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Thread: The job of captioning
Number of posts in this thread: 6 (In chronological order)
From: Karen Mardahl
Date: Thu, Nov 18 2010 1:57AM
Subject: The job of captioning
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I'm intrigued by tweets coming out of Accessing Higher Ground about getting
the captioning job done.
Jared Smith tweeted: Purdue University finds that using/fixing YouTube
automatic captioning costs more than using an external captioning vendor.
Then he followed up with: To clarify last tweet, YouTube was more expensive
for transcription. It would obviously be cheaper for simple time-coding.
Vendor was AST.
When reading these tweets, I'm guessing they tried the auto-caption to
generate a file with text and time codes. Is that what happened? Yes, having
a horrible manuscript to clean up would be messy and starting from scratch
might be far easier.
Lately, I've argued that people could use YouTube to transform a transcript
into captions. I describe the process in a SlideShare presentation at
http://www.slideshare.net/kmardahl/technical-communication-and-inclusion-5347819
(You must turn off JavaScript to view my crucial notes or download the
slides.)
My target audience was technical communicators who seem to be jumping on the
video bandwagon thinking "text manuals are dead and everyone wants their
instructions in a video". I try to point out that captioning is a must-have,
and it is so easy to do when you have a transcript. I also feel that anyone
making a video for instructions must have made a storyboard and therefore do
have a ready-made transcript. Few people should have to sit down and type
out an entire video. I won't comment on people who say "my video is
irrelevant for deaf people".
Interviews ("talking heads") will require work - there is rarely a
transcript available for that. I am not sure how to tackle Vimeo videos.
They seem to be a walled garden of some kind. People should definitely
consider professional vendors of captioning and audio description services.
My arguments are to not ignore the easy tasks. Short videos uploaded to
YouTube? There really is no excuse for not captioning. Lack of captions is
unprofessional in my book now. (Next major to-learn task is audio
descriptions!)
regards, Karen Mardahl
http://twitter.com/stcaccess
&
http://flavors.me/kmdk
From: Poore-Pariseau, Cindy
Date: Thu, Nov 18 2010 6:30AM
Subject: Re: The job of captioning
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Thanks Karen. Does the presentation include audio? (I turned my speaker on didn't hear anything, but wanted to check)
Cindy Poore-Pariseau
Disability Specialist
Bristol Community College
508-678-2811
x 2470, B115
-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = [mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of Karen Mardahl
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2010 3:58 AM
To: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Subject: [WebAIM] The job of captioning
I'm intrigued by tweets coming out of Accessing Higher Ground about getting
the captioning job done.
Jared Smith tweeted: Purdue University finds that using/fixing YouTube
automatic captioning costs more than using an external captioning vendor.
Then he followed up with: To clarify last tweet, YouTube was more expensive
for transcription. It would obviously be cheaper for simple time-coding.
Vendor was AST.
When reading these tweets, I'm guessing they tried the auto-caption to
generate a file with text and time codes. Is that what happened? Yes, having
a horrible manuscript to clean up would be messy and starting from scratch
might be far easier.
Lately, I've argued that people could use YouTube to transform a transcript
into captions. I describe the process in a SlideShare presentation at
http://www.slideshare.net/kmardahl/technical-communication-and-inclusion-5347819
(You must turn off JavaScript to view my crucial notes or download the
slides.)
My target audience was technical communicators who seem to be jumping on the
video bandwagon thinking "text manuals are dead and everyone wants their
instructions in a video". I try to point out that captioning is a must-have,
and it is so easy to do when you have a transcript. I also feel that anyone
making a video for instructions must have made a storyboard and therefore do
have a ready-made transcript. Few people should have to sit down and type
out an entire video. I won't comment on people who say "my video is
irrelevant for deaf people".
Interviews ("talking heads") will require work - there is rarely a
transcript available for that. I am not sure how to tackle Vimeo videos.
They seem to be a walled garden of some kind. People should definitely
consider professional vendors of captioning and audio description services.
My arguments are to not ignore the easy tasks. Short videos uploaded to
YouTube? There really is no excuse for not captioning. Lack of captions is
unprofessional in my book now. (Next major to-learn task is audio
descriptions!)
regards, Karen Mardahl
http://twitter.com/stcaccess
&
http://flavors.me/kmdk
From: Karen Mardahl
Date: Thu, Nov 18 2010 7:36AM
Subject: Re: The job of captioning
← Previous message | Next message →
Hi Cindy
No audio. I only blabbed when I presented. :)
regards, Karen
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Poore-Pariseau, Cindy <
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> Thanks Karen. Does the presentation include audio? (I turned my speaker on
> didn't hear anything, but wanted to check)
>
> Cindy Poore-Pariseau
> Disability Specialist
> Bristol Community College
> 508-678-2811
> x 2470, B115
> -----Original Message-----
> From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = [mailto:
> = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of Karen Mardahl
> Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2010 3:58 AM
> To: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
> Subject: [WebAIM] The job of captioning
>
> I'm intrigued by tweets coming out of Accessing Higher Ground about getting
> the captioning job done.
>
> Jared Smith tweeted: Purdue University finds that using/fixing YouTube
> automatic captioning costs more than using an external captioning vendor.
>
> Then he followed up with: To clarify last tweet, YouTube was more expensive
> for transcription. It would obviously be cheaper for simple time-coding.
> Vendor was AST.
>
> When reading these tweets, I'm guessing they tried the auto-caption to
> generate a file with text and time codes. Is that what happened? Yes,
> having
> a horrible manuscript to clean up would be messy and starting from scratch
> might be far easier.
>
> Lately, I've argued that people could use YouTube to transform a transcript
> into captions. I describe the process in a SlideShare presentation at
>
> http://www.slideshare.net/kmardahl/technical-communication-and-inclusion-5347819
> (You must turn off JavaScript to view my crucial notes or download the
> slides.)
>
> My target audience was technical communicators who seem to be jumping on
> the
> video bandwagon thinking "text manuals are dead and everyone wants their
> instructions in a video". I try to point out that captioning is a
> must-have,
> and it is so easy to do when you have a transcript. I also feel that anyone
> making a video for instructions must have made a storyboard and therefore
> do
> have a ready-made transcript. Few people should have to sit down and type
> out an entire video. I won't comment on people who say "my video is
> irrelevant for deaf people".
>
> Interviews ("talking heads") will require work - there is rarely a
> transcript available for that. I am not sure how to tackle Vimeo videos.
> They seem to be a walled garden of some kind. People should definitely
> consider professional vendors of captioning and audio description services.
> My arguments are to not ignore the easy tasks. Short videos uploaded to
> YouTube? There really is no excuse for not captioning. Lack of captions is
> unprofessional in my book now. (Next major to-learn task is audio
> descriptions!)
>
> regards, Karen Mardahl
>
> http://twitter.com/stcaccess
> &
> http://flavors.me/kmdk
>
From: Jared Smith
Date: Thu, Nov 18 2010 7:48AM
Subject: Re: The job of captioning
← Previous message | Next message →
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 1:57 AM, Karen Mardahl wrote:
The presentation here at Accessing Higher Ground
(http://www.colorado.edu/ATconference/SessDesc2010.html#Getting%20Capt)
presented an informal study that compared the costs of
auto-transcribing and auto-captioning with YouTube versus using an
external transcription and captioning service, in this case Automatic
Sync Technologies (http://www.automaticsync.com/). I didn't get the
exact numbers, but they found that it was about 30% more expensive
with YouTube. As you noted, the increased cost came in time required
to clean up the transcript, add speaker identification, and fix
synchronization issues.
A few thoughts and notes:
- The extra time seems to have been spent fixing minor errors in the
automated process. The unfixed captions may have been adequate, though
not optimal.
- YouTube performs very well with high quality audio. Poor audio will
obviously result in poor transcription (this applies to human
transcription as well). While the study randomized the videos used,
there was no indication of audio quality submitted.
- YouTube will likely improve over time as more video is
auto-captioned and, more importantly, as more people correct errors in
the auto-captioning. YouTube learns from its mistakes.
- If you already have an accurate transcript, both YouTube and AST do
a wonderful job of synchronization. YouTube, of course, does this for
free (at least for videos under 15 minutes).
- You can use YouTube to auto-generate transcripts and captions,
download the transcript and captions, and then delete everything from
YouTube and use the files elsewhere.
- If one has a choice of spending 5 minutes to get sub-optimal YouTube
captioning vs. not captioning at all because YouTube is not perfect,
the correct choice here is obvious. The point of the study was that if
you want high quality captioning for a lot of video, AST was a bit
less expensive.
Jared Smith
WebAIM.org
From: Karen Mardahl
Date: Thu, Nov 18 2010 7:57AM
Subject: Re: The job of captioning
← Previous message | Next message →
Audio quality is a good point, Jared.
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Jared Smith < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> - YouTube performs very well with high quality audio. Poor audio will
> obviously result in poor transcription (this applies to human
> transcription as well). While the study randomized the videos used,
> there was no indication of audio quality submitted.
>
In my example, I transcribed a video by Bruce Lawson. YouTube will try to do
an auto-caption from any uploaded file, but the machine translation will
fail if the voice isn't perfect according to some sort of standard. Bruce
has a British accent. I think the machine translation failed for that
reason. This is rather US-centric of YouTube, though. They are starting out
with English only. They can't handle French, for example, at this time. Of
course, understanding and transcribing a voice is magical to me - I have no
clue as to how they do it. Still, I'd think British-y accents could be
handled. My curiosity would love to know how that works.
I also tried the caption feature at my former workplace. The speaker had a
good neutral English (she's from California), but there was some melodic
background music because it was a product launch. (Not my choice.) It was
faint, but I believe that was enough to choke the machine translation.
However, it was a pro-production, so there was a manuscript and it took a
total of 10 minutes from first video upload to final, reviewed & edited
captioned 2-minute video. Easy-peasy.
regards, Karen Mardahl
From: John E. Brandt
Date: Thu, Nov 18 2010 2:42PM
Subject: Re: The job of captioning
← Previous message | No next message
At the Boston Accessibility Unconference last May, there was a gentleman
there who ran a transcription business that used a combination of human and
machine transcription. The recorded session was machine transcribed first
and then humans did the rest. He claimed it was faster and cheaper than
human only. But he admitted that the pricing had to do with the quality of
the recording. The poorer the quality, the more expensive the total cost.
This sounds pretty consistent with what Jared is saying.
~j
John E. Brandt
jebswebs.com
Augusta, ME USA
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
www.jebswebs.com
-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
[mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2010 9:44 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] The job of captioning
On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 1:57 AM, Karen Mardahl wrote:
The presentation here at Accessing Higher Ground
(http://www.colorado.edu/ATconference/SessDesc2010.html#Getting%20Capt)
presented an informal study that compared the costs of auto-transcribing and
auto-captioning with YouTube versus using an external transcription and
captioning service, in this case Automatic Sync Technologies
(http://www.automaticsync.com/). I didn't get the exact numbers, but they
found that it was about 30% more expensive with YouTube. As you noted, the
increased cost came in time required to clean up the transcript, add speaker
identification, and fix synchronization issues.
A few thoughts and notes:
- The extra time seems to have been spent fixing minor errors in the
automated process. The unfixed captions may have been adequate, though not
optimal.
- YouTube performs very well with high quality audio. Poor audio will
obviously result in poor transcription (this applies to human transcription
as well). While the study randomized the videos used, there was no
indication of audio quality submitted.
- YouTube will likely improve over time as more video is auto-captioned and,
more importantly, as more people correct errors in the auto-captioning.
YouTube learns from its mistakes.
- If you already have an accurate transcript, both YouTube and AST do a
wonderful job of synchronization. YouTube, of course, does this for free (at
least for videos under 15 minutes).
- You can use YouTube to auto-generate transcripts and captions, download
the transcript and captions, and then delete everything from YouTube and use
the files elsewhere.
- If one has a choice of spending 5 minutes to get sub-optimal YouTube
captioning vs. not captioning at all because YouTube is not perfect, the
correct choice here is obvious. The point of the study was that if you want
high quality captioning for a lot of video, AST was a bit less expensive.
Jared Smith
WebAIM.org