Closed captioning for the Login-Impared
March 9th, 2008 by Shannon Newton
An interesting idea come from the “Cooking up accessible video for the web” session at SxSW. The speaker and organizer is ‘Utilikilt’-wearing Pat Ramsey, an accessibility consultant and web designer based in Austin,Texas. Despite Pat’s attire and my desperate hope that a strong, exposing breeze didn’t flow through SxSW ballroom E, he was knowledgeable and engaging.
Pat Ramsay and his Utilikilt
His discussion focused on how to make web video accessible to the hearing impaired. This has implications for M7 in two ways. The most obvious way is to enable the user to turn off the sound and show a close-captioned text feed over the video.
A less obvious but more interesting impact is the ability to show the annotative player comments directly over the video. This would allow a user to watch/listen to the video while reading the comments without having to visit the site (the entire encapsulation could be embedded into email).
This method discussed was using the MAGpie feeware from the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM). MAGpie allows a person to create an XML file that can be incorporated into a SWF flash skin (Adobe is currently integrating into Flash 9) that displays the MAGpie captured text as a distinct layer in Section 508 compliant format.
The capture via MAGpie is a bit buggy on Intel Macs but plays nicely with all other hardware/software platforms.
…and for the record, I was a little envious of his ‘freedom of movement’. Do not be surprised if you soon see me in a Utilikilt.
