Okay this is a sound test for our Captioner and we are going to start in just about a minute. Please let me know if the sound volume is okay, and then Marsha I am going to have you go ahead and say something for the Captioner as well.
Welcome to captioning video for the internet. Thank you for captioning this session demonstrating how real time captioning works, especially with the Webinar series.
Okay with the sound check good and most of our participants who are registered have logged on, I think we are going to start. Welcome, this is a session sponsored by the Great Lakes ADA Center. We are one of ten national DBTACs, and this session is on Captioning Video for the Internet. Our speaker is Marsha Schwanke and she is a web developer with 8 years of experience designing, programming, testing, and managing content-rich database driven applications. And she is an expert in accessibility and usability based on best practices with the W3C web content guidelines, as well as Section 508. She currently is responsible for developing the content management for the DBTAC-Southeast ADA Center, and a project of the Burton Blatt Institute in Syracuse. She has a degree in therapeutic recreation from Ohio State, and a master''s degree in information technology from American Intercontinental University. We are excited to have her with us today, and we think that today is going to be a great session. Just a few logistical information. We will have an archive of this session recorded and available on our website, and I will send out an email to participants with that link. We do ask that you fill out an evaluation at the end of the session to give us any feedback on how you think it went, and other comments and suggestions are welcome, as well as you may type questions into the public chat area or raise your hand to ask questions during the session, or at the end of the session Marsha will leave time to answer questions. And with that, since she has a lot of content to get to today and we are excited to tackle this important topic, I am going to turn it over to Marsha. Thank you.
Thank you Janet for the introduction and I noticed had typed in that my volume was low compared to, are you hearing me better? Can everybody hear me okay? We made a couple adjustments, is this any better? Okay, we will go ahead and get started and please let me know if you have any further difficulty in hearing me. In this session what we are going to cover is a lot of information on captioning. We are going to cover the what and why of captions, do an overview of compliance, some guidelines for transcripts and captions, cover some captioning tool resources that are available, some steps and tips for captioning, and if time permits captioning other formats and resources. We will not be providing specific information on specific captioning tools, there are many tutorials available. After the session I will be providing a Word document with all the references, and the extensive list of the tutorials that are available. So let''s get started. What you are going to see now is, there is going to be a video from Google video called Now You Can Closed Caption Your Google Videos. We are only going to watch about the first 30 to 45 seconds of the video. The video is embedded into the page, so you should hopefully be able to experience it. The only thing is, there is no sound to the audio so you are really going to have to pay attention to what the message is about. Also while the video is running, you will not be able to hear me speak. I will bring you back into the session, like I said, about 30 to 45 seconds. Everybody should now be back on slide 4. Let''s get started. Does anybody want to comment on the experience of seeing that video? Underlying the importance of captioning? So let''s continue with our presentation. On slide 5, this is an excerpt from a recent article that was published in Abilities Magazine in winter 2008, 2009 by C. Silverman entitled At a Loss For Words. My 13-year-old son and I have one or two TV shows we eagerly anticipate and watch with the ritual energy of sports fanatics I care of. But this season, we kept missing the shows and go to the website. But a key part of this experience was missing for me. The video player didn''t offer a caption option. As a person with a severe to profound hearing loss, I rely on captioning to deliver what I can''t hear. For me, access to the show was reduced to holding on to small bits of dialogue and attempting to make sense of it all. Having any kind of quality discussion with my son while watching the show just wasn''t going to be a part of this experience. So what exactly are captions? They are text of the spoken word, and the content of the media that is equivalent, synchronized, and accessible. The key words being equivalent and synchronized. You must have these aspects in order to convey understanding and readability. The information that is conveyed in the captions is who is speaking, what is said, how it is said, and how it is expressed. And captions are different than subtitles, especially in the U. S. and Canada. We view in those areas; captions are viewed as a translation. It is assumed that you can hear, but you do not know the language. And subtitles also just use some dialogue and some onscreen text. The example would be for subtitles, would be foreign films. For captions we think of like newscasts. So what types of captions are there? There is open captioning or OC, which is always visible, which is burned in or envisioned media, and this is preferred by deaf and hard of hearing individuals, or individuals for whom English is a second language, ESL. However, open captioning is not preferred because it can be distracting. It doesn''t give the viewer flexibility to turn the captions on and off, as compared to closed captioning, which is CC. In order to be closed captioning, there needs to be some type of decoder. Another type of captioning is real time captioning, where live audio onto text, and there is a sync delivery. It is not an exactly sync delivery, because of course there is some time delay between what the captioner can type and then how it is viewed through the internet connection to the viewer on the other side. Typically real time captioning is run on a parallel application or web based client, like we are doing today with the real time captioning of this Webinar series. There is also limited technologies that actually support or integrate real time captioning; though that is increasing. Another thing to be aware of is that there is different styles of captioning. There is roll up or scroll up or scrolling captions, where the words appear left to right up to one word one line at a time. When that line is filled, the whole line scrolls up, a new line appears, and the previous talk line is erased. This is usually displayed at the bottom of the screen, but it can be placed anywhere. It is often used in live events where sequential word by word captioning is needed. There is also pop on or pop up or block captions, which are stationary blocks that appear anywhere on the screen, and in it contains the caption and followed by another caption. Sometimes the block disappears, sometimes the block remains present. This is usually what is used for most pre-taped or archival television, internet, and film programs. There is also a style called paint on. This is rarely used but what it is, is whether there is a single word or a line, it appears on the screen letter by letter from left to right, and then ends up as a stationary block like pop on captions. This is most often seen in very first captions when there is little time available to read the caption, or an overlay caption is adding to the existing caption. Another type of accessibility aspect to be aware of as far as captioning for the internet, is audio description. Audio description is a concise objective description of the visual comments, and it is kind of like commentary and narration. It is usually provided by a trained audio describer, and delivered via secondary audio program called a SAP, or a secondary line in the media. Live audio description is often delivered via headphones and small transmitter. This is often used in the performing arts, the visual arts, TV, and film. An example of closed captioning audio description, because audio description can be open or closed, would be like the option in DVD players where you can select to hear the director speak about the action and the reasoning, and why he chose things. Also just a further understanding of captioning, just to highlight some of the historical events related to captioning. Silent movies essentially had some type of captioning before sound arrives in 1927. And it wasn''t until the 1970s that caption TV came around. The first open caption program was the Mob Squad in 1972. Another interesting point of fact was the first captioned day time talk show was the Oprah Winfrey Show, and the first game show that was captioned was Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. Those were done in 1986 and 1987. And the first real time event was done in 1982, the Sugar Bowl. There are also some legal mandates that came around in the 1990s, such as the TV Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996. We will talk a little bit later about some of the legal mandates. And then of course, the internet came along. For the internet there was an explosion from text to VOD, video on demand. When the internet first came around, it was just plain text, when it was invented by Tim Berners-Lee; but of course everybody wanted more and technology advanced, so now that we have this video on demand where anyone or anywhere can caption and share video. And there is use of every combination of prefixes involving V, VID, video, and VOD; such as e-logs, podcasts, vid-logs, vid-casts, video blogs, VOD blogs, video podcasts, v-cast, and so much more. And video has just become such an intrical part of life and education. And also even when you think about captioning, like when was the last time you saw captioning? In a recent article published February 28, 2009 called Right Off You Tube, they cited a statistic how in November 2008, 146 million Americans watched online videos; for a streaming total of 12 point 6 billion clips. And this was double the 20 months prior. Also in many online courses are provided entirely using web multimedia. And of course the way that this video is viewed over the internet is through media players. The most common media players are Microsoft Windows Media Player, Apple Quicktime, Real Network Real Player, and Adobe Flash. There is also another flash player that I am going to talk about a little bit more, called the JW FLV player, which you may not have heard of but has a lot of great accessible features. And of course there are barriers that exist, survey says. So in an article that was done, The State of the eNation Reports by Ability Net in January 2008, it said how social networking sites were locking out disabled users. They took 5 websites - Facebook, Myspace, You Tube, Yahoo, and Bebo - and all of them failed miserably on real user testing for usability and accessibility. The majority couldn''t even register, participate in online communities that they wanted to join. In another survey of the preferences of screen reader users that was conducted by WebAIM, web accessibility in mind, and was released in February 2009. They found that Flash had significant access issues for screen reader users, 71.5 percent found it difficult compared to 14.2 percent have found it easy. And this difficulty varied little with their proficiency or time of using this screen reader and their disability. So in walks the solution, captioning. Why is captioning such a solution? It is because of its universal design, and maximizes use by the most number of people. While individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing really need this information, it also improves retention and comprehension of the information; it breaks through language barriers, and promotes flexibility to the environment whether it''s noisy, quiet, or shared. It also makes content searchable, provides compliance with state and federal laws, and it is just the right thing to do. It is good business. On the next couple of slides we will just kind of expand on why captioning is so important, and the impact of it. So who benefits from captioning? In a survey by Caption Colorado, Americans using captioning in the millions - deaf and hard of hearing 28 million, children and adults who are learning to read, 45 million, 15 million who are learning a second language, 50 million who are patrons of public places, 30 million who are users at exercise facilities. In all total estimated caption users, and giving some overlap in those different categories, about 118 million people benefit from using captioning. Further, education supports captioning. In a study that was done by MIT in 2005, they reported that video lectures were 76 percent more valuable than other content types. The transcripts of lectures were 54 percent equally or more valuable than video; that 59 percent preferred audio with synced lecture notes, that it was equally or more valuable compared to the video, and that 40 percent felt that English captioning added value. Additionally there has been research over the past 20 years by the National Captioning Institute, NCI, a lot of other researchers and organizations that have shown that captioning improves reading and literacy skills. One of the keys things is because it offers a multi sensory approach whereby you can see, hear, and experience the words. It also motivates those who are slow or reluctant readers, individuals who have learning disabilities and cognitive disabilities, or individuals for whom English is a second language. Furthermore it promotes literacy by improving reading skills, listening comprehension, vocabulary, speech patterns, and word recognition. One of the key huge features is how captioning makes video searchable. You can reach more people through the transcript, by the title of the content, to the metadata associated with the video, through the caption files which we will talk about later, which are just synchronization of the text with the audio and the video. And also what it promotes is by captioning you have a rapid access to certain points. That really saves time and research in accessing the desired material. Again citing the article from Right Off You Tube that was posted in February 28, 2009 it found how You Tube was actually becoming a search tool over Yahoo, that in November 2008 Americans performed 2.8 billion searches on You Tube, which is about 200 more million than Yahoo. And I encourage you to go check out Stanford University''s Entrepreneurship Corner. This is one of the best examples of how content can be made searchable through captioning. What they have on the screen is a screen shot of the Stanford University''s Entrepreneurship Corner. They provide the video and different other related videos and information. And then on the left hand side, and on the right hand side it actually provides a transcript and if you select any word in the transcript, it will take you exactly to that point in the video. Of course there is also compliance and the legalities. There is the ADA, which you must have effective communication, which is required for employment, private, public accommodations, government and telecommunications. There is the Section 508 where federal government agencies and contractors have to make electronic materials accessible. This is under video multimedia 1194. 24. There is also the Rehab Act of Section 503 and 504, where government funded organizations need to provide accessible programs and services regardless of disability. There is the TV Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 that said that TV sets with screens 13 inches or more must have built in decoders as of July 1993. And then there are some state laws, some which follow Section 508 or have their own legislation, California and Tennessee come to mind. So this captioning compliance, in particular Section 508 is based on the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or the WCAG. The WCAG 1.0 version was developed in May 1999, and 508 was followed in December 2000; mostly based on those aspects which must meet the minimum requirements in order to provide accessibility, and then added some additional requirements that are not in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. Just recently at the end of last year in December, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 were released. So what that comes to mind is, because they are still relatively new and because it will take a while for Section 508 to update to the new requirement, it is just something to be aware of, that probably about in a couple more years, in 2011, that 508 is going to be updated to reflect those new guidelines. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, how they are set up is that they are based on the level of importance. Single A is what you must absolutely do, anything under those guidelines under Single A you must do it to make it accessible. Things that are under double A are things that you may do to make it more accessible and things under triple A are things that will really be best practices for accessibility. One of the key differences between the WCAG 1.0 and the WCAG 2.0, is that WCAG 2.0 was based more so that it cannot technology dependent, it is built to be much more flexible to the times. Regardless, for captioning, it does require captions in order to meet the minimum and or for the new guidelines, audio description, and of course you must always have those full text alternatives. If you want to provide sign language, that would be the ultimate best practice. One other note on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in comparison to Section 508, there are various resources that do an analysis and compare them side by side. There is also an interesting article that I will have in the resources that analyzed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 by disability type as well. So specifically the captioning standards are for Section 508 relates to the WCAG 1.0, at guideline 1.1; that you must provide a text equivalent for every non texted element. In Section 508 Part B and the WCAG 1.0, 1.4 guideline, you need to provide equivalent alternatives for any multimedia presentation and they need to be synchronized with the presentation. For Section 508, section M, to the WCAG 1.0, it covers different sections like 6.3, 6.4, and 8.1. It is about an approximate equivalent, it is that you need to include a link in the applet or plug in that is required to access content on the same page as the content. Section 508 does have other specific requirements regarding the accessibility of the plug in or the applet. So let''s just break these down, and it is a lot of technical jargon and what not, but just so you have the actual reference. So in order to be compliant, basically what you need are equivalent alternatives whether they are captions, audio description, and transcript. You also need to have access to the plug in. You need to provide a link to download, and this needs to be near the content, and your plug in needs to be usable by keyboard, screen reader, magnification software. Another aspect that is more thoroughly defined in the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is color. Under the initial guidelines, and in Section 508, information cannot be conveyed by color alone; but they got a little more fancy in the WCAG 2.0. There is this formula that determines the brightness and the color difference, and there is a resource if you really want to look and understand that formula sometime and play around with it, but you don''t have to know the formula because there is various tools that are available. The standard for providing contrast between the background and the text content is the brightness difference, which should be greater than or equal to 125, and the color difference which should be greater than or equal to 500. And the tools that can help you determine if the colors that you are using are, have sufficient contrast, are the online color evaluation tool, the color contrast analyzer Firefox extension, the contrast analyzer version 2.2. And another note about how they determine the color contrast; it has to do with color is made up of these values called RGB values which stand for red, green, blue, and so what the formula does is takes those values and multiplies it and divides it and figures out those differences. But as I said, you don''t have to know the exact formula and each one of these tools helps you evaluate that in a different way. For some of them you do need to know that red green value. For some you can enter in just a 6 digit text and decimal code for what you are using for that color. So how do you evaluate if you are being standards compliant? Things that you are going to ask yourself - if I can''t see or hear the media, understand this content. Sometimes it actually helps to turn off your speakers as well when you are reviewing it. Turning off your screen to see if the transcripts and the audio makes sense. You can also check if there is captions and there are audio descriptions that are synced with the action by reviewing the video. You can do a search on your site for any video files, audio files, and see if the transcript link or the file is near it; and also is there a link to download the plug in near the audio video file? Make sure that see if you can navigate to all controls via the keyboard, unplug your mouse. Also check can a screen reader access the controls? Check it with a magnifier as well. And hopefully when you follow the captions, you will come up with a, we are going to take a look at this example that I have. It is again on a Google video, and it is just a 30 second public service announcement actually from the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, the FDIC, and so it is actually very timely so I am not promoting the message or anything, but it is actually done by Suze Orman so on the next couple of slides we will learn and check in how this was all accomplished. So we should all now be back at Slide 24, captioning compliancing, there is an evaluation. Before we get into how this was all accomplished through captioning, asked us if CC button keyboard accessible and it should be. I did not specifically test it. [silence in audio] On to slide 25, and I will answer your question a little bit later on so we can get through some more information, especially talking about captioning and how it is done. Your question may be answered a little bit further in the presentation. One of the key points is planning for captioning. What you need of course is a video or an audio file, a transcript of the audio portion of the video, a captioning tool or service, but what is wrong with this picture is that the second part is often developing the plan for creating the captions. And this should usually come before what you need, not after. You really need to think about the delivery of the media, outline the work flow keeping in mind the time, the money, the resources that are needed; and being aware and researching the issues, standards, tools, and the services that are available. When you put the time into developing a plan for creating captions, then captioning becomes a much simpler process that is going to allow for greater function of your web content, and ensuring that your projects are in compliance with established guidelines. And captioning just doesn''t have to mean a transcript of the audio. Just keep in mind how important any additional information that can be conveyed. Planning for your caption, the delivery of media. When you plan your video, you really need to keep in mind the audience, the internet connectivity method, and the format because some of the issues related to the delivery of the media are the download time, the storage capacity either on your server and or the viewer''s server, and also that media players use different formats; and we will talk further about this. The types of media though that as far as delivery of media are usually streaming media, which is also known as video on demand, where you have a live or archived content delivered almost in real time and the viewer gets to experience it as it''s download. Generally streaming media is not stored on the viewer''s system. This is preferable for large files and also because it allows the ability for the viewer to jump forth or back into the content that is desired. The other type of delivery is progressive downloads, where the files are actually downloaded to the viewer''s computer. Sometimes you have to have a complete download before viewing begins, other times you don''t. It depends on how the video is set up, but the final result is that a copy of this video does usually exist on the viewer''s computer. This is also not desirable, especially with copyright issues, larger videos, and even some smaller bandwidth versions as well. And so in planning for captioning, really you have to think about the work flow and the time and the impact of issues. You need to think about the staff support, how the work flows with collaboration of content producers and distributors, how the ease of production and it''s flexibility to changing formats, to changing technology; also to the popularity and availability of video sources as well as staffing changes. You really need to think about the time that is involved when you plan for captioning. Captioning is really detailed work. It needs to be reviewed at several points for accuracy and grammar. There is a need to understand non spoken information, and how captions are conveyed. This transcript is the most time consuming, and one of the most important pieces for captioning. Understand that the total time to caption a video is usually 5 to 10 times the length of the video, so just to give you some examples, if it is a 5 minute video it is probably going to take 25 minutes to 1 hour for captioning. 15 minutes may take 1 and a quarter to 2 and a half hours. And you know, multiply the complexity of that if you have 50 videos that are each 10 minutes, it is going to take like 40 to 80 hours. Towards the end of the session we will be providing some different resources, both for do it yourself, third party, some web software tools that are available. And there are some tools that are available, especially if you want to do captioning on a large scale system. As part of being aware of the issues for captioning, I just wanted to, it doesn''t necessarily specifically relate to captioning except if you are trying to distribute or view captioning, caption material through an HD TV, such as in a classroom. And of course it can be it is kind of like a telephone, how the information can start at one session, it gets passed from source to source to source. And what they are finding with HD TV is that the cable itself cannot transmit the closed captioning signals. Before, this wasn''t an issue because line 21 in TV was set aside and the broadcaster sent the closed captioning to the TV, which then had the decoder to view it. But there is no equivalent in HD TV for the connect between the display and the source. There is also a lack of the standards to transmit the closed captioning between components, or in high definition as a separate display. Part of the key issue is only the device that decodes the data, the source, like the DVD player has access to the closed captioning. And the source needs to overlay this closed captioning on a picture prior to transmitting it over this interconnect. Many sources are just unable to do this, or if it is available it is an extremely complicated process to set up and it is kind of hidden within options. And there is really not a mandate for overlaying to add closed captioning information to a picture. There is a really good resource, Banjo''s World, which is actually a caption vlog. Banjo actually is an individual who is deaf or hard of hearing, and in September 2008 he did an entry on HDMI does not work for closed captioning, that explains it in a very nice clear manner. You can also refer to Wikipedia on the closed captioning HD TV interoperability issues. And a great example for captioning, I am again referring to the Stanford Captioning Project. What they did is they identified the problems and you go can right on their website, www.captioning.Stanford.edu/service.php, and what they did is they identified the problems, solutions, and the time line for accomplishing captioning. The 3 issues that they identified are common place for most captioning programs or services, or plans. The issue being converting various media to a web ready format that works for accessible web based players, and also providing a text transcript from audio of media, and then syncing that text transcript with media. One of the ways that they did this is they are actually using a system called Docsoft, which is an AV captioning solution that provides tools to leverage the software to blend server and desktop applications to quickly and easily produce captioning. And this of course is on a much larger scale basis. So specifically with a plan in mind, what are the steps for captioning? And these steps are kind of in general regardless if you are using a captioning service or not, you may not be doing some of the steps yourself, but these are the steps that need to take place for video to be captioned. The first step, you need the video or audio file, you need the transcript, you need for the second step the transcript, the third step is the caption display where you segment the captions and you insert the time codes. The fourth step is creating the actual caption files. The fifth step would be combining those caption files with the video, and the sixth step would be to publish and distribute the captioned media. So in the first step, what this slide is talking about is the various video audio files and the media players that play them. One of the key things is that only certain media players play certain files, which is why when you are planning for your video and for the captioning service or program, that you really need to keep in mind what format the video is and or what format the audio file is in. Again taking the most common media players, there is Microsoft Windows Media Player which uses a video file, a .wmv or .avi, and an audio file for Windows Media Player is a . wma. For Apple''s Quicktime and iTunes, the video file is a .mov file or a .qt file. The audio file may be a .m or p file. For Real Network, Real Player, the video file is .rn. For audio file, there is a .ra, a .ram. For the Adobe Flash Player the video file is a .fwf or a .flb. An audio file is .mp3. Most all the players can play .mp3 files. And then the other video media player that I mentioned that you may not be familiar with is the Video Lan, VLC medial player. One of the aspects of this is it is a cross platform media player and it is the only player that can display both closed captions and closed audio descriptions. It has keyboard accessible controls and it is accessible for a screen reader because the buttons are labeled, and the other neat feature it has for a screen reader is it actually hides above the video so that the screen reader can access them, but they are not visible to all viewers as they have hidden player controls that perceive the video as well. A really neat resource to check out is called the file extension resources, and I will display that link on next slide. So some resources for understanding video or audio files and the players that are supported by them, and different technologies that are available, is the file extensions resources which is www.fileinfo.net. And there is also the Tech Terms computer dictionary, which is www.techterms.com. And a good source, another good resource to review, especially before you produce video, is the Basic Script and Production Tips for Accessibility: Producing Programs and Videos for Viewers with Vision Impairment, which is from the National Center for Accessible Media, NCAM media access group which is a MAG - M-A-G. So step two, one of those key points as far as captioning video. It is really the key starting point. It is going to need to be in a plain text file, which is really needed to upload to any captioning tools or services, or the event that you are using, or providing. As you will see later, many of the even services, you need to have that transcript. While they may provide transcript services, by you having it already provided will greatly decrease the turn around time, especially if you are using a service. For the transcript you need to make a link to access it before and after the media, and you need to make it available either as a text file and or a web page, and or alternate formats. The sources for the transcript, there is a couple of different ways that you can get this transcript. You can actually caption it from the production, such as through real time captioning, you are able to capture a transcript. You could have a script beforehand. It could be typed by hand or you could be using voice recognition speech detect software to get your transcript. However a couple of points on if you are using speech recognition for the transcript; it really requires extensive training of the software, it is not viable for multiple speakers, the success of it really depends on the speaker and even the topic. There is built in patterns of recognition into the speech software besides the training, but only about 90 percent of the people fit into that. There is those 10 percent who just don''t fit into the normal patterns of speech. Those people are ironically called goats in the speech recognition arena, or they are called sheep if you do fall into the 90 percent. The other thing about this speech recognition is that even with training, you can train it and train it and train it, but then what happens in reality is totally different. There could be different background noise, of course you have daily fluctuations in your voice, the technology could have just changed; even like in testing our mic today, we have done several tests before and we still again had to test it and it was different and may need adjustment. The long and short of it is that to use speech recognition, there is more time and money compared to if you transcribe it by hand, or you have that transcript that is captured on captioning or from a video capture. And, part of the reason is the extensive time that is involved in training with that as previously mentioned, that if you are going to edit it, it does more start stop time compared with if it was just outright transcribed. Transcription, depending on the amount of dialogue and the typing speed, you can estimate it for about a 2 to 3 minute program is generally about 1 hour to transcribe it. And also with the speech recognition use, the error rate, even with training it is on the average accuracy is only about 85 percent and think about that with the 10 percent error rate you are losing text, 20 percent error rate you are losing meaning. So on average you have a 15 percent loss through speech recognition. So in the transcript, what is the content that needs to be conveyed in the transcript? It needs to transcribe the spoken words and describe other aspects, other features that is both on screen and off screen; things like the narration, the dialogue, the sound effects, the pick up cues. You want to be able to, when you are transcribing the content; you want to type contractions as they are spoken. Such as, you will type I''ll instead of I will. When you are transcribing you want to follow standard capitalization and punctuation. You don''t want to spell out numbers. At the end of the transcript is where you are going to put any captioning credits, and make sure that you identify at the very end of transcript. Other considerations for the content of the transcript are the sentence size. The sentence size really depends on the space that has been allotted for the caption, and the font size that is being used. In general rule of thumb is you want to keep it in proportion and display 1 to 2 sentences. You want to accurately represent each speaker''s words, their quality of conversation, their speech pattern, and you want to change as little as possible - keeping that original language. It is best to do word for word except fillers like ''um'', ''huh''. You want to use the correct, not the phonetic spelling. You don''t want to be changing the sentence structure and grammar even when things are mispronounced, and you don''t want to water down or rewrite except where this is required for the presentation rate. You want to make sure that your transcript, that it is easy to read, that you are consistently using the same styles, and of course that you spell check it. Some conventions that are usually used in transcripts is the speaker. It is usually the name followed by a colon, or there may be 2 greater than signs in front of it with then the speaker''s name. You want for titles and things that are read aloud, you want to use italics. If something is audible like a breath, you may want to display it as Hhh, like for Hhh... When there is unclear audio, it is best to put it as such, especially if you know you have gone over and over and you just can''t understand what they are saying at a particular moment. Use a less than sign and then write the word inaudible, or silent, and then use the greater than sign. Singing is usually denoted by a musical note, if you can use that musical note icon that is typically used in TV; though there is some support and some new captioning tools. And also for line 21 scroll up captioning any speaker might be identified, or if 1 person is talking, by 2 greater than signs back to back or there may be 3 greater than signs for like a new story that is in the news or when 2 or more people are talking. An interesting note is that all capitals, all capitals are frequently used in line 21, because it is usually happening in real time so that is a real time saver not having to do capitalization, and then also originally many decoders have fonts that didn''t have any descenders. Those are the letters that extend for the lower case letters like G, J, P, Q, and Y. There was a survey that was conducted by Gallaudet University on caption features, and what people preferred was that actually more often than not, or more than is currently done, more than is currently practiced, is they want more description or more identification of elements including background music, speaker identification, sound effects, and other elements of the soundtrack. What they didn''t prefer was color to identify changes or information, any type of flashing which would also break standards for accessibility. They didn''t like those paint on captions where its letter by letter is displayed. They didn''t like extensive use of italics except for like the titles or the narration, and they did not prefer underlining. So here is an example of a transcript. What it shows is in brackets, bang! Sound of the door slamming. Describer, colon. A woman runs hurriedly out of the house and toward her husband who is mowing the lawn. Lisa colon, do you know where Scruffy is, question mark, exclamation mark. Describer colon, man stops mowing and looks puzzled at his wife. Dan colon, I haven''t seem him for 20 minutes. In brackets, sound of digging. Dan colon, oh no, exclamation mark. Scruffy is in the flowering beds. Let me select just a couple other examples that show you in real time, so we are going to go out to a web site here, the University of Wisconsin Madison, the transcript of video that they did for introduction of the screen readers. This is HTML based. And so what you should be seeing is the accessibility introduction to screen readers, transcriptions clearly identified, and then they also set off in the beginning to let people know that typed in italics was centered on the screen reader. The other example, I just wanted to show you was actually from the audio conference in Webinar series, how they actually displayed their transcripts. Again, in HTML, they format so that each speaker is identified in a separate box. Just a minute while it is loading. I apologize for the delay in that, but I will go ahead and move on to the next slide. So going into the next step for caption display; the preparation that you want to use for this, you want to make sure you ensure the media is edited and final. Captioning is not something you have to do and redo again and also that that transcript has been spell checked. Before you actually import the transcript, you may need to reformat a little bit for the tool itself. So you are actually going to kind of have 2 files. You are going to have your actual transcript file, and then you are going to have the transcript file that you actually upload to the captioning tool or service. It really needs to be a text file for this, and it should be, there should be a single space between each sentence. A double space, when you are creating a new caption or to clear a caption for a long pause, or after the last line to avoid the last caption being dropped. In preparing the caption you also want to make sure that the time code in the tool that you are using is set to full zeros at the beginning or hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds; and that your final time code is empty caption at the end. And this slide is to just show you a screen shot. All captioning tools have a different version of this but they all provide some sort of way to actually enter video information like the title, the copyright, other comments. And this is a screen shot showing again, the interface of a tool, again most tools have a similar interface where there is a point where you can actually see the video and play it, and then you have the time codes next to it; the start and stop, maybe if there''s any classes or styles associated with it, and then you have the actual caption itself. Usually in most tools, you are going to want to leave the speaker blank and I will talk further about that. Part of the reason is many tools when they go to create the caption file, if you have put in that speaker they will put the speaker on 1 line and then the caption on a second line, so it wastes a lot of space. So generally you are going to want to leave this speaker area blank, and instead put this speaker''s name in the caption itself so that the information is inline. One other key thing to notice about line breaks; line breaks really work differently on Macs and PCs. In a Mac when you hit enter to start a new line with any caption it will work fine, but in a PC you insert that hard return and a line will be skipped before the next line of caption begins. One of the ways to fix this is making sure that you are using a full text editor like Text Pad or Note Pad, and you can copy and paste a special character for a line break. It looks like a little square. And this won''t have any adverse effect in the Quicktime file either, but you really don''t want to insert a hard return before or after time codes, unless of course you want that empty line. Some common styles for caption display are the contrast in the background and the font color. You want to have like a black, white, or transparent background with black, yellow, or blue letters. The case, it can be all caps or mixed is acceptable, but generally all caps is best use for the real time captioning. It is better for readability to do the mixed case. For the font type you want to use a Sans Serif font such as REL, Helvetica, or Verdana. There has been numerous studies that showed Sans Serif is the type of font style that is best viewed online. Font size is about 12, sometimes the 16 points. Generally preferred position for captions is at the bottom. The alignment can be either left aligned or centered. It is kind of a personal preference. So this is an example of a caption display where I was talking about the speakers. You want to go with the inline option where, in this example it is like Homer, are you saying you are never going to eat any animal again? And Homer colon, and it goes right into are you. Whereas if you did the next line option you would have Homer on 1 line, and then the next line starts, are you saying you are never going to eat any animal again? For the display size of the caption area, the caption width is usually the same as the video. The height is usually about 80 pixels for the area, and just keep in mind that the amount of words that can be displayed depends on the size that is defined for this area, rather with the font size. The next couple of slides just kind of demonstrate that if you are actually captioning do it yourself by hand, things that you may want to that are best practices to try to do - such as keeping, words together that modify or prepositional phrases, or if you have any connectors like and or, you don''t want the and on 1 line and then start the information that follows the and on the next line. Or even if there is a verb and whatever it modifies like, eating a cookie, that is best on 1 line. For line placement, especially with like 2 lines that are different, they are both going to start at the same point if they are left aligned. However if the dialogue does repeat like where are you, where are you, so that it doesn''t come across as a hiccup or a mistype you want to indent that second line about 2 spaces. For captions when you are displaying a type of language, you want to use actual foreign words or a description such as in parentheses man speaking French. You want to keep the flavor of the speaker''s language in dialects to making sure that you are portraying the personality. This includes any profanity and slang. No slang in the examples and no profanity in the examples, but there is slang such I ain''t gonna, ain''t going nowhere, I''m gonna get cha, let''s call ''em, she''s waitin'', and there''s no g on the end. I just sort of held my knees in water and pulled ''em. It is also a good idea in captions to identify and regional accent at the beginning of the first caption such as southern accent, if y''all want me to. And some very good resources on caption display are the Captioning Key Guidelines and Preferred Styles, which is a 33 page book issued by the caption media, The National Association of Deaf along with the Office of Special Education Programs, OSEP. This is available online or it can be downloaded as a PDF file. There is also the National Center for Accessible Digital Media Design Guidelines that offer a step by step solutions for making electronic media accessible. This is free online or through a CD by emailing access@wgbh.org. So there is caption file formats and players. This is really important again because only certain files can view certain players. With the Microsoft Windows Media Player, it is caption file is a SAMI, S-A-M-I, which is Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange. For Apple Quicktime there is the Quicktime text track, and a SMIL file, S-M-I-L, which stands for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language. For the Real Network Real Player there is real text and it also uses the SMIL. For Adobe Flash you can define the caption. The caption file can actually be in the time line or as an XML file. An XML file stands for extensible mark of language. Hold on just one moment. So this is just some information about the SMIL file, and how a SMIL file is an HTML like language a form of extensible mark up language. You can write using a text setter or through a captioning tool, and a SMIL file does provide support for multiple languages for audio and text. It is used by Quicktime and Real Player, and it controls were or how the media content is displayed, and a key part of it is it points to an external file with captions and how when the captions are displayed. The file that it will point to is a .rt file for Real Player, and a .mov or .txt file for Quicktime. Some notes about SMIL with Quicktime, if it is not supported before Quicktime 4 point 1, and that the SMIL file is easier to implement if you are streaming a Quicktime video from a Quicktime server. And Real Player does use the SMIL file for media control and it is implemented just a little bit differently. The SAMI file is also HTML like, it is best to use a captioning tool in order to create a SAMI file. You could use a text editor but it is a much more complex file. It is not case sensitive, its supports CSS which is cascading style sheet, which are styles that define the look and feel of information. A SAMI file is used by Windows Media Player. Again it contains the captions and defines how or when the captions display, and it may use a .axl file or in a webpage to combine the SAMI with the media. And I know it is getting a little bit technical, so if you just bear with me just trying to give you some tips and some background about these files. The one other file that you may hear about is what is called a DFXP file, and this is from the World Wide Web Consortium. What it is, is it is meant to be a standard methodology for creating and delivering captions, especially the timing information so that you are not dealing with all these different players and all the different ways the information is portrayed. There is a small javascript application that is available from Stanford University whereby you can actually convert a subtitle file to a DFXP file. So now to some just key points is that what is really important is the naming of the caption file. You want to make sure you are using any consistent naming so that you can readily identify which caption files go to which video. It is best to use separate folders. And the key thing to really pay attention to is that SAMI and SMIL files both use the same file extensions, .SMI or .SMIL. So a good rule of thumb is to always save SMIL files with the .SMIL extension, and always save SAMI files with the .SMI extension. Some other key concepts about the caption file is the multiple languages. The file size can really impact the performance of the caption display, and because you have to load the whole file, you need to use a single captioning file for each language and you really don''t want to use online translation tools to convert to another language because they are rarely 100 percent accurate. So in captioning for Quicktime, here are just some points to keep in mind. The 2 methods for captioning is that Quicktime can either be in a text track as part of a movie, which creates 1 file with the audio video in captions, but it does require Quicktime Pro. Or you can create a separate text file with the caption information, and then you have to use a SMIL file to put the Quicktime movie and text file together; and so you actually have 3 files involved in that. Some other tips about captioning for the Quicktime player is audio description, you can toggle on or off using either a Mac or a PC, but you do have to upgrade to the Quicktime Pro version to be able to accomplish this. And to enable captions to work in Quicktime, the caption files need to be saved as a SML and the Quicktime text files need to be in separate folders. For Real Player, the method for captioning is that real text file and then you use the SMIL file to combine the media with the real text file. And you want some other tips for Real Player is making sure you are using relative values for point sizes to make captions accessible. To enable captions to work in Real Player, you need to save this SMIL and the real text file in the same folder with the video file, and make a new folder with the Real Player caption files with a video copy. These things as far as saving and storage of the files are important whether you are captioning them yourselves or getting them from a service. And Real Player caption files should really be opened with Real Player. You don''t want to embed them because of access issues, so the other aspect is there may be a file called a RAM file, .RAM, which holds the address to the media files or the SMIL. A RAM file is only openable by Real Media, so this will ensure that the Real Player is open for this file. Some tips for captioning for Windows Media; you need that SAMI file and then you are going to combine the SAMI file and Media file to what is called a .ASX file, and you want to avoid embedding in the webpage. You really want to be careful though with these SAMI files, that if you open them with the web offering tool or word processor, it could reformat the code and any minor changes that are made in that SAMI file could render it unusable. You want to use what is called EM for font sizes, to make the captions more accessible. And to enable captions to work in Windows Media Player 10 or newer, the important points are to storage, to save that SAMI file in the same directory as your video file and give the SAMI file the same name as your video file. For captions to display, the other tricky part about Windows Media is they usually have to be turned on manually, but how and where depends on which version of Media Player is being used. Windows likes to move where the turn on and off captions is. Another point about Windows Media Player is that it can only, only 1 caption language can be displayed at a time. And just a little bit more on that .ASX file, it is really important and there is a lot of misinformation about the .ASX file out there. For accessibility you really don''t want to embed the Windows Media content into the webpages, because for a couple of reasons; part of it is because that tag that you would embed into the page is not part of the standards for accessible compliance. It also lacks the accessibility, blocks so that you cannot use keyboard access, and there is also because there is incompatibilities in different Windows Media Player versions. For example, Windows Media Player for Mac doesn''t support captioning. A really good tutorial on creating ASX files is Techniques for Creating Accessible, Closed Captioned Web-Based Video by David Klein and K. Fritz Thompson; and that is available through the disability law at University of Iowa website. So just spend about 5 minutes here, just highlighting some resources. I won''t go through all the features of each tool, but just so that we can highlight and have time for questions at the end. For captioning tools and services there is different types; the DIY, do it yourself, the web software, and the third party. If you are going to do it yourself, again you really want to think about the time involved. It is about 5 to 10 hours of work per video hour. Think about the training, the learning curve, the support for it, how much video you are going to be doing, and how that is going to impact any future growth for more captioning. If you are going to use staff or students, and again the training involved with that and support. The costs as far as space, equipment, training, hiring, tech support, management. So again, I am just going to go through these and not actually cover different information on these tools. But a captioning tool that is available from the National Center for Accessible Media and it is a free tool. It is called MAGpie. The key thing about that is that version 1 only allows Windows Media compatible files, whereas version 2 of MAGpie you can do any media. Another captioning do it yourself tool is high caption where you can add media, add captions to media that has been created with Flash. And also with this captioning, high caption, it is developed by high software and it does integrate with their access testing and monitoring products. Another do it yourself product is called Softel Swift. This is usually a professional captioning workstation that is used by many major caption service providers. A really neat tool and another free tool that was developed by the University of Wisconsin Madison, is a do it yourself tool. It is called World Captioning and this allows you to add captions to Quicktime compatible video using a transcript. The only thing is it only requires Mac OS X 10.4 or more, but the features are really neat because you can, once you have the program downloaded, and again it is free, you just drag the movie file onto the interface, or you drag the transcript into the program and then it guesses where the captions are. The process is a little bit different in this because you actually have to, instead of starting sequentially with captioning, you have to start like at the first one and then go to the last one and then go to the middle to set those points, and then adjust it in between those halfway points, to quarter points, and so on and so on until you get the timing all synchronized. But just the fact that you can drag and drop it right into it and then it creates those captioning timings is a very timely feature, and it is free. Another do it yourself tool is the Subtitle Horse, which is a free online application to add captions to Flash videos. And Subtitle Horse can be integrated into some content management systems. Another do it yourself tool that is free as a Flash component from the National Center for Accessible Media, is a CC for Flash. The next 2 slides were just some information about captioning and Flash, how they are stored and how Flash supports audio description or can detect assistive technologies. A really key component of captions in Flash is there is Flash playback captioning component, where, excuse me, whereby just by adding that component for captions so it doesn''t require a line of coding, and also by default now in CS4 it actually makes the controls accessible too, and there is different skins; a skin being what you see for the interface around the video. Those are also, you don''t need to configure them. They just support keyboard and screen reader access now. And again you can just drag and drop them when you are creating Flash. Just some tips for optimizing Flash. Another do it yourself tool is Adobe Captivate where you can, it is a Windows application and you can caption that directly into Flash video files. Another tool primarily for broadcast, but its software called Caption Keeper that converts line 21, closed captioning data, into web streaming format. This is really valuable for any broad back technology, especially with the exponential growth of video and TV programs now being offered online. And that is offered by the National Center for Accessible Media, but you have to contact them for any type of demonstration and pricing. Audio description tools; there are some available. They are do it yourself, and what they do is they include audio descriptions through a SMIL file. Some of those are MAGpie 2, Quicktime Pro, Adobe Premier Edition, and Apple iMovie GarageBand. Just some repeats of considerations for web software and third party. One of the key things is thinking about the support, and if they need the media, and if there is some of them actually have any type of integrated systems for video capture, captioning, or transcript like Adobe Acrobat Connect, which is a web conferencing tool. Also offers captioning support as of August 2008. There is 2 points. Either you need to have your own video file if you want to use the support that is actually in You Tube and actually use their tool. If it is not your video then you have to use Overstream. Overstream is an online captioning tool. It doesn''t copy the video, but it actually superimposes it. It is really easy to use. I have created videos for Overstream within a half hour and they have the captioning right on them. You only need to have an Overstream account and then the link to the video. The con is that if the video moves, you are captioning breaks of course, and that it can only be viewed on the Overstream site; and you cannot adjust any type of the captioning styles. There is also Google video, but the key thing to note about Google Video is that soon they are going to discontinue support for uploading of any new videos because they are going to focus on a video search engine. And Google Video, Google does own You Tube as well. So they are going to focus much more on search. If you go to Google Video and you do an advanced search, you can actually choose to display only closed captioning videos. There is a check box. And there is numerous resources available for third party. You can look up service providers by location or service through a website called Closed Captioning. Two, a couple of third party resources to be available are Automatic Sync Technologies, which is a web based, where you just upload your video, it doesn''t require any software. They can do transcription, but it is a very fast turn around. If you upload a file that is even like an hour long, you can actually have it be captioned, caption file that you need, everything back within 10 minutes. And these last couple of slides were just about some other formats like Adobe Acrobat Connect, which does allow for real time captioning. If you want to do any type of Apple device, some podcast examples and other formats like MoPics, descriptive video service, anything captioned radio which is coming around. So in conclusion, just to advance captioning you want to model policies and standards, develop an accessibility statement, advocate for more caption programs, promote awareness of accessibility, show your appreciation to caption media, and participate and support training and captioning, and compilage of captioning resources. I thank you all for your time today, know it covered a lot of information and at times some of it was a little more technical but I hope you were able to garner some viable resources and information from the presentation. Open the floor for questions.
I see that there is a question in the public chat, and I just want to repeat it for the captioner Marsha, and it says if you are embedding a video from You Tube, does that mean it would be good practice to link the Flash player?
Okay, if embedding a video from You Tube, as the moderator just said. If you are embedding it could be good practice to actually link that Flash player. You are correct. Just in case they do not have it. And asks if the PowerPoint is going to be available, and yes the PowerPoint will be available as well as additional resources for all the resources and references that were mentioned in the presentation today. Another caller asks, that has used MAGpie, that the quality of the video after adding the captioning is not good. What other free software would you recommend? Excuse me. Sorry about that. The addition of... the addition of CC in a web video also adding it to the searchable metadata, yes, when you have that closed captioning because it creates that caption file, that caption file has the text in it and that is part of what makes it all searchable is because it actually has that captioning information in it. Does that answer your question better?
Could you repeat the answer to that question?
In answer to your question, what I would, what I would try, MAGpie is one of the most commonly accessed. It is not necessarily the best. Some other captioning tools that are also free that I would try would be Subtitle Workshop, which is for Windows only. There is also CapScribe, which is a free open source application as well. And you can also try for Flash, CC for Flash. But one of the key things, I know you were looking for free, but also might try the service especially like the AST, the Automatic Technologies as well because it is a very low minimal charge with a quick turn around, especially if you have that transcript file.
Are there any we will give Marsha a second for any more questions, any final questions. I would also ask that you complete the evaluation of our session. The link is on the slide that Marsha just pushed forward, as well as in the chat area. It has been a great session and I thank you all for your good questions and attention. Just the PowerPoint and resources will be emailed out with the resources for when the archive is available for people who registered and participated today. And thanks, thanks Marsha. You did a great job.
I also put in the URL an insert to callers question about the other free tools, I put in CapScribe.