Comments (7)

1. 

   sujatha.balakumar

   Many government agencies hire outside vendors to caption their videos. I was recently at the ATIA conference is florida where I saw a demo of IBM's automated captioning tool The IBM AbilityLab Media Captioner and Editor solution.

   they claim it is 80% percent accurate and it is easy to use an someone like you can go fix the 20% errors on the fly and post it asap to the website versus sending it to an outside agency which will be more time consuming and not instant

   1 year ago

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2. 

   ProfG

   For captioning of live webcasts, we use a contracted service that charges in the neighborhood of $175/hr. I find this to be a reasonable and fair charge for the labor of live, on-call (trained) human beings and have no problem with paying such a fee for real-time captioning.

   For closed-captioned post-production work, we use an online vendor to transcribe the audio, which we feed to YouTube. YouTube produces a timed-text file (.sbv) which we convert to .srt, which works with our online video.

   FYI, we're running .mp4 video with h.264 encoding. It runs fine on iOS and Android devices and all the browsers we've tested it on.

   Good luck!

   1 year ago

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3. 

   Jim Tobias

   Good info, but we should be discussing the strategy here, not specific tech solutions.

   1 year ago

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4. 

   ProfG

   Is your position that a knowledge of tactics (what is and is not possible in the field, and at what cost) has no bearing on strategy? I'm pretty sure this little side conversation isn't running-up the cost of IdeaScale, nor burning time for the disinterested; however, it has provided limited information about how achievable 508-compliance can be.

   If you'll forgive an imperfect analogy, without a shared knowledge of "what is," strategy is likely to be about as accurate as the worldview from Plato's allegorical cave (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave).

   1 year ago

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5. 

   Community Member

   Get it in budget, that is a challenge, then you are on for next year.

   1 year ago

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6. 

   garymichaelmorin

   Although we see agencies with improved rates of captioning, though still far from sufficient, what's seriously lacking are standards for quality of captioning - font color and size, captioning of music and lyrics, in-screen versus letter-box with captions below the video, etc.

   And there is no discussion of Audio-Description, which has been a required Standard since 2001 (the requirement for captioning actually predates Section 508/June 2001).

   Both of these issues need to be a part of the strategy - quality captioning and AD and budgeting for both. BUT, before either of these things can be done well, people with disabilities have to be valued as employees and as members of the public/consumers of Federal agencies and that just isn't the case yet. It's still about begrudgingly complying with a law, not meeting the needs of employees and consumers. So, the strategy has to address intention and motivation.

   1 year ago

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7. 

   garymichaelmorin

   At various times in the last couple years, I've heard that CAP provides captioning and AD services to agencies with whom it has agreements. Has anyone else heard of this or used their service?

   1 year ago

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