This post was originally posted by me on December 20, 2008 in the Innovate blog, which has since disappeared: see the Internet Archive version saved on March 9, 2009. It was then reposted automatically on the etcjournal.com blog, when the content of the Innovate blog was transfered to it. I am reposting it as it was, except that bolded titles are replaced by H4 title styles and the broken pictures have been removed or replaced.
Sylvia Monnat, director of captioning at Télévision Suisse Romande (French-speaking Swiss television www.tsr.ch) for the explanations she gave me by phone on live captioning through re-speaking.
Neal Stein, of Harris Corporation (www.harris.com), for the authorization to publish on YouTube the video excerpt shown below, and for his explanations on the US live radio captioning project.
Why Caption Radio?
Making radio accessible for deaf and hard of hearing persons is not commonly perceived as a priority. For instance, the new version of the Swiss law and ordinance on Radio and Television that came into force in 2007 does add several dispositions about accessibility for people with sight and hearing disabilities but does not mention captioning radio. See art. 7 [1] of the law and art. 7 [2] and 8 [3] of the ordinance (in French). According to most non-deaf people’s “common sense,” deaf persons don’t use radio – just as many non-blind people still believe that blind people can’t use computers.
This post was originally posted by James N. Shimabukuro on December 5, 2008 in the Innovate blog, which has since disappeared: see the Internet Archive version saved on December 11, 2008. It was then reposted automatically on the etcjournal.com blog, when the content of the Innovate blog was transfered to it. I am reposting it as it was, except that James N. Shimabukuro’s bolded titles are replaced by H4 title styles and the broken pictures have been removed or replaced
Jim Shimabukuro for having encouraged me to further examine captioning tools after my previous Making Web Multimedia Accessible Needn’t Be Boring post – this has been a great learning experience for me, Jim
Michael Smolens, founder and CEO of DotSUB.com and Max Rozenoer, administrator of Overstream.net, for their permission to use screenshots of Overstream and DotSUB captioning windows, and for their answers to my questions.
Roberto Ellero and Alessio Cartocci of the Webmultimediale.org project for their long patience in explaining multimedia accessibility issues and solutions to me.
Gabriele Ghirlanda of UNITAS.ch for having tried the tools with a screen reader.
However, these persons are in no way responsible for possible mistakes in what follows.
Common Features
Video captioning tools are similar in many aspects: see the screenshot of a captioning window at DotSUB:
This post was originally posted by James N. Shimabukuro on November 8, 2008 in the Innovate blog, which has since disappeared: see the Internet Archive version saved on December 11, 2008. It was then reposted automatically on the etcjournal.com blog, when the content of the Innovate blog was transfered to it: see Making Web Multimedia Accessible Needn’t Be Boring, also for the comments. I am reposting it as it was, except that James N. Shimabukuro’s bolded titles are replaced by H4 title styles and the broken pictures have been removed.
Some people see the legal obligation to follow Web content accessibility guidelines – whether of the W3C or, in the US, of section 508 – as leading to boring text-only pages. Actually, these guidelines do not exclude the use of multimedia on the web. They say that multimedia should be made accessible by “Providing equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content” and in particular: “For any time-based multimedia presentation (e.g., a movie or animation), synchronize equivalent alternatives (e.g., captions or auditory descriptions of the visual track) with the presentation.”[1]
This is not as bad a chore as it seems, and it can be shared between several people, even if they are not particularly tech-savvy or endowed with sophisticated tools.
When you subtitle a video on YT, the file of the subtitles also produces an interactive transcript under the player. See screenshot in YouTube’s Interactive Transcripts (Google Operating System – Unofficial news and tips about Google. 2010-06-04). Unfortunately, you need to point the cursor on the transcript symbol to activate it, so blind people cannot do that.
Contrary to what I feared, WordPress does allow deep linking to a given point of a video, and hence to make a transcript that is – hopefully – accessible with a screen reader. The way I did it was:
make a transcript by copypasting the one you made the subtitles with and simplifying the time codes as above
on the HTML interface, copy paste the <a href= etc> part of this first link for each following time code, adjusting minutes and seconds for each
add the </a> tag for closing links after each link.
Issues:
this process is a bit of a pain in the neck, especially for longish videos
from a user’s viewpoint, each link will open the video again
Nevertheless, the pain in the neck might be worth it if it allows blind users to start a video where they want. Anyway, if you are using a screen reader, you can’t very well listen to the video and to the reading of the transcript at the same time.
Posted by Claude Almansi 
