[Athen] Questions regarding post-secondary institution captioningprograms

[Gaeir Dietrich]

The answers below apply to the California community colleges.

* Who is the entity that produces the captioning? 

It is generally disabled student services or the library, although a few of
our campuses work through their A/V departments.

* Organizationally under which university/college department's) is the
entity located, funded, and managed? 

Our Chancellor's Office has been providing funding to disability services to
handle captioning. That money is not sufficient for all captioning needs, so
on most campuses, new materials are required to either be purchased
captioned or be captioned prior to the first showing. Usually the cost of
captioning those materials is absorbed by whichever department orders the
materials.

One creative exception is Mesa College. At Mesa, all video orders go through
their AV librarian (contact me off-list if you would like her contact
information). If something is already captioned, she purchases it out of the
department's funds. If a different but similar video is available already
captioned, she offers the department the following option: disability
services will use their funds to purchase the alternative or the department
can order the original video but then the department must pay to have the
material captioned.

* What are the most cost-effective hardware/software used? How much
resources are needed and what are the operational costs? 

For in-house captioning, I really like the captioning package from CPC
(http://www.cpcweb.com/). It is fairly easy to learn and their support
materials are pretty good. The Mac system is a bit nicer than the PC system,
but that's because the Mac is still a better multimedia platform than the
PC. We do trainings for our colleges on how to use the equipment.

You need a really fast computer with a huge hard-drive for captioning. You
also need a large external drive for storage. If you are going to caption
DVDs, you will also need a DVD authoring tool, like Encore or DVD StudioPro.
The price tag for the necessary equipment (programs and computer and
peripherals) weighs in right around $12,000. Not cheap, for sure, but when
you consider that captioning for videos is anywhere from $6 to $20 per
minute-and higher for DVD-you can see that out-sourcing is not cheap either.

* How much staff is employed? 

Most of our campuses have one person who oversees the alternate media and a
second person who actually does the captioning-usually as a part-time or
contract position.

* What are the pre-requisite skill sets, and qualifications that are needed?


The most important qualification to do captioning is really, really good
English skills. There are rules for formatting captions, like "do not
separate a preposition from the word it modifies," which presuppose good
facility with English. The best captionist I have trained was an English
major. It also requires good attention to detail and some background with AV
equipment. An English major who has dabbled in film editing would be a great
fit.

* What are the policies and procedures that start from the request for
captioned material, to production, to delivery of the final product? 

In our system, we require permission from the copyright holder to caption. I
encourage our campuses to go through their collection and request permission
for all the holdings from a particular copyright holder at once. Most often
permission is granted. On the occasions it's not, it's usually because the
company intends to produce their own captioned versions.

 

If the campus wants to go from VHS to DVD, that is a second permission issue
and also must be requested.

 

While the campus is obtaining permission, they can begin creating the
transcript. The procedure I recommend is to capture the audio and create the
transcript from that. It is best not to work from the video directly as
going back and forth over the same section of tape can damage it. The
fastest option is generally to have someone who is very proficient at Dragon
NaturallySpeaking listen to the audio and "re-speak" or "parrot" what they
hear, although if you have someone who can uses steno equipment, that also
works well. (And, no, trying to use Dragon directly does not work well.)

 

The means for capturing the audio varies a bit depending on how you are
captioning. If you want more details on that step, please contact me
off-list.

 

Once you have the transcript, the next step is to format the captions and
then time-sync them  with the video. This step is the most difficult in the
process and the one that takes the longest to learn to do well. One way to
short-cut this step is to use a company called Automatic Sync
(http://www.automaticsync.com/).  With AST, you can upload the digital audio
and the transcript, and their software will format the captions and do the
time-coding. You just take the resulting file into your captioning software
and make sure the very first caption matches up. Everything after that just
falls into place.

 

Once the file has been time-stamped, you are ready to burn the captioned
copy. If you're going to tape, you simply play the video tape and record to
it from the computer file. DVD is a bit more complex, but the process is
quite similar.

 

Once you have a captioned version, archive the transcript and the computer
files. That way if the captioned version is ever lost or damaged, you can
easily create a new one. Also, on the AMX database, campuses can share their
transcripts and computer files (although not the finished videos).

 

Since only one copy of the video can circulate, lock up the original and use
the captioned version.

 

My last question. Does anyone have any information on other post-secondary
institutions that have an in-house program? 

 

Well, we do! :-)  Hope this helps!

 

****************************************************** 
Gaeir (rhymes with "fire") Dietrich 
High Tech Center Training Unit of the 
California Community Colleges 
De Anza College, Cupertino, CA 
www.htctu.net 
408-996-6043 

  _____  

From: athen-bounces at athenpro.org [mailto:athen-bounces at athenpro.org] On
Behalf Of Christopher Kinney
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 7:09 AM
To: athen at athenpro.org
Subject: [Athen] Questions regarding post-secondary institution
captioningprograms

 

I'm been charged to investigate the feasibility of setting up captioning
services at Georgia Perimeter College. To be honest I'm not having much
luck. I have contacted a number of schools and other sources and have
received no answers as to how other schools are doing this. Basically the
responses I have heard is that there is technology out there to caption
materials. That's great, there are also components that I can use to build a
rocket. However if you put all of those components in front of me, I
wouldn't know what to do with them. So my questions are to anyone who works
at a post-secondary institution that runs a media caption program for
Deaf/HoH. 

My questions regarding setting up a captioning program are: 

* Who is the entity that produces the captioning? 

* Organizationally under which university/college department's) is the
entity located, funded, and managed? 

* What are the most cost-effective hardware/software used? How much
resources are needed and what are the operational costs? 

* How much staff is employed? 

* What are the pre-requisite skill sets, and qualifications that are needed?


* What are the policies and procedures that start from the request for
captioned material, to production, to delivery of the final product? 

My last question. Does anyone have any information on other post-secondary
institutions that have an in-house program? Any information would be greatly
appreciated. 

Thanks, 



Christopher Kinney
Assistive Technology Coordinator
Center for Disability Services
Georgia Perimeter College
555 N. Indian Creek Drive
Clarkston GA 30021

TEL: 678-891-3385
FAX: 404-298-3830

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