[Athen] AHG Round Table Session Summaries requested - RT1 Campus Captioning/Transcription solution(s)

[Alice Anderson]

a special thanks to Catherine for this request, and for agreeing to  
gather the RT notes and add them to Athen blog

>

> RT1

> Campus Captioning/Transcribing Solution

> Facilitator: Alice Anderson (with help from Sean Keegan and John  

> Foliot from Stanford)



Below are the notes I took - no doubt they are incomplete, and may  
have missed what others came to the table for.  It appears (to me)  
that we are all looking for answers, and are very impressed with the  
steps John Foliot and Sean Keegan of Stanford have taken. The recent  
news "Google Introduces Automatic Captioning" http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20091119/bs_nf/70194 
  ... will clearly give this movement a giant boost.


Captioning/Transcribing are moving to the top of the list of campus  
needs – developing solutions in an area where the players are not  
identified, and the technologies and players are shifting daily, and  
much needed work on search capabilities adds to the complexity of  
finding easy solutions. The work that John Foliot and Sean Keegan at  
Stanford have done is impressive, and worth taking a look at (links  
below to both their Saturday presentation, and Stanford Captioning site.


Captioning workflows typically involve:

1.    A video and/or audio media

2.    Generating / obtaining a transcript

3.    Formatting the transcript text into captions

4.    Synchronizing caption display to appropriate video time code

5.     Encoding the formatted and synchronized captions into final  
presentation media file

Introductions at the round table – who is doing captioning, and what  
are you doing or trying to do?
-       We have many different needs and different levels of solutions  
(World Caption Tool http://helpdesk.wisc.edu/accessibility/page.php?id=6525 
  for those who want to do it on their own  -  to Automatic sync (for  
fee) obtain transcript, sync captions and generate multiple files). We  
are looking to develop a campus solution to address multiple needs,  
have a simple process from start to finish and reduce costs. We  
conducted a pilot http://www.doit.wisc.edu/accessibility/captionPilot.asp 
  recently to identify what kind of captioning needs exist. This has  
been the catalyst to move forward as a campus to develop a campus  
solution. Work now is focussing on identifying requirements for a  
competitive RFP bid process of vendors for services (captioning,  
transcribing, or both).

-       We have a student accommodations focus

-       We have a voluntary focus – work with content creators

-       We are not doing in house captioning now

-       We now have a deaf student taking online classes use Angel  
(all auditory, huge distance education college using WIMBA, Comcast  
etc to broadcast)

-       We have needs for in class and on-line services

-       We have 42 deaf students – podcast lectures to all students

-       We want to have a web accessibility policy, and have an  
increase in deaf population – want to address captioning/transcribing  
needs.

-       We want to know how to implement captioning through the grant  
– what tools are out there

-       We have statewide assistive technology vodcasts ..


This round table will NOT address accommodations or captioning classes  
live/real time. Although Lecture capture systems are part of the mix  
for campus captioning solutions sought.


How to get started on your campus?

-       Make it simple

-       Make it affordable

-       Bring as many campus players to the table as possible

-       Take captioning and transcribing off the ‘accommodation’  
discussion list, and move it to  ‘Benefits All’ (Universal Access),  
search ability, compliance etc. benefits...


What are the barriers? Getting transcripts and captioning are  
perceived as difficult and geeky, and expensive.


Solutions: automate the process - scale out the process

There will be multiple formats (input and output)

You may need to be able to scale up, as the campus buys in – be ready!


Identify on your campus - who do you have to support this initiative,  
and what resources are needed? – You may need servers and someone to  
set up and maintain the process including a website ..


*** Getting text transcript is the hardest part of captioning! ***


These are the documents/talks referenced at AHG’s meeting

(1) Terry Thompson's (U.Washington) slides ...http://staff.washington.edu/tft/ 
  - link to Video Accessibility"

Media Players referenced: YouTube Player, JW FLV Player, NCAM  
ccPlayer, HTML5 <video> element

(2) John Foliot & Sean Keegan (Standford) captioning slideshow: http://bit.ly/2CmdhG 
  and Standford Captioning website http://captioning.stanford.edu/



November 19, 2009, cnet news

YouTube turning on automatic captions - Google is ready to launch an  
ambitious attempt to provide captions for videos on YouTube - http://tinyurl.com/yb3stv5




                Alice Anderson
TECHNOLOGY ACCESSIBILITY PROGRAM
   Division of Information Technology (DoIT)
       University of Wisconsin-Madison
      1210 West Dayton Street (3124)
              Madison, WI 53706

           Telephone: 608.262.2129