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Re: The job of captioning

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Nov 18, 2010 7:48AM

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