Re: Accessible Flash

Joe,

By no captions in Flash, I assume that you mean there is no functionality in
the Flash authoring tool explicitly dedicated to the development of
captions.  However, Flash can be captioned.

On our Rich Media Accessibility Web site
(http://ncam.wgbh.org/richmedia/showcase.html), we have an example of a
Flash movie that was captioned in the Flash authoring tool by the original
developer.  This entailed putting text in the movie area, in the same way
that any text appears in a Flash presentation.  This is laborious, and can't
say that I recommend it because it places the burden of captioning on the
Flash developers.  Suffice it to say, Flash developers are not usually
trained captioners.

We have also finished captioning another Flash movie, this time using
MAGpie2, and playing the Flash movie in a Quicktime SMIL file with the
captions added.  The disadvantage here is that you need both the Flash
player and the QuickTime player.  This example will be in the showcase soon,
and there is a similar example with a Flash movie playing in the Realplayer
with captions on the University of Toronto Web site.

I agree that it is not as easy as we would like, but it is possible to
produce captioned Flash.

Andrew


On 8/15/01 7:07 PM,  Joe Clark (joeclark@joeclark.org) wrote:

>> I used to have it running (when I had a native linux system, before
>> some other propritary stuff trashed my computer) without a sound
>> card. I assume that at the very least there are captions available.
> 
> There are no captions in Flash, or audio descriptions, subtitles, or dubbing.

-- 
Andrew Kirkpatrick, Technical Project Coordinator
CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media
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Received on Thursday, 16 August 2001 08:44:18 UTC