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Re: Converting Web Video Captions

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Nov 1, 2011 1:30PM

Agree that providing a transcript is a fine solution. However, this is also good work for a machine. I have an old example from a few years ago (http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/accessiblevideo/) which is a Flash video with some additional player controls, including a "show transcript" button. A braille user can click that button to view a transcript of the video's captions, and the transcript is generated automatically from the TTML captions.

It isn't really that complex to get a simple text stream. However, it is still not an automatic process that players often provide.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

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http://twitter.com/awkawk
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2011 3:17 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Converting Web Video Captions

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Randy Pope < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> In developing a website for the deaf-blind audience, I'm looking for a
> method, program or whatever that will convert web video closed caption
> into a format that can be outputted in a braille display.

The format you want is text. There isn't a special captioning format that is accessible to a braille display. In order to generate captions, there had to have been a text transcript. Simply make that transcript available to address the needs of deaf-blind users.

This transcript should include more than just the spoken audio, but should include other auditory and visual cues and descriptions so that the full content of the video is available entirely from this text content. It's often best to present it in HTML with appropriate markup, etc.

Jared