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The job of captioning

for

From: Karen Mardahl
Date: Nov 18, 2010 1:57AM

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