WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Using closed captioning versus open

for

From: Rachael Zubal
Date: Aug 27, 2001 8:04AM


As a person with a hearing loss, I think captioning is important. Too often
I cannot hear the pronunciation of words, especially with the sometimes
grainy quality of on-line video.
I like Paul's idea about instead of having open captioning, you have closed
captioning, with instructions on how to select/change this feature on your
Real Player.
Rachael Zubal
Information Coordinator
<EMAIL REMOVED>

>>> <EMAIL REMOVED> 08/25/01 13:37 PM >>>
I would like to thank the responses I received on my question regarding
"Capturing audio portion of a video and converting to text". We are
pursuing several ideas, but it may take a little while to see which will
work. If anyone has other ideas, I would like to hear them.
I noted the questions regarding how to display the captioning in the
SMIL file in RealPlayer. I am wondering about the merits of using open
captioning in a SMIL file versus using closed captioning. Closed
captioning will display if the accessibility feature is enabled in
RealPlayer Preferences. If open captioning is used, it will be visible
to everyone without any additional steps. It benefits the person with
the hearing impairment, but it may also benefit others, such as the
person working at a workstation with their speakers turned off, the
person working at a computer without speakers, or a person working in a
noisy environment. There are probably other reasons open captioning can
be useful, but are their reasons for not using it?
Thanks,
Johanna