[wburns]

My university is interested in what the best way to add closed captioning to captures. We need to have something in place for ADA compliance. Anyone had success with certain methods?

[Brett Dalton]

wburns, on 02 August 2010 - 02:03 PM, said:

My university is interested in what the best way to add closed captioning to captures. We need to have something in place for ADA compliance. Anyone had success with certain methods?

We currently don't caption our lectures just because of the volume (5000+ per semester). We do have a "Alternative Format Service" that does do captioning and other format shifting including scanning and formatting documents for screen readers on request for disabled students. The unit is reasonably size and just predominately handling text documents it can just keep up with demand so adding captioning ontop of this at any sort of scale is not practical.

As for captioning there aren't a lot of good pieces of captioning software in existance to do it yourself and it is a VERY time consuming process to do accurately. It is a fairly specialised skill and hard to do well, I had to do some for a video production some years ago and it took me about 6x real time to do a reasonable job. AFS does limited captioning for our public website material, but mostly only provides transcripts which is better and even then mostly outsources.

In the end AFS wrote their own tool to produce captions in flash as this was relatively simple to do, this isn't directly integrated with our lecture capture system because they are also working on an accessible Flash player which is configurable for the users needs with persistent options. This is still under development but is being designed for simplicity. The other avenue i want to investigate is Adobe's voice recognition package that first appeared in CS4 which is supposedly used for voice to text on video which can make video searchable by text. It produces an XML format output which Premier uses to find in and out points, I am literally in the process of installing CS5 today and hope to have a play with it over the next couple of weeks to see if it is even worth persuing.

As you can see it's still early days for us in this respect. I think that if we needed an extensive close captioning we will probably look externally.

BRETT

BRETT

[wburns]

I think we are going to have to go basically the same way. Thanks for the help!!