Jen says:
Back in the day when many of those now involved in Show in a Box were
inventing everything about the culture of video on the internet, there
was a grand experiment with captioning video. And it turned out to be
a lot of work -- mostly to create the captions as lower thirds and to
put them on the image.
Fast forward four years -- and as video on the internet (and the
internet in general / internet donation collection) has radically
altered the presidential race... closed captioning is becoming an
issue. Specifically people are talking about how great it is Obama
captions his internet videos, while Clinton does not, and the GOP has
basically said we don't care.
This website keeps coming up:
http://www.projectreadon.com/
So how can Show in a Box support closed captioning? How would any of
us do cc now? Using vPIP? Sending things down a separate feed?
We should think about this again. If the technology lets us provide a
transcript and be done -- saving us from the hours of lower third
titling, then cc becomes more feasible. Or even if most tiny-budget
shows can't cc videos, at least the tools in SIAB can provide that
option. Yes?
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Cheryl says:
It's funny you should bring this up. Chuck Olsen was just tweeting last night about how one person consistently criticizes him & his online video work for not being accessible for the hearing impaired. The most recent thing he said was something like he would start taking Chuck & The Uptake seriously when they started providing captioned versions of their videos.
I don't think we can get there without *somebody* taking the time to do the timing: this caption should be up from here to here... more than just dropping a transcript into some software and having it do it.
I agree we need to do something for captioning, absolutely. Somehow. And to be picky, we wouldn't be doing "closed captioning" it's just captioning - there's an important difference but I'm too sleepy to articulate it correctly.
I'm mistrustful of that projectreadon site. It feels salesy. Their contact us link launches email. And their about page doesn't give any real info on how it works. I want the open source version, where the documentation may be cryptic, but at least its there someplace.
Holy wow. I just went to del.icio.us and did a search for bookmarks tagged video+caption and I got heaps of results. Here are some of the interesting ones:
overstream.net - lets you put a stream of subtitles over a video hosted elsewhere (but only specific services) - this could be cool because if there are volunteer translators, we could get video captioned in multiple languages. I guess you get a link to the captioned video and that sends the viewer to overstream.net, the video loads off the hosting service and plays with their stored captions. They say "At the moment, YouTube, Google Video, MySpace Video, Dailymotion, Veoh and Megavideo are supported. This list will continue to grow. If you are a video provider who would like to appear in this list and give your users the possibility of overstreaming your videos, please write to integration@overstream.net and get integrated in no time. " - let's get Blip.tv to get listed!!
Here's a good review of overstream: http://blog.proud-geek.com/2007/05/18/captioning-your-videos-4-overstream/
then there's dotsub.com, similar to overstream.com but you upload your video there I think. Interesting to note their sidebar says Rocketboom is a partner site. the same person reviewed dotsub here:
http://blog.proud-geek.com/2007/06/19/captioning-your-videos-6-dotsubcom/
Another one. Opencaptions.com - they let you caption any quicktime video already on the web. And you can do so collaboratively with others - share the load. But it's not quite even in Beta yet so is still buggy. Same person reviewed it: http://blog.proud-geek.com/2007/07/02/captioning-your-videos-7-opencaptionscom/
then there's http://www.veotag.com - you can work with video on the web or on your own computer, but it looks like this will be a for-pay service once it's out of beta
youtube's even got a "remixer" that lets you add subtitles to youtube videos, but reviewers say it totally sucks: http://www.youtube.com/ytremixer_about
um. how to caption windows media player files: http://streaming.wisconsin.edu/accessibility/magpie_tutorial/windowsmedia.html
http://www.captions.org/ has articles about captioning on the web - news and developments - it doesn't seem updated often, but that likely reflects how little attention this issue gets
the National Center for Accessible Media & WGBH (Ry!) are working w/BigMedia
"to establish and manage the Internet Captioning Forum (ICF). The ICF will initially address the technical challenges presented by online video repurposed from broadcast or other previously captioned sources, as well as video created specifically for the Web."
- basically they want to come up with a web-wide solution or at least document best practices: http://ncam.wgbh.org/news/icf.html
Google Video has been thinking about this:
http://googlevideo.blogspot.com/2006/09/finally-caption-playback.html
http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=26577
thorough & interesting: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/07/23/video-howto
webaim.org has an article on 2 methods for captioning quicktime plus an accessible web is their goal, so good info is bound to keep cropping up: http://www.webaim.org/techniques/captions/quicktime/
then of course .edu people have been working with MAGpie for windows and mac:
http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/magpie/
The Open & Closed Project is working on accessible media in Toronto:
http://openandclosed.org/
& paying for the development of a good captioning font: http://screenfont.ca/
evidently Flash in CS3 has some kind of captioning:
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/captions_flash_video/
and there's something called "Captionate" that lets you caption flash video, and get
this, Jeroen Wijering's FLV Player added support for Captionate embedded captions back in May 2007!
http://www.buraks.com/captionate/
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