Three Video Captioning Tools 2008-12-05

Note

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

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By Claude Almansi
Staff Writer

First of all, thanks to:

• 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:

[see http://terrillthompson.com/uploaded_images/dotsub-792095.jpg in Terrill Thompson’s Free Tools for Captioning YouTube Videos, Aug. 2, 2009]

Making Web Multimedia Accessible Needn’t Be Boring – 2008-11-08

Note

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.

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By Claude Almansi
Guest Author
7 November 2008

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.