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Re: Transcription/captioning

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Apr 13, 2011 2:03PM

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 1:19 PM, John E Brandt < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Yes, we want closed captions rather than open captions.

This is a bit unclear. In general, "closed" captions can be turned
on/off, whereas "open" captions cannot. I think what John is
recommending is that you avoid captions that are part of the video
stream itself (i.e., there is no external caption data).

Even with closed captioning (or open captioning for which there is
external caption data), it isn't really accurate to say that they are
searchable. They could be made searchable if you built a custom system
to do so. No major search engine indexes and provides search
capabilities for caption data, with the exception of YouTube, which
does so for captioned videos that are within YouTube.

Perhaps with HTML5 <video>, if they ever decide an a standard <track>
captioning format, we might someday see search engines provide search
capabilities for captions.

Jared Smith
WebAIM.org