[Athen] Two things

[Terry Thompson]

I've become a believer in Flash for video because of its widespread
cross-platform availability, and because we have so much flexibility to
build players that meet our needs, and lots of folks are doing just that.
There are many examples of accessible Flash players, two of the most notable
being (as John noted) the JW FLV Player and NCAM's ccPlayer: 
http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/ccforflash/

JW FLV Player in particular is quite impressive - extremely capable and
highly customizable. My favorite feature is it's support for audio
description. Just record the narration in an MP3 file, tell the player where
to find your audio file, and viola! Audio description that users can toggle
on or off as needed, just like closed captions.  

John, you mentioned having problems getting it to handle caption files in
the W3C's DFXP format. I had trouble with that initially too, and finally
found the problem to be that the player is a bit finicky in its support for
DFXP. The two issues I discovered are that the timestamps must be specified
with the "begin" and "end" attribute, NOT the "begin" and "dur" attributes. 

So, this doesn't work even though it's technically valid: 
<p begin="00:01:30.00" dur="00:00:05.00">This is my five second caption</p>

But this (also valid) does work: 
<p begin="00:01:30.00" end="00:01:35.00">This is my five second caption</p>

Also, if you have code within your captions (such as <br/> to separate
multiple lines of  caption text), that needs to be contained within a CDATA
tag, like so:  

<p begin="00:01:30.00" end="00:01:35.00"><![CDATA[This is my<br/>five second
caption]]></p>

Terry

Terry Thompson
Technology Accessibility Specialist
DO-IT, Accessible Technology
UW Technology Services
University of Washington
tft at u.washington.edu
206/221-4168 


> -----Original Message-----

> From: athen-bounces at athenpro.org 

> [mailto:athen-bounces at athenpro.org] On Behalf Of John Foliot 

> - Stanford Online Accessibility Program

> Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2008 4:46 PM

> To: 'Access Technologists in Higher Education Network'

> Subject: Re: [Athen] Two things

> 

> Charlie Jordan wrote:

>  

> > Also -- not to beat a dead horse, but if you've been 

> captioning, would 

> > you mind giving advice about what file formats we should be 

> offering 

> > videos in?  Many of my institution's promo videos are in 

> quicktime and 

> > wmv; are there better choices both for captioning and "playability" 

> > features?

> 

> Repost from earlier today to another list:

> 

> FLASH CAPTIONED VIDEO:

> 

> You want to investigate the JW FLV Player.

> [http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player]  Most of 

> the heavy lifting has already been done for you.

> 

> You will need a copy of Flash CS3 to create your FLV files 

> (or any other flash tool that can export FLV files), and of 

> course you will need a time-stamped Transcript file.  JW FLV 

> currently supports files in either the .SRT format or 

> (allegedly the DFXP) .XML format 

> [http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Making_Video_Accessible],

>  although I have not been able to get that to work (??).  

> However using .SRT, it is/was slick. 

> 

> (You can generate an SRT file using a number of 

> shareware/free tools - I like and have used Subtitle Workshop

> [http://www.urusoft.net/products.php?lang=1])

> 

> Once you have the FLV and SRT files, upload them (along with 

> the JW_FLV Player SWF) to your server, embed some code into 

> your web-page, and presto:

> YouTube style streaming + captioned video.

> [http://soap.stanford.edu/jw_flv_player/index.html]  Note 

> that the captioning can be toggled on or off (The "T" in the 

> toolbar), and that your videos can be "branded" using a 

> separate, semi-transparent PNG file (cool factor).  As an 

> additional benefit, the JW FLV Player can also support an 

> additional descriptive audio file (as MP3) - making it one of 

> the most accessible playback mechanisms I've run across.

> 

> One item to note:  due to security settings in Flash, the 

> SWF, FLV and SRT files all need to originate from the same 

> server, although I have successfully placed the files in 

> individual sub-directories of the root IP address.

> 

> Hope that helps

> 

> JF

> ===================================

> John Foliot

> Academic Technology Consultant

> Stanford Online Accessibility Program

> http://soap.stanford.edu

> Stanford University

> Tel: 650-862-4603

> ===================================

> 

> 

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