More people are watching television and movies online than ever before. A recent Nielsen survey showed that 81 million Americans view video content online. At the same time, the Internet has become home to an increasing number of live video events, streaming and downloadable videos, distance learning and training resources and other online content featuring video and audio.
As the world shifts to watching more and more video online, what happens to those millions of viewers who rely on captions to understand and enjoy video? This is an issue of concern for people who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH), their families, friends and professionals providing services to this growing population.
The Media Access Group, a nonprofi t service of Boston public broadcaster WGBH, has been a pioneer in creating access to all forms of media since the early 70s. Julia Child’s “The French Chef ” became the very first captioned program on television when it aired on PBS with open captions, visible to the entire viewing audience, in 1972.
Since then, WGBH has gone on to “break the silence barrier” time and time again. The lists of “firsts” include:
- First captioned national news broadcasts
- First captioned local news
- First captioned children’s series
- First captioned music video
- First closed-captioned feature fi lm in a theater, via WGBH’s Motion Picture Access® or MoPix® Technologies
- First captioned online series.
Voluntary efforts by many television networks throughout the last two decades to provide captions for
live and scripted programming have greatly improved access to television for the nation’s D/HH viewers. Regulatory mandates, such as the Federal Communication Commission’s ruling that all broadcast, cable and satellite programs be made accessible via captions by January 2006 have also contributed to the growth of the service.
Now that television programs are migrating to the Internet and new programs are being produced to debut on the Internet, an accessibility divide is opening between broadcast (where nearly all programs are captioned) and Internet-based video (where very little programming is captioned thus far).
WGBH is working on a variety of fronts to tackle this challenge. Networks, corporations and multimedia distributors contract with its bi-coastal captioning staff to caption over 10,000 hours of television and online content each year. WGBH has created free, do-it-yourself tools for creating captions (and audio descriptions for viewers who are blind or visually impaired), as well as tools to enable “recycling” of captions from broadcast or video to Internet-compatible formats. And they are working with some of the largest providers of video on the Internet to make sure more captions migrate with programs as they move online.
Do-It-Yourself Captioning Tools
Media Access Generator, or MAGpie MAGpie was developed by the WGBH – Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) to enable multimedia developers
to add their own captions and descriptions to their content without cost.
Using MAGpie, authors can add captions to four popular multimedia formats: Apple’s QuickTime,the World Wide Web Consortium’s Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL), Microsoft’s
Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange (SAMI) format and Adobe® Flash®. MAGpie can also integrate audio descriptions into SMIL presentations.
While MAGpie is an ideal authoring environment for multimedia specialists, publishing companies or service providers who want to create captions, subtitles and audio descriptions, others will also benefi t from its use. Research performed by WGBH has demonstrated that caption authoring is a valuable classroom activity. Children who produce caption fi les for short video clips tend to write more and their writing skills improve more rapidly. MAGpie is friendly to those who are new to multimedia, educators and even to young users. Download MAGpie directly from this site:
http:// ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/magpie.
CC for Flash
Use of Adobe Flash technology to add dynamic and engaging video content to Web sites is on the rise. With WGBH’s newest tool, developers are able to more easily add captions in Flash. Now, millions of D/HH users are better able to experience Internet-based video in Flash and search engines are able to capitalize on captions as searchable text (or metadata) within online program content.
WGBH has created a component for Flash, CC for Flash, that can be authored for playback in Adobe Flash Player. The component is easy to use and is freely available from this page of NCAM’s site: http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/ccforflash.
Funding for development of CC for Flash was provided by a grant to NCAM from the NEC Foundation of America, with additional support provided by Yahoo!™
CaptionKeeper: Recycles TV Captions
CaptionKeeper™ is a software tool that extracts captions from analog media (television and video tapes) and reinserts them into Internet-based video. The software uses existing closed-caption data to create caption text suitable for live and archived multimedia presentations with Real, Windows Media and QuickTime players.
CaptionKeeper is the first software tool of its kind, assuring that an organization’s resources aren’t wasted: video only needs to be captioned once. In addition, when large captioned video archives at libraries, universities or other clearinghouses are being digitized for future use, captions can be routinely transferred intact by using CaptionKeeper. More information about CaptionKeeper can be found at www.captionkeeper.org.
Internet Captioning Forum/ICF
In an effort to overcome technology and production barriers, the leading providers of Internet-based video have joined with WGBH to develop solutions that will increase the amount of captioned online video. The Internet Captioning Forum (ICF) was formed in the fall of 2007 to address the technical challenges presented by online video repurposed from broadcast or other previously captioned sources, as well as video created specifically for the Internet.
The scarcity of captions online is due to a variety of challenges: a proliferation of media and text formats and players; editing of programs originally distributed with captions; and lack of clear online caption production and delivery requirements.
The ICF collaboration is expected to yield a range of solutions and tools, among them:
- A database for online media distributors, populated by major captioning providers, of previously captioned programs. This tool will facilitate the location and reuse of existing caption files
- Technical and standards documents, case studies and best practices for proliferating online video captioning
- Demonstrations of innovative practices to preserve captions while editing and digitizing captioned videos.
In addition to the global audience of D/HH people, beneficiaries of ICF’s initiative also include people who rely on translation engines to convert caption text into other languages, people using online video in noisy situations or at work and search engines that use caption text to search and retrieve online videos. Track the ICF’s activities at www.internetccforum.org.
The Role of Advocacy (or, “If You Caption It, We Will Watch”)
If you fi nd yourself frustrated that video on the Internet is inaccessible, put your frustration to work for your own benefi t and that of others. Click on the feedback button of the national networks’ Web sites and your local television stations’ sites (which may be showing uncaptioned news clips online). Let them know you want access to their online offerings. It is technically possible to caption this material and in some cases to inexpensively recycle captions from the broadcast version of programs. Let Internet outlets know you would appreciate and, indeed, that you need captions. Supply will catch up with demand, if that demand is made known.
Conversely, if you tune into Internet programming and find captioned video offerings, let the site’s owners know how much you appreciate this access feature.
And Finally (for now), Captions in Your Hand
As video moves online, it’s also moving into our hands. Mobile devices of all kinds (iPods, smartphones, PDAs, etc.) are now able to play video and audio. WGBH is researching optimum ways to get captions to those devices, options for turning the captions on and off and consumers’ preferences for the appearance of captions (font, size, background). This project, Captioning Solutions for Handheld and Mobile Media Devices, is funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Visit http://ncam.wgbh.org/mm to see what captions look like on a variety of devices.
Captioning Information and Resources
