "As the tools for producing captions continue to move forward, perhaps this will make some organizations look differently at the feasibility question."

“ My hope is people who watch videos will reach out to people who post them and say, 'Can you caption this,' and that the community on YouTube will embrace this.”— Naomi Bilodeau, technical program manager at Google

In Canada, it will soon be vital for Ontario businesses. Under new legislation taking effect early next year, businesses with 20 employees or more, in the private and public sectors, will need to make their websites easier to access.

"One of the biggest concerns was the captioning," said Jutta Treviranus, the director of the Inclusive Design Institute, a research group that partners with nine academic institutions in Ontario. Companies expressed worries they would not have enough captioners to meet the new requirements. Now, organizations could use YouTube as a tool to speed up the process, Ms. Treviranus said. "Having tools like this is really exciting ... that's going to make it very possible."

But the rules need to go further, pushing accessibility at the level of federal law, said Gary Malkowski of the Canadian Hearing Society. "There are a lack of laws or regulations in Canada that require better accessibility," he said.

Ms. Treviranus believes exposure from the Google technology could help. "It will definitely move the field along and make this technology more usable and sophisticated."

Captions are also useful for people who speak English as a second language to help them understand videos. The voice recognition service works only on English videos, but that could expand in the future.

For now, YouTube hopes more people will be pushing the "CC" button on its videos.

"My hope is people who watch videos will reach out to people who post them and say, 'Can you caption this,' " said Naomi Bilodeau, a technical program manager at Google, "and that the community on YouTube will embrace this."