Captioning, Transcripts and a Teachable moment

All,

 

Many of you already know that I am passionate about getting transcripts and
captioning added to on-line videos.  I've always tried to frame the dialogue
around the greater benefit captioning/transcripts provide to all users, not
just those in a particular disabled community.

 

Back before Christmas, I was approached by a web developer who was working
on a project for NASA:  an out-reach program geared towards students at all
levels (K-4 through "higher ed") that essentially encouraged students to use
NASA Videos and create "remixes".  Since NASA is clearly a Section 508
respondent, the preview videos on NASA's site required captioning (Section
508 - b. Equivalent alternatives for any multimedia presentation shall be
synchronized with the presentation), but the developer was curious what to
do regarding the videos being offered as downloads. Somehow, she ended up
IM'ing me at work and we had an interesting exchange.

 

After a bit of discussion, I proposed that they (NASA) include numerous
'pieces' of digital data in a zip file, and some of those bits would be the
time-stamped transcript and 'flat' transcript, so that the students would
have those pieces of the total 'picture' to use and remix at the same time
that they mixed and mashed their visual media.  

 

NASA agreed!

 

Late last week, the site was launched - a review page can be found here:
http://tinyurl.com/bmptxd . While a "How to Add Captioning" tutorial is
still not available (note to self - contact the contractor to discuss),
"on-it" educators at least now have the tools to take the ball and run with
it: not only will students be learning about space related topics, but the
potential for learning 'multi-media production' (which is clearly also part
of the bigger picture) that is inclusionary (through the addition of
captions) exists - students can be taught that adding captions is simply
part of the bigger production work-flow.  The current 'hard part' - getting
the transcript - has been done already by NASA, so remixing and adding 'new'
caption files to the 'new' videos is relatively easy and teachable.

 

Or at least, that is my hope.  For those of you reading this and who are
involved in teaching, alt media production or a related endeavor, I ask that
maybe you help push that ball along as well.  NASA has given us a great
starting point, but we, accessibility advocates, need to help highlight that
great start, and help other educators seize that start point and work it.
It would be *SO COOL* to start seeing these Student/NASA remixes on YouTube
with captions (YouTube now supports .srt caption files), so let's go do it!

 

Thanks!

 

JF

 

See also: 

*         Stanford Captioning: http://captioning.stanford.edu 

*         WebAIM - Web Captioning Overview:
http://webaim.org/techniques/captions/ 

*         YouTube - Add captions or subtitle tracks to your videos:
http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about 

*         JW FLV Player (A sweet little FLASH based player that scores
incredibly high marks for accessibility supporting Closed Captions *AND*
descriptive audio):
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/tutorials/Making-Video-Accessible 

*         Easy YouTube Player (Christian Heilmann's remixed YouTube player):
http://icant.co.uk/easy-youtube/ 

*         Captioning Media for iTunes:
http://soap.stanford.edu/show.php?contentid=89 

 

 

(Hey listees - have any other great resources?  Post them to the list!)