Week 5: Basic Multimedia Accessibility

What makes multimedia accessible?

1. Captions: synchronized equivalents for audio
2. Descriptions: synchronized equivalents for video

Part I. What are captions?

• A visual representation of spoken narration or dialogue
• Indicate important non-speech information:
  • sound effects, music, laughter, speaker identification, etc.
• Synchronized to appear simultaneously with audio
• Displayed in either pop-on or roll-up styles
• In some countries, captions are called subtitles
• Captions and foreign-language subtitles are not the same thing
  • captions contain information in addition to narration and dialog; subtitles do not
  • captions are frequently positioned on the screen to indicate who is speaking; subtitles are not
• Captions can be closed or open:
  • closed captions can be turned on and off by the user
  • open captions are visible to everyone and cannot be turned off
• QuickTime Player, iTunes, various mobile Apple devices, RealPlayer, Flash and Windows Media Player all provide controls for turning captions on and off
• Depending on the format, authors can also provide custom controls for toggling captions

What about transcripts?

• A transcript provides a text version of the audio track
  • a transcript is useful for creating captions
  • a transcript is a by-product of the captioning process
• Transcripts should be considered a supplement to, not a replacement for, synchronized captions
• Captions can be displayed by all major multimedia players
  • QuickTime, iTunes, RealPlayer. Windows Media Player, Flash, BlackBerry smartphones
  • Note: Captions in HTML5’s <video> element are a work in progress.

Good to know: Closed captions are now available on some on-line programming: ABC.com, Hulu.com, Hulu desktop, MTV, NBC.com, Netflix Instant Play, YouTube (auto-caption, with mixed results)
 

Part II: What are Descriptions?

• Known as audio descriptions or video descriptions
• Make visual media accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired
• Provide descriptive narration of key visual elements
  • actions, costumes, gestures, scene changes, etc.
• Usually timed and recorded to fit into natural pauses in the program-audio track
• Like captions, descriptions can be closed or open.

What are extended descriptions?

• used when a longer description is necessary but there is not a sufficient pause in the program audio to accommodate it. Typically used in educational videos.
• program dialog and video appear to automatically pause while a long audio description plays
• when the description has finished playing, the video and dialog resume playback

Part III. Creating your own on-line captions and descriptions

Tools

• Do it yourself with NCAM’s free application, MAGpie (Windows only)
• Experienced Flash programmers can use NCAM’s free CCforFlash (AS2 and AS3) component to synchronize the closed captions
• Non-experts can use NCAM’s free ccPlayer (AS3 and AS2) to synchronize external captions with Flash video embedded in a Web page
• Other free or cheap captioning applications
  • Note: the ones that export [TTML] (which can be used for flash captioning) are labeled, the rest export other formats but not [TTML].
  • Note: this is not a comprehensive list, there are others.
  • Subtitle Workshop
  • JW Player (not authoring software, but playback software for captioned AND/OR described Flash)
  • Universal Subtitles at PCF (an experiment in crowd-sourced captions/subtitles; use it to add captions/subtitles to someone else’s video)
  • MOVCaptioner (TTML; 14-day trial is free)
  • CapScribe (TTML; also can be used to record and synchronize descriptions)
• Audacity is a free sound editor that can be used for recording and editing description tracks.

Read:

1. Descriptions and Captions in iTunes U
   • These guidelines are iTunes U specific and so deal only with technologies that are supported within iTunes U.  However, they’re worth reading for general knowledge (especially the PDF info.)
     • chapters 1-4 deal with adding captions and descriptions to apple media
     • chapter 5 deals with creating accessible PDFs
2. Described and Captioned Media Program's Description Key and background information.

Do:

1. Go to YouTube and learn about Google’s Automatic Captions:
   • Hover over the CC button, click on Transcribe Audio, then click OK. This will override the existing (human created) captions with Google's auto-captions.  Enjoy and discuss issues of accuracy!
2. Add captions and/or descriptions to a video of your own and send a link!