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Re: Caption Question

for

From: Sam Cartsos
Date: May 8, 2015 2:44PM

Thanks Jonathan. Yes, those are great points. Allowing users to
customize the size and styling of captions is the best way to go. The
same goes for user preference - let users turn them off if they'd like.
There's other reasons not to use burned-in captions - if you're looking
for an SEO benefit, want your media listed as captioned in YouTube, or
plan to use the data for search, you have to meet compliance
requirements, and so on. For all these reasons, open captions are not a
good overall strategy for captioning your media.

Having said that, the appeal of open captions is that the captions are a
feature of the media. Everybody experiences them as part of the media,
with no action required on the user end, and the creator has control
over the styling. If you consume a lot of captioning, as I do, you
probably have strong opinions and insights into what works well and what
doesn't, and the default experience in many players is quite poor, and
not customizable in many cases. In addition, most users don't have
captions on by default. Explaining how to turn them on in a variety of
players is painful for everyone involved. For Lisa's project - she
doesn't have control over the player, wants people to experience
captions and have it be a positive experience - I think open captions
are a good choice.

Thanks,
Sam

On 5/8/2015 12:06 PM, Jonathan Avila wrote:
>> I'm a big fan of open captions
> One challenge with open captions is that users cannot change the visual appearance of the captions -- this can be a challenge for people who have a visual impairment in addition to being deaf or hard of hearing. Also on smaller devices users may need to increase the size of the captions. There is another technique to encapsulate closed captions into the media file -- that way the captions are included in a single file -- although this technique may be more limited though in it's support for different platforms and players.
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