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Alt Text & Universal Design
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- Discussion of Week 5: Basic Multimedia Accessibility Mon, 2011-03-07 23:04
- Discussion of Week 4: Basic Web Accessibility Wed, 2011-02-23 21:36
- Discussion of Week 2 Image Descriptions Wed, 2011-02-23 19:38
- Discussion of Week 3 Science and Complex images Wed, 2011-02-23 17:02
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Discussion of Week 5: Basic Multimedia Accessibility
Wow! I just watched the Google video about auto captions. They had me completely sold on it ... until I tried it. From the auto captions alone, there was no way to really understand what was going on. You would think they would at least have taught the technology to recognize the word "Google" (it wrote rubles instead).
But I completely agree that this is the right direction to go in. You might get large corporations, non-profits and government bodies to provide captions, but the vast majority of video/audio will not have them.
Same with descriptions. That would be much harder to automate though.
Here is a link to a video I captioned last year for work (aka Wisconsin Lottery): http://wilottery.com/video/sausages.swf
I used Flash and a linked XML file for the captions.
Once I found out how to do it, it was pretty easy to accomplish. But wading through all of the (mis)information on the internet was tedious and time-consuming.
Since then, I finally convinced the marketing folks to require captions on all the videos. Turns out they were doing it for TV anyway and it wasn't a great hardship to make those captions available on the web as well. We now have a YouTube channel, handled by others, so I'm out of the captioning business for now.
Wonderful!! It's very important for people to hear from real experience that captioning is not that difficult.
I used and recommend for beginners Caption Tube: http://captiontube.appspot.com/ and for those who are willing to help increase the number of subtitled videos out there I recommend Universal Subtitles: http://universalsubtitles.org/en/ . They are really cool because you can add subtitles to VIMEO which is a service that does not have, nor plan to have, captions support for their videos.