[Athen] Captioning Web Videos - and some feedback from you all please

[Andrew Kirkpatrick]

John,
I'll respond to these...

The exciting thing is however, that it can be done, although it remains a
bit of a manual challenge to produce these files - a simple "turn-key"
solution really doesn't exist right now (but there *is* work being done in
this area).

AWK: there's a variety of solutions, some that are manual do-it-yourself captioning tools (e.g. MAGpie, Captionate, HiCaption), some are professional solutions (e.g. "please caption this for me...here's some money"), and others are semi-automated

1) should we provide the foreign transcript in the caption file? (this
raises questions of i11n as well, especially with the Japanese rap and
foreign character sets)

Check out songs 1 and 4 in this example (set the captions to Spanish for #4 to see multiple languages):
http://stream.qtv.apple.com/channels/wgbh/sprites/090500/mb_main_sprite.mov

2) should we provide, instead, a translation of the rap? (even if it is
somewhat out of context; plus then we are providing information that
non-caption choice users are not getting, so is this right?)

Song 1 from the link above does include "chanting in the ---- language" rather than a direct translation.  I suppose that it depends on the significance of the content.

3) is Kim's choice of simply noting "Japanese Rap" or "German Rap"
sufficient?

4) What kind of support do the various media players have for i11n
switching on the fly? (If in fact this is what needs to happen, or will
all the foreign text/character sets simply follow through from the initial
transcript/caption file? - I am thinking of alternative output as well -
Braille for example).  Can we (should we) be thinking about the lang
attribute here (DFXP can accept it) - and if yes, how, and will, Adaptive
Technology be able to take advantage of it?

Here's a Flash example: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/accessiblevideo/  This includes three languages of captions, Japanese, Spanish, English, taking advantage of Unicode support in the player.

Right now there isn't any AT support for the lang attribute in DFXP.

AWK