WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: captioning live streaming video

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Oct 24, 2003 8:48AM

We've used a program called CSpeech - http://cspeech.com/ - to do live
captioning in-house. As Chris mentioned, there are a few service
providers that will provide the service, but it is quite expensive
(usually $200-$400 an hour). These prices include a stenograper.

CSpeech will cost you $1000 but does it all, except the stenography,
which you can outsource locally for usually less than $100/hr. CSpeech
will send real-time captions to RealPlayer, CART software, chat
programs, Instant Messengers, etc. It does take some
technical setup, but allows you to do everything in-house. Once it's
set up, you only need to establish an audio feed (Internet or
telephone) to a remote stenographer who will dial in to the computer
hosting CSpeech. The stenographer will transcribe the audio which will
be sent to CSpeech and streamed to end users. If anyone chooses to use
CSpeech (or any other realtime system), we've developed and will give
away a very small application that will stream the captions to a very
customizable Flash movie

WebAIM recently received grant funding to pursue development of a less
expensive captioning solution. We hope to get the cost down
significantly. My hope is that our software will allow stenographer or
voice recognition input and will stream captions to any number of end
client programs (IM, chat, static Web pages, RealPlayer, Windows
Media, Flash, Java, etc.). It will also save caption files that can
then be used with archived audio/video. We're just beginning
development and hope to have a beta version in the Spring. If anyone
has recommendations, ideas, tips, or leads that could help us, let me
know.

Jared Smith
WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind)
Center for Persons with Disabilities
Utah State University



***************
On Wednesday, October 22, 2003 you sent:

SA> Hi,

SA> We are looking into ways to caption/describe live streaming video on the web
SA> (not streaming already-created video, but streaming an event as it happens).
SA> Is anyone familiar with a means
SA> of doing this?

SA> thanks

SA> Sandra Sutton Andrews
SA> <EMAIL REMOVED>

***************


----
To subscribe, unsubscribe, suspend, or view list archives,
visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/