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Re: The job of captioning

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From: John E. Brandt
Date: Nov 18, 2010 2:42PM


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 REMOVED>
www.jebswebs.com


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL 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