Transcript Event ID: 1742494 Event Started: 4/12/2011 1:22:47 PM ET Please stand by for realtime captioning. Operator: Please trch -- continue to stand by. Your conference will begin in approximately five minutes. Please continue to stand by.. Operator: Please continue to stand by. Your conference will begin momentarily. Please continue to stand by. Welcome and thank you for standing by. All participants are on a listen-only mode until the Question and Answer Session of today's conference. During that time if you would like to ask a question, you may press star 1. Today's conference is being recorded. If you do have I objections you may disconnect at this time. Now we would like to turn the call over to your host for today, Ms. Katherine Otts. You may begin. Welcome to the creating accessible multimedia and digital content workshop. I wanted to introduce you to our speaker of the hour who is Mr. Geoff Freed, and Jeff is the project director of the National Center of accessible media. He is the multimedia -- accessible multimedia and web access project. He is a meeting expert on web accessibility and accessible web-based multimedia and developed methods and techniques to explore the industry standard and format. Mr. Freed is a member of the ( indiscernible ) working group which created the nonproprietary ( indiscernible ) format for text in play and as well as the AST mobile handheld working group and SMPTE 23 B-cap suring working group. He also participates in a variety of WC3 web accessibility groups. I would like to introduce you to Geoffrey, and we also thank you for your indulgence while we dealt with technical difficulties this end. Thank you. Geoff Freed. Thank you, Katherine. All those abbreviations she read make me sound very impressive, and I will explain them all by the end of the show and they won't seem so impressive, I am sure. I will start by saying in this presentation I would like to take questions as we go along. We got started a little late so rather than put the questions off to the end I will take them as a go along. Here in the room raise your hand and ask a question and I will repeat it so people on the line can hear it and Katherine will be taking tear of the online questions and pass them onto me. I am here to talk about multimedia online and how to make it accessible, what makes it accessible, why it has to be accessible. I would like to give you a brief overview of where I come from at NCAM. N cram stands for the National Center for accessible media based at the WGBH educational foundation in Boston. That's the same WGBH you might see on division or here on public radio, on the web. In addition to being a TV and radio producer, WGBH operates research and development arm and that's where NCAM fits in, and NCAM is part of the greater media being assess group which is made up of three parts, the first part many of you probably know which is called the caption center, and caption center invented captioning in the early 1970s and went on the air in 1972 with the first captioned brock which was Julia chilleds, the French chef. In 1990 we wrought online the -- brought online the descriptive video service which makes division programs, and at that time just television programs and TV programs and, movies and theaters, DVD, accessible to people who are blind or impaired by adding narrative track describing what is happening on the screen for anyone who can't see it. We'll be talking about captions and audio descriptions and showing demos as well and then the third part of the media access group N NCAM, begun in 1993, we were charged with -- we were created as a research and development arm charged with doing R&D for making electronic media of all kinds accessible to people with sensory disabilities and my particular area studied is multi-media. I do a lot of standards work and anybody here do standards work? You can admit it. Okay. ( laughter ). It is not as dull as you might think. We do a lot of work making multimedia accessible online, created a way to make movies accessible in theaters,s, using a system that can display captions and add audio descriptions to movies in theaters, and a lot of our work is funded by the federal government through grants. We have Donna the lo of work -- done a lot of work by NSF and we'll talk about some of these projects and another major funder is the Department of Education, and we also operate a consulting service where we work with companies large and small. Some of our clients include the CBC, Los Angeles department of water and power, work with apple and Microsoft and BlackBerry and these companies as well as other federal agencies like the Department of Energy, to help them comply with their own accessibility regulations, sections 508, content and accessibility guidelines and add thighs them about accessible multimedia. Those are the things that NCAM does. I am here to talk to you about the multimedia. Are there people here who produce multimedia in the room? A few hands go up. Okay. Or create web pages or oversee people who create web pages. Okay. A big question is what is multimedia? It is one of those things that everybody knows and not a whole lot of people define and I am one of those people. I cannot offer you a definite definition of what is multimedia, but for the most part we can say that multimedia is video, it is audio, it is text, it is animation, it is pictures, it is interactivity, all of those thingsdz alone or in combination. When you see a video on a web page, that's multimedia. When you see a flash banner at the top of a page urging you to buy something, that's also multimedia. DVDs are multimedia. Video tapes used to be multimedia. Downloadable materials from iTunes, from the ( indiscernible ) store, that's all multimedia. That stuff you're familiar with. Some things you may not be familiar are are coming soon in the form of a new version of HTML called for the most part HTML 5. In HTML 5 will probably result in an explosion of multimedia on the web not that we don't already have enough but there will be more because HTML 5 makes it easier to get multimedia on the web. We'll talk more about that later. I will show you an example. Here in the room you will be able to see some movies playing in just a minute online what you might see something jerky, so what I have on the screen is a little window with a movie in it on the left side and on the right side there are four other regions, and as the movie plays, assuming we have a good connection, as the movie plays, you will see things happening on the right side of the screen. Let's take a look and show some of these things you can do on these. Have you ever con deered a common thread that exists between open source and phone hackers in South Africa? Adventures use ( indiscernible ) and a video cast seen by tens of millions of people. The video of the cat playing the piano is the most interesting part of any presentation. What is happening on the screen is this video on the left was actually driving change on the right side of the page. So as the video was showing the picture of hackers in South Africa, if you were able to pay attention to what was happening on the right, there was a map that popped up in the little map window that showed the location of those hackers and there was a Wikipedia entry that popped up and then something that came up on a Google search. The same thing happened when the cat popped up. There was a map of where the cat is, and discussion about what the cat is doing and other things happening as well, and HTML 5 technology will make all of this easier to produce. I won't say easy, but easier to produce and tools will come along that will make it easier to create this kind of thing. That will present the accessibility challenges for all of us. You probably notice the movie itself was captioned and there weren't descriptions. Another thing that we'll have to start considering is how to give people who can't see the screen but are using screen readers alerts and control of what's happening outside of the video. Question? Will it also allow translations or multi-languages to be available? The question is will this kind of thing also allow translations or multi-languages to be available in the caption or subtitles? Sure. Yes, providing the author either writes the translations a he had had of time, that's one-way. Not to say that in the near future the translations won't happen in realtime and be inserted on the fly as well, yeah. Okay. So let's talk about what makes multimedia accessible. Some of it can be pretty obvious, captions make multimedia accessible. Subtitles, in other countries captions are called subtitles, and in this country captions are called captions. When I say subtitles, I am actually talking about foreign language subtitles. One distinction to keep in mind about captions is that captions are always displayed in the same language as the audio. They're not in translation. They're a visual representation. Subtitles, foreign language subtitles, those are translation and have two different audiences. Audio descriptions make multimedia accessible. Dubbing makes multimedia accessible and then the transcript which is not always the substitute for captions but it is itself a useful tool and will talk a little about transcripts later on. In addition to having all of these sometimes colted synchronized equipment, you also have to deal with the playback device. A DVD player is for the most part not very accessible to somebody who can't see. Online a multimedia player, a video player or audio player that can't be controlled from the keyboard or can't be controlled with the screen reader but can only be controlled with a mouse is not necessarily a very accessible thing, so making multimedia accessible is not just about adding captions and descriptions, it is also about making the thing itself accessible to everybody. It is always nice to point out that accessible multimedia brings other benefits besides bringing -- besides making things accessible to people who can't see or hear. Search is always at the top of the list. Captions are a great search tool and a lot of people have already figured that out, that you can use captions to search to a specific spot in the video and direct people to that spot and play back from there. Questions so far? Okay. Anybody here not heard of section 508? Nice. No hands have gone up. Good. I am not going to regurnlg at a time what section 508 says about captioning description. If there is anybody online that has not heard about section 508 to summarize, 508 says that if you are a federal entity any multimedia that you supply to the public or internally that is in line with your agency's mission must have synchronized equipment and captions which can be open or closed and audio descriptions, again, which can be open or closed, so if you have multimedia, federal entity, the thing has to be accessible. 508 while it only applies really to federal entities, a lot of nonfederal entities are paying attention to section 508 as well, and California community colleges, California state University, many states such as Alabama which I put up here, and they pay attention to section 508 and reference sections 508 in their own accessibility rules and regulations. There are many other entities that we work with at NCAM that want to follow section 508 and there is a commercial vendors, power utility companies, and they often turn to what the feds are doing because they want to follow what they think is best example and section 508 is generally what people follow. I wanted to just draw attention for a second to the Department of Energy as a group that is paying particular attention to section 508 not that there aren't others but we're working on a project with the Department of Energy now called national weatherization training program which is an online course to train professionals in home weatherization, blowing in insulation, taking care of leaks and things like that in your house and they're creating a massive curriculum online that contains not just static materials or sort of like textbook materials but a lot of multimedia, movies, interactive games that allow to you simulate what it is like to blow insulation into a home, into various types of homes, so before you go outside and actually undergo onsite training, you're doing online training, and ( indiscernible ) is working with NWTP to make all of that stuff accessible as possible. It is a big project and very serious about it. As I said, there are static materials, dynamic materials, and they're working to make them all as accessible as possible. Is that publicly accessible at this time? Yes. This particular site is accessible. Katherine, I don't know if you will be posting these slides. Okay. You will be able to follow these links, yeah. Very interesting, especially if you like carpentry and stuff like I do, it is kind of fun to blow insulation into a house. A viewer has a question. They want to know do the section 508 requirements apply to content created with federal grants? To seconds 508 apply to content created with federal grants strictly speaking no. If the Department of Education gives business X funding to create some videos, 508 does not actually say that business X must comply with seconds 508, but there may be rules that are mart of the grant application process that says when the grant money you must make materials accessible. Yes, in the back? ( inaudible ). Right. The question is the statement is the slides that were handed out don't exactly lineup with what's on the screen. That may change after ( indiscernible ). I am sorry. Can you send the revised version. She has the revised version. It is my way to fiddle with this stuff until I step up here. For the most part what you see will be on the paper will be on the screen and there will be additions and changes. Okay. Let's talk now specifically about captions. As I said before captions, there are visual representation of spoken narration or dialog. They're in the same language as what you hear. Captions indicate not just what's being said but other things, what we call nonspeech information like sound effects, music, laughter, identify who is speaking if the person who is speaking is not on screen or if there is a crowd of people and it is not clear who is speaking. We indicate if it is necessary the direction of the sound effect, if somebody suddenly looks that way, we might put up a caption that explains what the sound effect is and identifies what the sound effect is. Captions do all of that. Subtitles, language subtitles, they're a different audience. They're for hearing people. They translate the audio, the dialog or the narration into another language and that's all. They don't generally supply nonspeech information. Captions are synchronized to appear with audio as closely as possible and basically two styles, pop-on captions and roll-up captions. Rail-up captions are the kind of captions you see when you are watching live programming like news or sports, election results, things like that and pop-on captions I am sure most of you are familiar with it. Here is a quick sample done in flash. This is an online example. I will skip ahead.[ video playing ] The biggest adventure of all time will happen in the smallest of places. Oh, my gosh. Oh, no [ MUSIC ] [ MUSIC ] [ MUSIC ] 20th century Fox presents a blue sky animation studios film. Hello, hello, hello. Hello, hello, hello. Jim Carrey. Shooting the breeze. We're a club, a group. A secret society. No one else can join unless they wear a funny hat. Pop-on captions. You see them every day. They're on just about everything you watch on TV. They're on movies. This particular implementation I will talk a little more later. This is a flash player and the nice thing about it is it has an on screen button to hide the captions if you don't want to see them or reveal them. We'll look at that again later. Captions can be open or closed. If you don't know the difference, it is very simple. Open captions are captions that everyone sees and cannot be turned on or off. They're always there. They're always on. They're burned into the video some people say. In the old days everything was open captioned and in about 1981 closed captioned technology was invented which allows the viewer to turn the captions on or off. In the TV model, the broadcaster transmits the captions with the sound and the picture and the TV at home is in the old days was hooked up to a set-top box that has a switch and turn one-way and reveal the captions and turn another way to hide them. Now a days just about every TV, every TV 13-inches or larger you buy in the states has the captioner encoder built into it. I don't know if the rule changed now that we're in the digital domain. I think it is 7.8-inches vertically, larger than that everything had the decoder built in so you don't need a set-top box any more. Online captions can be open or closed as well. If they're closed, then the player will have a menu option or a toggle somewhere to turn them on or off or the author of the video will have supplied some kind of interface to turn the captions on and off and we'll see samples of that in just a little bit. Just about every multi-media player you can think of supports captions in one way or another. When it comes to open captions, any multi-media player can display pictures of text. That's what open captions are. Closed captions are supported by all of these players we see here, quick time, iTunes, anything with an I in front of it from apple, including apple TV, Realplayer, silver light, if you are a silver light and flash and all of these things provide support for captions and we'll see examples in a little bit. Questions so far about captions online? Captions are not limited to stationary online devices like desktop computers or even laptops which are not so stationary but handheld devices like if you have an iPhone, if you have an iPod touch, if you have a nano, nanoTV, all of those devices come with built in caption support. You may not know it. If you buy from iTunes a move that I has captions you can watch them on any one of these devices and they look really good. They're entirely ( indiscernible ). Certain BlackBerry Smartphones, I will show a picture in a little bit of what closed captions look like on a BlackBerry, and anybody here ever hear of mobile DTV? Mobile digital division? Nobody here has a TV receiver in their pocket? You do? Katherine here, she is with it. She is sitting over here watching broadcast TV right now. Mobile DTV is a specification that was released last October that specifically targets terrestrial TV broadcasts which is to take over the air TV to mobile devices. They can be the size of a telephone, a Smartphone, smaller than that, they can be larger than that. They can be built into seat backs in cars and built into displays on buses. Mobile DTV shows you the same thing that any over the air broadcaster sends out in your area and here in the district there are a number of broadcasters sending out mobile TV signals. There are a couple of models that I know about that actually support captions in mobile DTV, one is made by Samsung, called a Samsung moment, and there is another portable DVD player from LG which also has a mobile DVD receiver. YouYou can sit on a bus and provided you're within the broadcaster signal range you can watch the local ABC or CBS affiliate's programming while you're on the move. Some people may say, well, doesn't that tempt people to watch TV while they're driving? Yes, it probably does, but if they have captions turned on, maybe that will be okay, so mobile TV is available in a number of markets around the US and also used in other parts of the world and broadcast on I a different standard and the important thing is that mobile DTV supports a full range of caption features. That's something that NCAM worked to provide as part of the Department of Education funded projects about captions in mobile sphere and we'll talk more about that later. Here on the screen I want to show you some examples of what pings cays look like on various playback devices. On the screen now we have got three views using the quick time player, you can put captions in a little black region, the bottom of the video player or you can lay the captions over the video using the translucent background or sort of like the foreign language subtitles and captions can look like that and here is a shot of a different kind of captions displayed in the quick time player and I mention that if you buy a move Friday iTunes and captions on the handheld device, and you can also watch the same move by captions on a desktop or laptop machine and the captions are look like this and if you're familiar with captions from the good old days of analog TV these will look familiar, simply white layers on a black box. These are in the format called SCC. There is a screen shot on the right of the menu feature in quick time that allows to you toggle them on and off. Used to be that you had to pay $25 and buy quick time pro and access to the future and it is not the case any more. Captions in iTunes can be controlled from a menu. They look similar to what we just saw. The aning on captions look like that. If you come away with no other information from this today you will know that one can power two 100-watt light bulbs for 24 hours. It is on the screen. Here is what -- here is another way of controlling captions in iTunes. If you use iTunes you know that you move the point era cross the screen and you get a control bay are that pops up and captions are present and you get this little cartoon bubble at the bottom and if you click on that you get a menu to turn the captions on and off. This is the real player showing captions that looks a lot like what realtime captions look like. The real player offers a menu choice also for turning captions on and off and the same for windows media player. They have a menu choice as well. Then there is flash. A lot of people are familiar with flash, flash is used on so many websites these days to do so many things and not just to display movies and to display ads and provide interaction and if you are creating movies to be played back in the flash player, take note there are several ways to add captions to your flash player and if you are a flash programmer and you know how to roll your own player, you can get component from NCAM which I will talk about in a minute. Being use it to display captions in your videos as you see here. If you are a flash programmer and still need flash on your website you can download a free player from NCAM that looks exactly like what you see on the screen. That gives you a basic interface. It gives you a captioned toggle, and you can simply type in a few parameters and point to the move and I the captions. This is one version of what captions look like in flash. Then online so many broadcasters are now putting full episodes, full series, full movies online that you can watch for free or for a fee and some of them are listed here, and Netflix instant play came online last year with captions. They have been online for a while and now Netflix is beginning to include more and more captioned episodes and captioned movies online. I will show you a picture of what had Hulu can do in a minute. Other notable examples, MTV provides a lot of captioned material and You Tube in the last couple of years has started putting huge amounts of captioned material online and people can up load captions themselves or they can use a feature called auto caption and has anybody tried using auto caption? You should try. It is a lot of fun. Probably not intentionally. What auto caption does is listens to the audio track and then it turns that speech into text with varying degrees of accuracy. I am not going to show you an example now, but when you go home, go to You Tube and look at just about any movie and there you will be able to CC at the bottom in the controller and click and hold and amen why you will come up and choose auto caption and you will see what it looks like. It has mixed results. It is early technology, speech to text is what it is called, but it will improve as time goes by. I want to point out one thing that Hulu does. I will show you. When you are searching for captioned material on Hulu, you can actually turn on a filter where the pointer is and allows you to search for only captioned material, and in addition even if you haven't just searched for captioned material when Hulu returns search results they always indicate with a little icon when something is captioned which is a very nice feature. ITunes will do this as well and other sites and this is immediately obvious. Yes? With the captions can you capture what You Tube is giving you? The question is when you use auto caption in You Tube can you capture the translation and clean it up? Yes. They do give you the facility to do that. I don't know if a lot of people do that or not. You Tube also gives you the facility to up load your own captions so if you have created a movie and you caption it yourself, get everything looking nice and pretty the way you want it, you can up load the captions in many different formats. Anybody else? Something else not that I work for Hulu but I like what they have done. In the bottom picture here you can see Bart and Lisa with captions and in the top picture I want to point out some preferences that huhly gives you what are quite handy. When captions are present, the Hulu player gives you the CC button. When you press it, it allows to you turn the captions on or off and allows to you change the appearance of the captions, and so if you like to see captions with a different contrast scheme or a background behind them you can state that and you can save those preferences if you have an account so every time a movie with captions is played, you see those captions in your visual preferences and you can state that which is a really nice feature for people who like to watch a lot of TV programming online. And then captions on some mobile devices if you haven't seen them. On the left that's a screen shot of captions on an a iPhone or iPod touch and look just like they do in quick time player. If you have a nano, old one or new one, they look as you see on the right, and if you have a BlackBerry, various kinds will now display closed captions if the captions are integrated into it and they are nice and big and can be altered in a number of ways. BlackBerry gives you a number of size options and color options and you can even override what the author has done for placement and movement to the left and right and top and bottom. They did a really good job with this implementation. Any questions about captions at all? Hate them? Like them? Can't get enough of them? Okay. Anything online? Okay. Let's talk about descriptions. Anybody here not familiar with audio descriptions or video descriptions? A couple of hands. Audio descriptions sometimes called video descriptions are basically the same thing. They're used to make visual media accessible to people who can't see the screen. Short summary of audio descriptions, they're an extra narrative track that descriebdz what is happening on the screen for people who can't see it. Not everything that is happening but important things and important actions and costumes, gestures, scene changes, anything that gives away a visual clue or CUE. People that write descriptions are trained to be careful not to give away too much information like in the case of a mystery. You don't want to give the person who is listening to the audio more information than the person sighted and thus give away a clue or give away what happened in the end. For the most part audio descriptions are timed to fit in the pauses of the narration or the dialog, so that the narrative, the audio description narrative track does not step on dialog or the program narration or program audio as we call it and there are times when the descriptions will squash the program audio a little to make sure enough information is given. As with captions, descriptions can be opened or closed. In the days of VHS, any movie you bought or rented on VHS had open descriptions and these days the most part all descriptions are closed. They can be had on DVDs, good deal with TV programming, if you watch the thing on PBS like merns experience, masterpiece theater, Turner classic movies, many of these things have descriptions. Let me show you an example now. This is just a short clip with descriptions. [ video playing ] We'll do one more and stick to the seafood and in this case we'll do beautiful blackened scallops. He brings up a plate of golf-ball-sized scallops. And those who have not prepped a scallop, this is the sub deductor muscle. It is incredibly chewy so not so good on the mouth feel and we'll make a spice mixture, green chill lee flake and a little salt and sugar and paprika. He dumps the spaces into a bowl and stirs them together with his finger. I have the cast cast I robber pan. He dips the scallops in the spices. Dip in the other side and make sure the cast iron is nice and hot. Touch the oil. Should be smoking. Lay them in there. They will blacken up quickly for you. You don't need to cook them all the way through. I will lift is medium rare, not going to do a carrot salad and show you a cool thing I have here. These are ready to flip all over. Ming flips the scallops with Tongs. The cooked side has a dark brown crust. There you go. ( laughter ). Do you want to watch the rest? ( laughter ). The description track had one voice, a female voice and Ming's voice, and we intentionally tried to make the voice distinct so that it is not -- okay. So that there is no confusion over which is the narration for audio description and which is the program narration. You heard the descriptions were sort of squeezed into the pauses where he wasn't speaking and there were not that many pauses because he seems to tuck a lot and there were a couple of moments where the descriptions stepped on his narration like he is giving out information there. Historically speaking audio descriptions are written by humans and recorded by humans and then blended with the program audio. When the descriptions and the program audio are put together, the program audio track is lowered a little bit when the descriptions are active, so that you can distinguish the two. These days a lot of people are looking into other ways to produce audio descriptions and while the programming and materials that you might produce here at NSF are probably going to be high enough quality you always want human narration, it is interesting to think about other possibilities and one of those possibilities is what's called text to speech. Using computer technology, computer generated voices, to intentionally read from a script and speak descriptions. Here is the same clip with text to speech descriptions. Later in the kitchen. Let's do one more. We're going to stick to the seafood and in this case we'll do beautiful blackened scallops. He brings out a plate of golf-ball-sized scallops. And not prep the scallop and this is the abductor muscle. He pulls off the fleshy part. And it is incredible chewy so not so good on the mouth feel and we're going to make a little spice mixture, green Chile, a little salt, a little sugar and a little paprika. He dumps the spices into a bowl and stirs them together with his fingers. I have the cast iron pan and take some of these beauties. He dips two scallops in the spices. Dip the other side, and then make sure your cast iron is nice and hot. Touch the oil. Should be smoking. Lay them in there. He adds the scallops. They will blacken up quickly for you, beautiful thing with scallops, you don't need to cook all the way through. I will cook them about medium. Those are text to speech descriptions. In some cases we're finding through focus groups and re research we're doing that text to speech descriptions are probably fine in the dramatic situation they're probably not fine. Maybe in a documentary situation they are fine. Depending on user preferences, there are other ways to generate text to speech descriptions as well using screen readers, technology and this is an emerging thing that people are starting to look at now which will probably result in more descriptions. I want to take just a brief -- do you have a question? ( inaudible ). When the glitch happened apparently we lost the online presentation. Let me take a second. We have to take a quick break.Anybody have any questions in the room? In the back? The back to captions, I do a lot of voice-over PowerPoint online, and is there a way -- I always have a script. Is there a way that I can like up load the script to put in the PowerPoint instead of trying to have a track or have a ( indiscernible ) captioned? Is there any way I can up load it? Is there a program I can up load the script and have it time out or make key frames to put on there? There are services, captions services available, that will essentially do what you say which is you give them the video, right, but I am trying to see inhouse. Inhouse. To keep costs down. Right now what we're doing is putting it on You Tube which did he go did he go regates it so much and then breaking it up and making it more painful to watch and what I am trying to do is make it higher quality so we can approximate ut it on our internal web so people can watch it that way. There is no way anyone can make it more exciting. I am sorry. In terms of doing for automatic captioning or automatic ( indiscernible ) inhouse, there is really nothing available right now that will do that to a sufficient degree. What I was going to say and this may eventually come to more personal technology is that there are services where you can send them a piece of video, a transcript, and they will automatically generate captions for you based on timing, schemes, various bits of technology they invented that will bring the cost of captioning down and it doesn't necessarily give you a really good captioned video but it does give you captions. Right. That's kind of what we're doing now and takes two or three days ( indiscernible ) and time and money. Right. What you're waiting for is true speech to text captioning where it is not just a matter of using voice generation, it is a matter of a piece of software listening to your audio and spitting out captions. Hang on just a second. Questions? ( indiscernible ). Jug leer is an online captioning service or provider captions in a similar way that You Tube will provide captions, not mistaken if that they have proprietary technology that will turn speech into text, and again it is not necessarily the most accurate way to do things. It is beginning technology. In five years it could be better, yes. Does anyone know if opal online programming, does anyone know if opal online programming for ( indiscernible ) have any closed caption options? I know they have options for the blind, but have not heard anything about closed captioning options. I actually don't know. Does anybody here know about opal or anybody online? That's something to look into. Later on I will be talking about some library focus things with caption descriptions and actually OPAL, no. ( inaudible ). Anybody else while we're waiting? Okay. Okay. Sorry about that. It is not a real presentation unless something goes wrong. ( laughter ). Oh, this never happens. I don't understand. ( laughter ) so more about descriptions. What we just saw are for one word regular descriptions but there is another type of description technology called extended descriptions which really tend only happen on the web or online or in nonbroadcast situations, and ex extended descriptions are the type of descriptions where you need to convey more information than can be conveyed in three or four second pause and drama or 20 second pause in a documentary and extended descriptions are used when we need this extra time and the way they work, the program video and audio are automatically paused and a description track will play for as long as it needs to play and then it will resume playing, so let's say, for example, you have a movie directed at high school kid about capitalism and there is a professor lecturing and writing things on the blackboard or white board but not speaking what he is writing. There is a spot where you can pause the video and description would become available that would ( indiscernible ) everything the professor has written. We have an example here. [ event -- video playing ]. To explore this he put teenaged and adult volunteers through an MRI and monitored how the brains responded to a series of pictures. In a laboratory a teenager lies on a table that slides him into an MRI machine and a photograph shows a wide eyed woman clenching her teeth and Stacy talks to the teenager. All the adults identify this emotion as fear and the teenager is invariably saw something different. Those are extended descriptions and the video paused and it came on and it was all done automatically so the viewer doesn't have to do pausing or playing and all done by the author. It can be done right now the only way is by recording or I am sorry embedding the extra description into the full movie but technology is coming that will allow to you turn that on and off so you don't have to make essential will I two different movies, one with the long description and one without and extended descriptions change the length of the video or the multi-media and without the description it is five minutes long and could be fifteen minutes long if you have a lot of extended descriptions added to it. Research is showing it can be used to great advantage in educational settings especially with children. Any questions in anybody here ever use the descriptions? You all work for federal government and putting video on the web? Here I will tell you how to do it. There are a number of ways and tools that you can use and take advantage of in creating your own captions and descriptions line. NCAM has a free application called magpie. It has been around about 10 years and windows-based and creates closed captions that can be integrated into any number of formats, and flash and silver light and BlackBerry and you can also use it to record your own audio descriptions and synchronize them with the video. Like I said, it is a windows only application. I am not going to give you a lesson in captioning with magpie right now but there is documentation, and I like to think that it is well written and if you have too much material to caption yourself, and the next best thing to do is hire professionals and access group and WGBH and there are a number of other captioning agencies as well but one thing that a professional captioning agency can do that you may not be able to do is turn things around quickly and do a really good job. When it comes to captioning, if you are beginning captioner using software like magpie or other software to do a 10 minute clip, it might take a couple of hours to start with. As you get more experience that 10 minute clip might take you 30 minutes, 40 minutes after practice, and the captioning is time intensive and transcription and timing and editing. This is just a quick view of what magpie is. This is what a lot of caption editors look like. You have an area of the tool where you can enter captioned it ex and type it in yourself or create an electronic transcript and just import it into the application and assign time codes to each block that are instructions for the player to make the captions appear and disappear in certain intervals and there is a playback window that ease show you what the captions will look like with the video. With magpie you can use color, fonts, fonts, sizes and a lot of styling and all of those things can be created and Army of interns or volunteers or employees. This is what a video description or audio description project would look like in magpie and looks similar in other editors where you have the video, have an area where you can record the audio and yourself and this does not -- magpie is not set up to do text to speech recording so you would write out a description yourself and then sit in front of a microphone and record it into magpie and then as we captions you simply assign a time for each description to be played back, synchronized with the pauses in the videos. There are a number of formats to be aware of. If you have done any multi-media creation and you're painfully aware of this that different players support different caption formats. If you create captions for a quick time movies, the captions are no good for a piece of real media or windows media. Quick time supports its own format called Q T text also SEC and real text -- real player has its own called real text and Microsoft caption format is called Same, and then BlackBerry Smartphones support format called T text. There is one nonproprietary format available from WC3 called PTML.The idea is for players to eventually abandon proprietary format and take up one format to be used by everybody which will make authoring a whole lot nor simple. It was released by CC3 a year ago and is a formal standard to be used. Flash, flash is its own thing. Unlike with quick time player Windows media player, there is no single flash player that you download and use. Every flash player is different. If you are a flash programmer you can make a flash player that looks like whatever you want. Initially flash video could not be captioned, but we work with Adobe and we help Adobe create a captioning component that can be downloaded for free from the Adobe accessibility site that will basically synchronize a TTML file with a flash video and display the captions and also offers its own component called CTfor flash which you saw in action in the clip and offer the flash video player and I wanted to show you an example of in flash video that takes advantage of closed captions with CCplayer. [ MUSIC ] [ MUSIC ] [ MUSIC ] [ video playing ] Qak, qak. On a crisp, full, day, there is nothing better than racing leaves down a stream. My leaf won. My leaf won. Peep, wasn't that my leaf? I thought it was mine. This is a flash player showing a flash video clip and in this case they ( indiscernible ) invisible button and you click to turn the captions on and off. Very simple. Yes, question? Do you have any idea how well the captions might ( indiscernible )? Do I have any idea about how the captions might migrate forward? I am want sure. She means with the content ( indiscernible ). Maybe she mean when is con content moves from one domain to another and maybe from captions broadcast on the air and when they move to web? Okay. Hang on. ( indiscernible ). It is a big topic. I will take it from the approach of moving captions from broadcast to the web which is a big thing happening these days. There is a standard group called SMPTE, society of motion picture television and engineers which has created a recommendation, a standard for moving captions from the broadcast sphere onto the web, and specifically addresses problems like how do we make the captions the web look just like they did on TV what they should do and how do we do it quickly and easily and cheaply? There is also a rule now that says coming soon that programs that originated in the broadcast world and moved to the web must -- if they were captioned in broadcast and most things are captioned now, those captions must be retained when the program or the movie or the video moves to the web. So SMPTE with the new caption format called T T, timed text, is actually based on TTML, the nonproprietary format and designed to help broadcasters painlessly as possible move captions from broadcast to web. Another question from the remote audience, can you define open versus closed captions? Can I define open versus closed? You bet. Open captions are caption that is everyone can see and can't be turned off and in a way you think of open captions a being lo the same lines as subtitles and burned into the individual in the old days although least in movies and burned into the individual and can't be turned off. Closed captions are captions that can be turned on or off by the viewer in your television set, some very deep in the menu you have a toggle that you can chias to turn the captions on or off and you can also make closed captions these days look different. You can change the background color, the border color, the text size, and things like that, and those are closed captions and you choose to reveal them for you turn them off. Which is required for section 508, open or closed? Rand the second part of the question, or is it just by providing captions we'll be fine? Let me back up a little bit. Up on the screen is what section 508 has to take. I won't read the whole thing, but it says the captions shall be open or closed so you can have open captions and be compliant with section 508. There is another clause that says they shall be user selectable unless permanent which means they shall be -- the user can turn them on on or off and have to be given an option unless the captions are open, unless they're permanently part of the video. It is generally accepted that closed captions are best because that way you give the user the option to see them or not. Open captions are not necessarily a bad thing and from my point of view I think everything should be open captioned so it is easy to do and that's not practical. Not everybody wants to see them. That's why there are so many ways to present the closed captions. Anybody have questions in the back? Anybody else?We just are talking about flash. CC player. If you're in need of putting flash on your website, a flash video on your website that's not a flash programmer, you can but you have converted your movie into a format and write captions with an application such as magpie and then you can download a free player from NCAM which is called CT player and it looks like this where you have a video playing up here and then down here you have a bunch of controls and you have CC button and after you write the captions you get them looking like what you want, you can simply change a few lines and embed code and HTML and which is outlined in documentation to stuff your individual into this player and stuff the captions into this player and have them play back at the same time. This is a free solution that anyone can download and anyone can use and in fact if you are a flash programmer and you don't want to create your own player, if you want to alter this one, you can do that as well. That's one solution. The Perkins school for the blind has done a good job implementing this particular player. [ video playing ]. There are several strategies that a student can use.This is something that would satisfy requirements and an interesting thing about what Perkins does is they caption the audio as well as program. Questions about this? Captions or descriptions? Yes. What purpose is served by captioning the audio description? What purpose is served by captioning the audio description? Well, in one sense the audiences are different. Captions are for people who are deaf or hard of hearing and audio descriptions are for people blind or visually impaired but there are also people who are deaf blind, and while the captions themselves may not be able to be moved to a braille display or veefd by a braille display device, synchronously with the video, and therefore the captions and the captions of the descriptions display in braille at the same time the move sigh being watched, that person could download a transcript, what's called a collated transcript which contains captions and descriptions and that can be read in braille. I am not sure if Perkins is actually providing collated transcripts like that but they may, and to save time they may just be captioning everything so that it can be dib ( indiscernible ) the transcript. It is not an uncommon thing what you saw. Anybody else? There is other do-it-yourself captioning tools and cap subscribe is a nice tool for the MAC that allows to you create captions as well as audio descriptions and I mentioned Adobe play back captioning component and if are you a flash programmer that's one to use, and there is also something new that went online this summer which is called the universal subtitles project from the participatory culture foundation. Their take is crowd sourcing where they're not providing a way -- they're not charging you to create captions for you. They're encourage you encouraging you to make your video available for anyone to caption. If you put a move a You Tube, somebody in another part of the world can caption that for you and add subtitles in a number of languages and make that material available when the video is played back so when the movie is played back over here there is a link to establish the captions which have been created over here, and both played back at the same time. This is something new. It is proven to be rather popular in fact. Do you get a directory of listing of those at the beginning or how do you find out what's available? Well, they allow you to caption videos that are hosted at a number of sites among them You Tube and I think Google and they're not posting the videos. And they're essentially hosting the captions and so you can up load your own movie to you iewb and then you can caption it using the tool that BCF provides and they're essentially storing those captions for you and as somebody plays the video the way they structured things and then I don't know if they provide ( indiscernible ) captioned. I wouldn't be surprised if they do that. In addition to providing captions, it is I way of providing translations which I think I am not sure but my gut feeling is it might be a more popular application because translation ( indiscernible ) are becoming a big deal. Let's take a brief look at HTML 5. You probably heard used as a buzz word in a number of situations and it is a specification from two places, W3C and group called what working group, and HTML 5 is HTML 5 and WC3 and HTML by the working group and it is for the most part the same specification that there are some differences and the big deal when it comes to multi-media in HTML5 is you no longer need to use plug ins or object codes to put movies onto a web page. If you do a lot of HTML program organize movie writing and movie programming, you know to get a move a a web page is a bit of a headache. The nice thing is that you just use an element called video or element called audio and depending on what you want to put on the page and change some parameters and away you go. You don't have to have any proprietary plug in on the user computer or use any unin-tell gibel code or anything. It is really simple.That's good. An interesting thing is there is no baseline format that has been defined. Browsers can feel free to support or not support whatever video code or video format they want. Which might mean that safari supports some video code ex and Firefox some and there might be some overlap but you might run into a situation where the movie that you create won't play on safari and will play Firefox depending on the code you use for video. Question.If a script is used for captioning and the video does not go according to the script, does it still comply with section 508 for captions ( indiscernible )? You have a situation where there is some deviation between the audio and captions and there is nothing in section 508 that allows for a certain percentage of deviation. It is not uncommon since the captioning process happens usually at the very end of the production chain for there to be last minute changes and for the captions not to reflect those changes. I will give you a non-legally binding point of view. If there is a little deviation, it is probably fine as long as the original meeting or original intent is conveyed. If there is a lot of venting happening, it has happened and the captions really don't have much to do with what's happening in the video, I don't know legally speak field goal you're still in compliance, but I think that you should get rid of the old captions and recaption the movie or the video. There is no bar that has been set. As why the there are no caption support defined for all browsers. There are two likely to be supported, one is TTML and the other is a new one still way in development called BTT, and they both will display captions and one of them and both may do other things as well and as with video, if there is no defined format for all browsers to support it, maybe the case that some browsers will show the captions that you have and some browsers will not. There is no way to predict just yet if this will be re sold, but this is something just to be aware of for the future. Right now if you are inventing HTML 5 video into a web page, there is no simple way to provide captions. One-way is provide a fallback which might be flash but probably within a year there will be captions support for HTML 5. Any questions before we move onto library specific topics? Okay. Somebody asked earlier, I think, and Katherine also asked me to think about this, we have all of this video with captions and some of it has audio descriptions but is there a way to convey this information to somebody say in a library, either a physically brother down the street or an online library like NCL and the answer is yes, there is for the most part. One-way to do it is using a meta data standard called access for all and there are links for this in the presentation that Katherine will distribute and access for all is a way to basically personalize the delivery of multi-media content and other content based on a set of user friendly ( indiscernible ) in a profile, see, that a sueser can create. Access for all sometimes called AFA can be used to describe a digital resource by describing delay of captions, descriptions disrks it have a transcript, does it have any number of other things, and using access for all the user can create a profile that says, for example, I want to be shown in search results only movies with captions or I want to know when captions are available and I want to see all the other videos as well. The idea with access for all is simply match the needs of the user with the available resources. There is a website online that was produced by WGBH with funding from national science foundation called teacher domain and this was launched about five years ago, and it is available now and constantly growing and it is a good comample of access for all in use and show you how it works. There is an area for my profile and at the bottom accessibility preferences. If I follow that link, what that does is shows me a window that allows me to specify a number of things related to accessibility and allows notice check a box that says I want be to told when captions are available or I want to be told bh transcripts or audio descriptions are available and I want to be warned if when I am doing a search in my search results I want to be warned if a movie or interactive resource has flashing material which can be a hazard for some people, and I want to know if I can control this thing without a mouse or if I only can use a mouse, and check any number of these boxes and now when I log on, and do a search, those -- that information will be delivered along with the search results, so if I search movies about calves, for example, I will see in the search results words like captions, audio description, if the movie has captions or descriptions or a flashing hazard and then notified that there is a flashing hazard and that will be to avoid. This is what it looks like speaking of cows. Here is a page on the teachers domain sight about rum nants, and you may not be able to see from the screen but over here on the right it is telling me that the accessibility features of this movie are audio descriptions of the captions. It is telling me that because those are the things that I asked it to tell me, and if I view the movie movie -- [ MUSIC ] [ MUSIC ] [ MUSIC ] [ video playing ] Where do we get all the milk, steak, butter, and ice cream that we eat and drink? [ mooing ] Cows. Right. ( laughter ). Here is a little caption button you can turn the captions on and off. Another question from the remote audience. If a ( indiscernible ) is used for captioning and the video does not go according to the script, -- Didn't you just ask that? Are there requirements or is there anything available for captioning webinars or content delivered online? Yes. In fact, happening right here right now. This is being captioned -- I don't know the captioning agency but it is being captioned in Adobe connect which has the captioning pod or unit that a steno captioner, somebody who is writing live and not speaking, can write captions for them to be displayed in this little window on your computer screen. Yes? However, we're using Adobe connect 8, and this is the first time that we're using Adobe connect 8, and the captioning pod is not functioning. Oh, okay. The captions aren't coming up on the screen and our choice was to have it all embedded, but there is something that's new with this Adobe 8 that we were unaware of until the last minute where there is a specific ( indiscernible ) that Adobe requires ( indiscernible ). Okay. So in other nongovernment situations, yes, you can see captions in the Adobe connect window in a pod and in this case the captions are being displayed in another web browser it looks like. You can see them over here and over there as well. Yes, there are ways to have realtime captioning online. Okay. Anybody else right now?More information about access for all. NCAM is right now working on another project that is advantage of access for all a personalized ac access to NSDL, and NCAM is doing this in conjunction with the department at WGBH in Boston where we're building a custom portal using tools that have been provided by NSDL to annotate materials available in NSDL from organizations, teacher domains, three organizations, teacher domain, the NSDL middle school portal and an organization called Smile which deals with science and math resources, and these multi-media materials, all of these materials, will be tagged using access for all meta date so that when somebody searches NSDL for this portal, and checks certain preferences that they want, those results will be returned to the user displaying the information they want in terms of accessibility and again this is something funded by NSF. Yes, question? Another question from the audience. Could it accommodate audio recordings with transcripts and then follows up and states without video? Could it meaning realtime captioning online? Can realtime captioning accommodate video without transcripts? Yes. Yes. In fact, I am not a transcript and I didn't submit a transcript, and I am just off the cuff and the captioner is capturing everything I say. This is not -- the captioner is not somebody sitting at a conventional keyboard and typing as fast as he or she can. A steno captioner is someone trained initially as a court reporter. If you have ever been in a courtroom or watching part of a trial, you will notice that up in the corner there is somebody typing, often silently on a little machine and what they're doing is writing a transcript and everything that's being said in realtime and they're not writing using a keyboard. They're writing foe net I cannily if you are familiar with the shorthand, using symbols to take the place of whole words or phrases and allows them to write at speeds up to 250 or 300 words a minute. That's what the steno captioner is doing and he or she has the machine, steno machine hooked up to a computer running special software that translates that foe -- information into human readable text then displayed using some identification. The answer is you don't need a transcript. You can use a transcript, but realtime captioning is in general not done with a transcript or parts of it can be done with a transcript and then for live portions switch to a steno captioning. Anybody else? Those are some uses for access for all. If you are inclined to read specifications or want to know more about access for all, supplied some links in this presentation. There is one version available, version 2, a new version is in public draft now which will contain improvements, and you can read that as well. There is some other uses for access for all or for annotated resources so people can find this and somebody asked earlier is anybody here ally brer an or cataloger? I will use words I think will make sense to you. I am not a librarian, but I am married to one and I know other librarians and as part of my research I often work with librarians to find out about how to make resources accessible. Correct me if I'm wrong or help me with some information. One way that you can notify patrons that you've got accessible materials is to provide it in the catalog system that the patrons see, but that requires a number of things to happen and it requires the cataloger to actually provide the annotation that this object or material has captioned or audio descriptions or foreign language subtitles and it may also require the patron in some cases, might be useful to create a profile like we saw with teacher domain and access for all to say I want to see a listing of all the movies captioned in this lay brother or all the movies captioned about cows orifice I I cows or -- physics and I want to be notified and a profile may not be something patrons want to create so in some cases it may be best for all records in a catalog to contain information about accessibility. It can be done. In the cataloging world in the mark fields there are certain fields where you can tell the user in the record it has French subtitles and director comments in French and Spanish and English and you can also say in a foreign language field that captions are available which is somewhat ironic because captions are not a foreign language. Captions are the same language but this is where that information is conveyed right now. There is another field, another field where you can add information in subfields that 041 which deals with language codes where you can say captions and subtitles are available through various languages and provided the cataloger takes volcanology of these resources and then the record that the patrons see is in the catalog in the library online or in the building can convey information about the resource in terms of accessibility. So while this technology might exist to one degree or another, it is largely up to the institution to make sure that these records are created properly, and up to the cataloger and in the older days the cataloging was easier to spend time on a piece and describe it more carefully than it is now because people are trying to save money and get things cataloged more quickly and in some cases while a DVD may have captions and audio descriptions that information does not always make it to the record. It may not be a policy of the institution. The cataloger may not know that there is a place to put this information or he or she may not have time because they vo to get cranking and get records out. So there is never a guarantee right now at least that caption resources be conveyed that way in a record. I am not sure, maybe somebody here knows in the library field but I believe that the library of Congress states that you should state in the record when captions are available and even though that might be a rule, that may not be a rule ( indiscernible ). Any questions about that? Did I use the right words? ( laughter ). Okay. We're nearing the end. I just want to point out some general resources in addition to the ones that were part of the previous presentation. Some links part of the resource section here we have guidelines that might be useful for you to look at when it comes to making digital media accessible and wrote divide lines accessible digital media and web accessibility as a whole and also have a lot of information about multi-media accessibility. These are available for free. You can download them yourself. Links to MAGpie and T C for flash and when it comes to creating descriptions of images or interactive objects or movies that contain signs and math content, last year we published a very thourogh seerdz of guidelines called effective practices for description of assigned content within digital talking books. If you are familiar with digital talking books or DTBs, DTBs are a way of providing print publications to people who are blind or visually impaired, and these guidelines deal with describing images that somebody cannot see. They're an excellent set of guide lines for describing static images and also of the principles that are applied to static images can also be applied one way or another to movie so writing descriptions to multi-media for example and you can learn more about these guidelines. We also wrote last year apple asked to us write a set of guidelines for creating accessible iTunes U-Conn tent, University -- U Spice a lot of colleges and Universities are taking advantage of iTunes U and we wrote a set of guidelines about how to add captions and description and as well as how to make PDFs. General links to guidelines section 508 and content accessibility guidelines and if are you a spec reader you can learn more about HTML 5 and SMPTE which I mentioned earlier as well and then finally for more information about NCAM about working with us or getting more information about accessibility, you can contact Donna Dan he willEwski in charge of our screak partner program or me, Geoff Freed and my email is up there if you like. Questions from the remote audience, I noticed the captioner is not including the speakers on the word. Are there guidelines as to how to clean up transcriptions? Second question. How would you deal in an unfinished. I don't know who is captioning this but I would like to thank them for not including the AH's or the UM's, and hearing people utilitier out most of that stuff and a captioner will filter out that as well unless it has a particular meaning. If this were a drama and I had my character spoken such a way that the Um's and Ah's would be there and I am looking now to see if the steno captioner is writing them. Yes. Right. In general captioning practices utilitier that stuff -- practices you filter that out and how do you denote an unfinished sentence? Most of the time it is with an ellipsis, dot, dot, dot, a commonly accepted way. Anybody else? Yes. I have the technical question. When there is no -- you described lots of different stuff to me, lots of different special software available. Okay. If I am looking at something and I want to see the descriptions or the captions, okay, how do I find out if this software is not in my computer or is not available and I need to download it from somewhere? Is there some error message? Is there a standard protocol that does that? Let me rephrase the question for the people online. You're asking how do you know as a viewer or as a user what to watch a captioned or uncaptioned video with on your computer? Is that right? Yes. Basically. Okay. It all depends. Some web page authors will say explicitly in text you need -- the flash plug in to view this movie, download for free button or you need quick time plug in to view this movie, download it for free and there is a button, and Adobe will tell you that these days about 95% of all computers on the planet already have the flash plug in installed, so chances are and I don't know if that is true but that's what they say. Chances are your computer has what it needs. In many cases when it comes to plug ins necessary for viewing movies in flash or quick time or Windows media, the browser will tell you if you try to follow the links and it will tell you you need to download a flash player. Do you want to do it? You're given the option to do it. These days that's how it is handled. Seven or ten years ago you had to do all of that manually. The nice thing about when I talk about HTML 5 is you won't need in order to play movies you won't need a plug in like the flash plug in or quick time plug in to play a movie. Your browser will know how to play certain types of videos already. If it doesn't, it will tell you. Whether or not it gives you an option to do something else, I am not sure, but a good author will provide what's called a fall back so if you as an author provide a video using HTML 5 in a format that you know not all browsers support, you will also provide an alternative in a format that you know most will support and that might be flash. Anybody else? Okay. That's it. Thank you very much. Do you have any parting words? Contact me if you have questions in the future. Thank you. ( applause ). [ multiple speakers ] This is one of the series, in the series of issues and answers works shops, and if you got the agenda for today at the bottom there is an announcement for the next workshop and April 26th, and also in this short series on section 508 and accessibility and hope to see you all there and either if that one will probably be at the library of Congress and rather than in NSF most likely but will also be webcast. So watch announcements either through the federally brother session group or the listserv or whatever listserv you are on and you can also indicate or when you register you indicated the ability to receive future emails about this. So let's look forward to that one, and also one more time thanking NSF for providing the capability for the program here in person and on the webcast. Thanks for the captioning as well. Thanks one more time to our leaders. We appreciate it. ( applause ). Thank you. [ event concluded ].Actions