KEEPING UP WITH BROADBAND-CAPTIONS MOVE ONTO THE WEB
125
Day Phone: 617-300-3722
Email: larry_goldberg@wgbh.org
Presenter #2
125 Western Avenue
Boston MA 02134
Day Phone: 617-300-2454
Email: jennifer_sagalyn@wgbh.org
Broadband technologies are increasing the availability of video, audio and
animation on the Web. This presentation will demonstrate new solutions for
creating and transforming analog caption files into usable formats for the web.
Growth of broadband
Broadband technologies (high-speed, always-on Internet service) allow Web
sites to make more pervasive use of rich media — video, audio, graphics and
animation. Many media companies' Web sites are designed with the assumption
that broadband access will soon become commonplace, both at work and at home. A
survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in May 2005
found that an estimated 66 million adult Americans already have high-speed
connections at home. Nielsen/NetRatings notes that broadband penetration in the
Television, home video and DVDs are the traditional forms of media that now
provide closed captions for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences. Captions for
these forms of media are created by encoding data into the vertical blanking
interval of the television signal. Even DVD authoring programs are currently
making use of standard caption formats. One of the greatest challenges facing
the industry is the need for authoring tools and utilities that can create or
display caption data for the growing number of technologies on the Web that
include audio. Web conferencing software, traditional television programming
digitized for the Web, and audio-enabled Flash animations are three examples of
technologies that require captions in order to be accessible to deaf and
hard-of-hearing audiences.
This paper will discuss in detail the solutions that are helping move
captions onto the Web to provide access to audio content.
CaptionKeeper and Caption Component for Macromedia Breeze (Web
Conferencing)
In 2005, NCAM created a caption extension for Macromedia's Breeze software.
The extension allows for the real-time captioning of a live meeting. A
stenocaptioner connects to a caption server (NCAM's Caption Keeper software
installed on the stenographer's PC), which operates as a caption source for the
captioning extension. This presentation will include a live demonstration of a
Breeze meeting with real-time captions.
Web conferencing is an excellent example of a web-based technology that
cannot take advantage of existing captioning methods, but instead need to
invest in the development of an application-specific solution. Breeze is a
Flash-based application, therefore a Flash extension was developed to transmit
captions to all Breeze meeting participants.
Television content moving onto the Web
NCAM is working with two of the nation’s most popular broadband sites — AOL
and Yahoo! — to deploy and document the use of caption authoring tools and
caption conversion utilities within their sites. We are also providing AOL and
Yahoo! with private grant-funded caption services, matched by their own
financial contributions, to "prime the pump” of captioned material on
their sites.
CaptionKeeper, MAGpie, and Caption Flash are all being utilized to develop
new methods of captioning that fit "IPTV" production and distribution
models.
NCAM is documenting the process and our partners' experiences, and will
create a White Paper in the spring of 2005 that details challenges faced by
broadband providers in offering captioned content. This White Paper will help
frame a national discussion on how best to foster the development and maintenance
of accessible content on media-rich Internet sites. Funding for this initiative
provided by the NEC Foundation.
Caption Flash
NCAM has developed a new captioning tool, Caption Flash, which will
automatically convert captions to display within Macromedia’s popular Flash
format. Currently, the captioning solution for Flash presentations requires an
awkward and time-consuming manual entry process. Consequently, there is very
little accessible Flash content on the Web. This is a serious and growing
problem because Flash software is a favorite of designers and developers
worldwide. These designers use Flash to integrate video, text, audio, and
graphics into rich visual experiences on Web sites serving every imaginable
market. Flash presentations are so pervasive that the Flash Player is installed
on more than 97% of all Internet-enabled computers as well as on a wide range
of handheld devices. The Caption Flash tool, which works in Flash MX 2004,
imports data from timed-text files, such as MAGpie project files, and
automatically imports the caption and timing data onto the Flash timeline. so
that captioning is included as part of the Flash file. This method of
integrating the data with the Flash file will allow for perfect
synchronization, control and display of the captions.
Video Search: Timing your transcript for indexing and to increase your
audience
With NCAM's free tool MAGpie, video content authors can easily create
caption data from existing transcripts. MAGpie 2.01 is a tool for creating closed
captions and audio (video) descriptions. Authors can add captions and audio
descriptions to QuickTime, Real, or Windows Media Player. MAGpie is the ideal
authoring environment for multimedia specialists, publishing companies or
service providers who want to add captions, subtitles and audio descriptions to
their work. According to Google's Video website, "Google Video will search
the closed captioning and text descriptions of all the videos in our archive
for relevant results."
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