Jared: Hello and welcome to another in our series of national center on disability and access to education web casts. I'm Jared Smith, I'm the moderator for this discussion today on web captioning and education. So I'm glad you're all with us today. I am joined today by Andrew Kirkpatrick, and Andrew is the corporate accessibility engineering lead for Adobe systems, and thank you Andrew for being with us.
Andrew: Pleasure.
Jared: And I'm also joined by Kevin Reeve. And Kevin Reeve is a team coordinator for the faculty assistance center for teaching at Utah State University. Thank you, Kevin, for being with us.
Kevin: Glad to be here.
Jared: I've known Kevin and Andrew actually for some time. We've done a lot of work on various things, the national center on disability and access in education is based here at Utah State University so I've known Kevin for some time. We've worked collaboratively on several projects and Andrew with his work at Adobe and previously at WGBH in Boston. We have a long history with the three of us here on the web cast today. I'd like to give Andrew and Kevin just a minute to introduce them self and explain their background in regards to education and captioning. If we could go ahead and start with Andrew.
Andrew: Right. This is Andrew Kirkpatrick and I'm the Adobe corporate accessibility engineering lead. I work hand in hand with, we have corporate accessibility product manager Kerstin Goldsmith. And my background is that as Jared mentioned, I came to Adobe from macromedia originally, and then before that from the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media at NCAM, I was the product manager for MAGpie a popular captioning and audio description tool vast available. I've been involved with captioning for quite some time. At Adobe my role is to work with all the different product teams helping them understand the issues related to accessibility, helping them address them. So that's sort of my one minute. A little quick overview.
Jared: Thank you, Andrew. And Kevin?
Kevin: Thank you Jared. I'm the team coordinator here at FACT. My team consists of 17 individuals, which include graphic artists, instructional designers, and multimedia specialists who do video, Flash-type programming, and editing as well. So it's a multi-facetted team that's here to assist the campus community with building instructional materials with a primary focus on faculty and online courses.
Jared: Great. Thank you. You know, I picked you two to join us on this web cast for a reason, because you guys really are able to represent, I think, more the industry side and what's happening in regards to the development of tools and accessibility and products, and Kevin, you know, you're right on the front lines as far as multimedia and education in working with faculty in developing these educational products that are being used, really, across our campus, and really in a lot of other distance education systems that are out there. So again, thank you, both of you, for being here with us.
I would ask any of you that are listening if you would like to ask any questions of our panelists today, if you would just there on the web site submit your question so we just remind you to do that. We'll be addressing your questions a little later in the web cast.
I'd like to start out a little bit just setting a frame work for web captioning. When we talk about web captioning we generally have two main categories I guess that we can talk about. One is real-time captioning, so captioning of real time streaming live events such as this web cast right here, and we do have the captions that are being provided in real time with this web cast. So that's one, the other one would be, I guess, anything else that's not real time. And that would be more archival or on demand type media that you would go to a web site and would be able to access at any time. They really are, in regards to captioning, two different beasts that we have to address, a little bit differently, because the technologies are different. I've asked Andrew if he would take just a minute and maybe describe some of the technologies, just give us a frame work maybe for some definitions and the technologies that are used more for the on-demand or archival type multimedia that's out there.
Kevin: Sure. Traditionally people have thought, the main media players that people are generally thinking about are windows media, quick time, RealPlayer, and Flash. And as far as how captioning actually happens with those different players, it happens through different means for each one. Windows media is capable of displaying captions within the player if the captions are provided in a format called SAMI, which is synchronized- -Actually I forget what it is for.
Jared: I had to look it up. Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange.
Kevin: Thank you. And for RealPlayer, you have RealText, and a developer can combine RealText with a real media file using a smile file as an intermediate file that connects and synchronizes the two of them together. With quick time you can do something similar, which is you can use a smile file to associate a quick time text captioned file with the media file, or in quick time you can also embed the captions as part of that media directly. With Flash it's a little bit of a different story, in that Flash has the ability to parse XML so we've seen developers come up with a wide variety of different solutions. And macromedia never provided, you know, a standard captioning component, and it's something that Adobe is interested and considering, but as of right now we don't have that. What we do have it there's a variety of tools that are available out there that will create captions for Flash, one in particular called caption ate allowed to add Q-points to an FLV video file, for a Flash video, and as of yesterday Adobe has released some captioning skins for that, so that's someone who uses captioning to create captions for the Flash video, doesn't need to do any additional development work. They just need to use one of these skins and it will display the captions very nicely within the player.
Jared: And where would we be able to find those skins?
Andrew: They will be up on the exchange portion of the web site eventually but for right now the place you can go to get them is at our accessibility blog, which is blogs.adobe.com/accessibility.
Jared: Very good, thank you. I think just to add to what you've said, I think the real key point is that there are a lot of media players on the web, the four main ones that we've talked about are RealPlayer, quick time, windows media player, and Flash. And it's important that we know that all four of those do support captioning, and that's really important. One of the keys, though is that all four support captioning differently. There isn't one uniform method for providing captions for each of those media players. As Andrew mentioned immediate ia player uses SAMI, quick time uses another proprietary quick time text, RealPlayer uses RealText and you have another one called SMIL, stands for synchronize the multimedia integration language. It's more of a presentation used by quick time and RealPlayer for the presentation of captions. So the data is stored in a quick time text file or a RealText file. SMIL is used to say okay put the captions here and the video here and this is how they should display and positioning and so forth. Just a little bit of terminology for you. Andrew, I guess maybe a followup question, you mentioned caption-ate that's available for Flash. Could you explain some of the other tools that are out there for end users that they can use in the production and development of captions?
Andrew: Sure. There's a variety of tools that have available. Ultimately it's important for people to realize that in all these cases the caption data file is just a text file. So anybody could, in theory, sit down and type out a caption test file. Now in reality no one's going to do that because the most significant challenge is identifying the exact timing that needs to be included in that file for each captioner. So there's a variety of tools that are out there that allow a caption writer to enter text into the piece of software, and to synchronize the timing with the video or the audio that's being captioned. Some of the tools that are out there, there's MAGpie which is a tool put out by the National Center for Accessible Media. It's a free tool, it works on Windows and Mac, and it puts out data for quick time, SAMI, RealText, as well as XML. Hi-Caption, there's a tool by Hi-Software which does very similar things, puts out in all those different formats. It also puts out in a Hi-Caption XML format and they also provide a component for Flash that will help out with the developer to display those captions for a piece of Flash media. Caption-ate the tool that I mentioned earlier on which is used for Flash video, there's also professional level tools that will also output RealText, quick time text or SAMI, so if a developer had a video that they needed to have captions added to, you know, there's professional caption agencies that are out there from the media access group at WGBH to National Captioning Institute to, you know, various different other groups that will be able to do that work for you and provide you with the caption data file.
Jared: Great, thank you. Kevin, are there any other tools, or what are some tools that you have used in captioning, or anything that I guess you could add to what Andrew has listed there?
Kevin: No. And I was excited to hear about some of the other tools because Jared, as you know, we had a conversation many years ago as I was looking at captioning, windows media and real and quick time and that was at the point that MAGpie came out. So we found MAGpie worked for us, we found the tool that worked for us, we stuck with it. Although other tools out there that are content creation tools, or media creation tools like there's one that turns stuff into Flash called Camtasia. They now have the ability to do some captioning built right into the tool. So we're kind of seeing that it's not perfect, it's not the exact way I'd like it to be, but it is there, and it does provide a mechanism. So some of these tools are starting to come with some captioning built into it, but not all of them, and they're not to the point we need them yet.
Jared: Great. And that actually leads me into my next question and maybe we'll start with Andrew. So we have these tools out there, yet so much media on the web, and even educational media on the web is not captioned. So I don't know that it's necessarily the tool's fault, but where do these tools that we currently have, where do they fall short, and where can they be improved upon?
Andrew: Right. Well I just want to add one point in response. First is that there's also Adobe has another tool also that is doing similarly to what Camtasia which is captivate, the news version includes a captioning feature so you can use captivate to create a presentation that does include captioning also. So that's just an aside from the last question. But where the tools fall short. In general I feel like the tools are not so much what is falling short, but the process. And the level of awareness on the part of people who are providing the media. You know, it has gotten increasingly easy to create media, to put up on to the web. In order to use but it's not gotten proportionately easy to provide captioning. And ultimately there is still, you know, a fair bit of manual effort that is required, as well as caption authoring know how that is important, and is not a trivial skill set. So as a result not everyone is really able to create captions. And there's definitely a difference for users between good captions and text that happens to be at the bottom of the screen while a video is playing. And there's sometimes a belief by people that it's easy to do captioning because it's just text at the bottom of the screen, and you know, in some cases, you know, captions may not be particularly complicated due to the video, but making sure that the phrasing of the captions is correct in terms of where line breaks occur, and how information that is not spoken in the video is conveyed through captions is a real art that takes practice. So I would say that, you know, the biggest problem's not so much the falling down or the short comings of the tools themselves, but just the overall process.
Jared: Great. Is there anything, Kevin, that you would add to that?
Kevin: No, Andrew hit a couple of key points. I brought captioning for video production when I worked in video production to Utah State University in 1991, well captioning can be hard, it's text on the bottom of the screen, but then you realize that the national association of deaf and others have put together some standards and some criteria on how you should caption different things like rate, speed rates, and how to, as Andrew said, line breaks and how to caption people off screen and music and sound effects and the whole nine yards. That is where the hard part really becomes. It's easy to take a text file and throw it up on the screen. It's harder to do it and to do it right. And I don't know that a lot of people that are doing media for the web are necessarily aware of those standards and are doing it right.
Jared: Great. A couple of followups actually to that. I guess for either one of you. You know we talk about these standards for captions. For a long time, it's been very well defined standards for closed captioning for television broadcasts. It's very clear how those should work and how they do work, how they are displayed. We all know that the web, and web multimedia is very different, and I've seen that for the most part, most people tend to be taking a lot of those same ideas and applying them to the web. You know, but is that something that we want? Is it, you know, is that the right thing that we want to be doing or not? And I guess maybe a followup to that is, you know, where can people go to find these standards, to find guidelines for proper captioning?
Andrew: Right. Well there's not a definitive resource that can be provided. I mean it can refer to one resource a moment ago, Ken referred, the media access group at WGBH, the caption center has their document on their web site, I don't have the URL handy but that provides some amount of guidance. But there's issues within the broadcast world as well in terms of caption quality and consistency of captioning that are being grappled with, you know, on a day-to-day basis there as well. So I mean the two different media types need to, you know, inform each other and ultimately we need to make sure that we're working with the users to make sure that what is being provided is satisfactory for them.
Kevin: Another thing that I have here, I just pulled out while Andrew was talking, I have a captioning key guidelines of preferred styles from the captioned media program and the captioned media program, if I remember correctly, is part of the NAD, National Association of Deaf. They actually have, I don't know if they call it a certification program or not, but it's a way that captioning houses can become what they call certified, or at least sanctioned by NAD to do captioning. And it just kind of tells you the quality of what they can do. And I don't know if certification is the correct word, there.
Jared: I guess as a followup to that, it seems that we're in agreement that it takes some sort of knowledge and maybe even technical skill to be providing captions properly and adequately so that they're going to be most accessible to those that really need them, the deaf and hard of hearing. So I guess the question would be, is it, you know, are end users, even the best ones to be doing this? Or is it best like in education, for a group like the fact center where Kevin works, to be doing that, because they can be trained, they can be specialized, maybe even certified in doing those captions correctly. Any thoughts on that?
Kevin: I'll take a shot at it. It was already mentioned that it's easy to create media, and it's becoming, there's such an explosion of media being thrown up on the web, you tube that was just acquired by Google is an example of a place that people were creating videos and media and just putting them up on the web. Anybody with a home computer or a cell phone these days can create media and throw it up on the web. The bottom line about captioning and this type of media is the awareness issue. A lot of people, including faculty and most people at similar facilities like I have, don't even think about it, aren't even aware of it. Number one. Number two, they probably do know about captioning per se, because it's been on television for a while, but they don't even know where to begin to look or to start for doing it with media. Or web-based media. And third is the time factor it takes to actually do the captioning, and figuring it out. For example, window media doing it is a little bit different than real, it's a little different than quick time, and when you're dealing with all those types of media files you almost have to have an expert in house that can help you. However, even though a center like mine knows how to do it, one, we don't always do it, and two, faculty and people on campus don't always have to come to us because they've got garage band on their apple, they've got Adobe audition, they've got other programs that create DVD's and media and pod-casts, and they can do it themselves. And we don't even see them, we don't even know who they are. So an awareness issue is, and I think pod casting, that's you know, audio, for the most part faculty are creating audio recordings of their lectures like crazy across higher Ed. It is the buzz in higher Ed right now. Entire college campuses have automated the process where a faculty walks into a classroom, logs on to a web site, hits a button, puts on a wireless Mike, it's recorded uploaded tagged and made instantly to the student but it's not captioned and there's no mechanism in place to do that. So some interesting challenges with this explosion.
Jared: Certainly. Just to spring board off what you've said, Kevin, Andrew a question for you. Do you think we'll ever be to a place where tools are really going to support the things that Kevin's talking about, that a faculty member could do that, attach a wireless mic and somehow there's a transcript, there are captions generated for that media? You know there's been a lot of talk in recent years, I should say for many years about voice recognition and its capabilities in providing transcripts and captions, and I think most of us realize that it's not quite there. Of course we've been saying that it's not quite there for about ten years, now. But do you think we'll ever get to the point? Do you think the tools will ever really support that native real-time development of these accessibility resources that we need?
Andrew: Right. Well I'm travelling right now so my crystal ball is actually back at the office. It's not going to be for lack of trying. You know there's certainly a lot of interest, you know, different groups are aware that they should be providing captioning, not everyone's aware of that, but you know there's people who are well aware that they should be providing captioning but feel that they, you know, that they need to make the decision not to in some or many cases, because of additional costs, or because of additional time, or for some other reason. And you know, the easier the process can be the more likely we're going to see captions getting up there. There's different companies that have been working on this, certainly you know speech recognition companies would love to do this, and work very hard at it. IBM has a project called caption me now, which has been doing work for, you know, many years to try and lower the burden on the overall cost and burden of providing captioning, particularly in a setting like in a university where a professor is making recordings and just generating content very regularly and rapidly. You know there needs to be an automated solution. When it will come, you know, I wouldn't even want to speculate. But you know hopefully we will see that sometime.
Jared: I agree and I think the tools have come a long ways in recent years, and there is a lot of development that's going on out there to make it better, but it's a difficult problem, and I think that we have defined that it can be a difficult problem. I mean that's not even, the other accessibility issues of one would be that some people would have the argument that streaming a sign language interpreter or an avatar or some sort of sign may be a better form of accessibility than captions and that opens up another set of difficulties. Audio descriptions is another issue that, you know, can be difficult. And we're not going to really go there, but you know, there are other things that are very much related that need to be addressed, as well. Just real quick, on real time captioning, for the most part we've been talking about archival, stand-alone type media that you put on the web. For real-time captioning it's a whole other dilemma that we have, not only because we have to generate captions, but we have to generate them right now, in real time, and then we have to get those captions to the end user. So are there any things that you guys are aware of, things that are happening out on the web, or tools that support real-time captioning?
Andrew: In fact, we are using one right now, right?
Jared: We are. And I might just put in just a little bit of a shameless plug for CaptionCaster, which is the product that we've been developing here at NCDAE as well as in partnership with WebAIM, and you know this is a tool that we're working on, we are about ready to start doing some beta testing and field testing, so if any of you out there listening are interested you can contact me or even fill out the form on the web cast page and we can see what we can do to maybe have you try this out or help us in development of this tool. But go ahead, Andrew.
Andrew: Well, so that's one. There's some other tools available, WGBH they have a tool called caption keeper, which is able to grab line 21 data that a steno captioner provides, and send it out in a variety of formats. There's, they can send it out in a format that windows media will understand or that RealPlayer will understand. There's not one currently for quick time. There's certainly caption providers that will also do this sort of work, caption Colorado is one such organization that does a lot of work through the United States federal relay service that government employees take advantage of for conference access. And both of these tools interoperate with Adobe's Adobe connect, formerly known as Adobe breeze. So that if you're using connect for an online meeting, you can include an extra feature that is provided free of charge at the Adobe web site to connect to one of these two services in order to have real time captioning within your connect meeting. Caption Colorado also has an interface that, a web-based interface that they use on their own that we've been taking advantage of a little bit for some of the meetings around, the new version of section 508 that's being discussed in committees right now. So there's a few different tools that are out there that do that and I'm sure that I've forgotten a few other ones. There's another one that I believe is called speche, that you know is a service where they will also provide online captioning.
Jared: Right. And I would just add to that, that there are some tools that support natively real-time captioning. They're fewer and far between so the real time communication and video conferencing type tools, pod casting tools that really support that real-time captioning, there's a few of those, and you've listed a few of those. For the most part, though, the real-time captioning tends to happen right now in some sort of parallel system. Like we are doing with CaptionCaster, and that was actually a question that came in from Norma gene from Houston community college, and she was asking, she just said she found it interesting that for this web cast that neither the windows media player or quick time provided captions within quick time or within the windows media player stream itself, but that we've provided kind of a secondary link to people to view captions. And she wanted to know whether that was planned, an oversight, or just what the reason was for that. And I just answered that real quickly. One reason at least is that quick time does not support real-time captions. Windows media player does support real-time captioning, but the methods for actually getting that to work are a little bit difficult, and so we haven't done that yet. It is planned for our CaptionCaster tool to try to integrate directly into windows media player, but the short answer is that the tools we're currently using don't really support it very well. So we are providing the secondary mechanism to get to the captions in another window. It's not the best answer. It works, it provides that accessibility, but we're doing that because the tools, just like so many of the other tools out there, don't yet natively support, you know, that real-time captioning inside the tool itself. A question for Kevin, and we've talked a lot about some of these tools, Andrew talked about breeze which is now Adobe connect, but what are some of the other tools that you see that people are using here on campus that, you know, should support captions, or at least would need captions, or maybe you are using some that do support captions. Just kind of set a frame work for what it is that you see that people are using, and you know here in education and where captioning is or is not being implemented.
Kevin: Streaming media probably being the largest use, meaning taking, either shooting video or taking video that has already been produced, either on a tape or DVD, and then putting it on the web so students can view it. That seems to be the biggest thing. And then the next thing I mentioned, the captivate CANTASIA type programs which are programs that allow you to do screen captures, live screen captures and demonstrations, or to put audio to a mediated power point type presentation, you know, things like that. And then pod casting, I mentioned that as well. Just taking off like crazy. Again, the tools are cheap, they're easy to use, and figure out. I wanted to add, Jared you brought up a point about the difficulty in doing some of this. The difficulty for folks at, on the end user side is getting, findings documentation on even how to begin or where to begin or how to use these tools. It's almost non-existent. Now I haven't gone out and looked in the last year but I don't know of any books, you know, like captioning for dummies or anything like that, or that even gives the novice user an idea of where to start or to even know that there was this plug-in for breeze, or Adobe connect now. I didn't even know that was there, I haven't looked for it, but it's hard to find out information about these tools, how to do it, and how to even begin to get started.
Jared: Maybe the three of us need to write a book.
Kevin: Yeah, I'll throw out a question maybe to the entire group, something that I would like to find. For example, video that is already captioned, if you've got a video tape that's already captioned, it's in line 21 of the video, is there something, a device that will take the captions right out of there as you encode it, and make it so that as you encode it into windows media, real or quick time or Flash video would that those captions and put them right in, ready to go? That would be a miracle device to folks like us. Because we use a lot of material that's already captioned, but we have to recaption it. I know there's devices that can pull out a text file for you. I've seen those, but it would be nice to be one that could just take that out and you know as you're encoding recaption it for you. That would be nice. >> Andrew do you have an answer to that question?
Andrew: You're talking about when you have captioned videos? Or you've got captions in the video.On the line 21?
Jared: Yeah, pulling it right out so when you stream it you can put it back in however you need to for the streaming side of it.
Andrew: Right. That is one of the caption keeper tool is capable of doing, is grabbing that data and sending it out. So that in that scenario that may be a tool that's worth investigating. You can find out about that at caption keeper. org I believe.
Jared: And that is also a feature that will be included in our tool that we're using as well, CaptionCaster. I believe, in both cases, you would need a captioning decoder, a hardware device that's going to be able to capture that and then get it to a computer.
Andrew: Yes.
Jared: But both of those software tools will and are going to support the ability to capture that and convert it into captioning formats that can be used in other media. Okay, moving on I asked if anybody has any questions for any of the panelists you can go ahead and post those to the web site. I guess a question for Kevin, you know, we've talked about many of the issues regarding faculty and staff, and those in education to generate these captions. But what do you say to these people when they say it's just too cost prohibitive? You know, it takes too much time, the tools aren't quite there, it's too expensive for us to provide captioning, and especially in many cases where we know there may even be a legal requirement to provide those captions, what do you say when people say that? It's just too expensive.
Kevin: I'm usually the one saying that. It is an issue, and I'll tell you from personal experience, I teach a fully online course, I have video media files that I have created myself. I had them captioned, then I rebuilt my course from the ground up, and the first semester I thought, I was barely ahead of the students so I barely got them done before the class started and I thought well, I'll get them done, and I needed to build some more and then I'll go back and caption them. I got an e-mail from a student who was in that class saying that she was hard of hearing and needed captions. So I had to scramble to get it done. I would rather be pro active and have them done, but in a place like mine you're usually, it's not like video program where you have a script, you have a production, you have three to six months you're doing it usually for these higher Ed classes. You are barely ahead of the students, or just a couple of months before the semester starts. And so sometimes you're in a rush to get things done. The hardest thing about captioning the stuff we have is you don't have a script so you have to get it transcribed and that seems to be the stumbling block right there is finding qualified people who can transcribe it in a hurry, quickly, accurately, finding those people sometimes is very difficult to do. Now anybody can sit there and listen and type. But not many of them could do it very effectively, and quickly. So that's the thing that is our stumbling block, not doing it, it's just finding, getting the transcription done. So you have to tell people why they should caption for one, it just makes sense to do it. Because it allows equal access. We have a large deaf population on our campus, and they take online courses, and they need the access just like anybody else. And that's where you just have to to talk to them, throw cost aside and look at the reason you're doing it and it is to serve students, especially in a higher Ed situation.
Jared: Andrew maybe just a follow-up question for you, what do you think we can do to make captioning less expensive.
Andrew: Well, I think that you know we need to do more in order to make it easier to add captioning and provide the captioning so that it's viewable in a reliable way. But you know, the process of actually getting the caption data is really where the significant cost comes in. And you know that's an area, we've talked about it a little during this conversation as far as how that can, who's working on voice recognition or other tools, and there's some, you know, experimentation and creative thinking out there that people are doing, trying experiments with voice recognition, you know, even if it's just one person echoing what is being voiced by other people who are in a video, so there's some possibilities for different solutions. But there's really the big problem at the core, which is that there's a very particular, detailed work that needs to be done, and it's time consuming. And you know it's difficult to disassociate that cost. There's tools out there, there's other companies out there like Automatic Sync Technologies, that does additional work if they have a transcript they can do some work to automatically synchronize the transcript with the video or the audio content. But in that case there's still the need to get the transcript. So there's people who are attacking the problem at different points, and I'm hopeful at some point we come up with something that, you know, makes for a big jump, or a big decrease in the overall cost.
Jared: I'm glad that you mentioned Automatic Sync Technologies that's a group I was going to mention. As Andrew said you can provide them an audio file and a transcript and they will, in just a matter of minutes, can return to you the caption files that you need for the major media players. So any technology that's out there, as you mention you need the transcript. It always seems to me, in my experience, that getting that transcript is the most expensive piece of captioning. To address that I would just recommend that as we're producing media, is if we think about captioning in our production, it usually is a lot easier. Even if you have story boards or scripts, those can be used to generate at least a partial transcript. For instance with this web cast, you know, we're providing captions in real time but we can then capture those captions, we can use that to generate a transcript. It's always easier to generate captions and produce captions in the production phase rather than after. That's just one thought that I would add to that.
We're going to go to a couple of the questions that have come in. I guess either one of you could maybe have an answer to this one. This comes in from Laurie Schladweiler from Pima Community College. She wants to know whether we're going to address copy right issues involved in altering media. If we're adding captions to media is that some sort of alteration that may bring up copy right issues. Anybody want to tackle that one?
Kevin: I haven't seen any changes to this recently, but in the past the ability to caption a video tape, as I saw it, that if you have a video tape that's been commercially produced and it's not available with captions, you can caption it, which requires you make a copy of it, and you can do that legally. There are no issues with that.
Andrew: Yeah, and there's been a little bit of discussion over the years about, you know, ownership of the captions as well in terms of who owns the captions, if you have something captioned. And there's not general agreement on that. But you know, and I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to lodge my opinion on that. But just so that people are aware that's sometimes a topic of discussion.
Jared: You know I'm not a lawyer, either, but I know that there are a lot of instances, you know, it's typically safe to be providing those captions and accommodations as they're needed without real worries of, you know, copy right violations. I would just add to that, that I know in more the broadcast media for video tapes and a lot of that, there are a lot of clearing houses out there that, you know, that you can access to get captioned media. So if you have a video tape that's being commercially produced you don't necessarily have to generate those captions yourself. A lot of times you can go out and find somebody that's already done it and get those resources from a clearing house. I'm not familiar with anything that does that, really, in regards to web multimedia, you know.It would be great to maybe have some repository where a lot of these resources are available in a captioned format. Of course I think a lot of that would require the publishers to get on board as well. That's where so much of our educational multimedia is coming from, is from these main stream publishers that are out there.
Let's move on, here, I'll try to find another question. Thank you for sending the ones in that have come in. Give me just one second I'll find another one here. Here's I guess kind of a comment, and maybe you can comment, anybody can comment on this, it comes in from Kathy Keller. She says, “I think we need to promote captioning as a new emerging technology field and get students involved. I see a job market here.” Do you guys see a job market here as well?
Kevin: Here at USU I work with students, when we do our captioning, it is students who are doing it here for us, but they've gone through a little bit of training so they understand the issues. Are they perfect and experts and are they following the captioning guidelines to a T? Most likely not. But a lot of the stuff that we're captioning is one speaker, a faculty member's lecture, so it's not as difficult as when you're capturing media that's got a lot of elements to it.
Andrew: Yeah, and I would add that an interesting project that one of my old colleagues at WGBH worked on, this is Jeff freed, worked with MIT and they had a physics interactive video tooter that was a project at lasted for a couple of years where they had, you know, dozens or hundreds of videos from a physics course, and part of the process was to recruit students to do the work. And you know there was various difficulties associated with that, in that some students lost interest quickly, some students were very good at it. But one of the other interesting points that came out of that as well is that there's a real need in certain cases to have people with fairly specific knowledge, as well, to do the captioning. In that case, you know, we needed people who had a fairly solid understanding of college-level physics in order to do the captioning effectively. So I think you know, yeah, there's some possibilities for students to be able to be involved, or college graduates to be involved with this, but you know like many other jobs there's going to be problems that come up in making that happen.
Jared: I would just add to that, that the people that are producing the content are generally the best ones to be providing the accessibility for that content. They understand the content. You know they're going to understand the terminology in the captioning, the best way to do that. But as we've mentioned before, it's important that we are, you know, that we're training them, giving them the methods, the layouts, the fonts, the colors, those types of things they need to be using.
That actually was another question that came in from Cathy Keller and we addressed this a little bit. Maybe Andrew for you, she was wondering where we can find these standards for web captioning as far as, you know, display and timing and those types of things.
Andrew: We'll have to find the links, I know that the link at Media Access Group is, it’s available somewhere but I don't remember what it is and it's been a while since I've looked for it. And Kevin, maybe you'll provide a link to the CMP standards, and we can have you send those out afterwards.
Jared: Yeah, we'll go ahead and get those together and I'll post them right on to the web cast page in the resources section if you want to check back.
We have- -I guess another question, Andrew, I know you're a little bit familiar with this, and Kevin I'm not sure you can add to this as well, regarding standards, the World Wide Web consortium is developing a timed text specifications, so there will actually be guidelines and specifications for the generation and delivery of captions for web media specifically. So instead of dealing with all of these different proprietary formats, the idea is that we would have one universal standard format that could be used. So Andrew I don't know if you want to maybe describe what's happening with timed text and tell us maybe whether you think it's going to work, whether industry is going to adopt this universal standard.
Andrew: Right. Yeah, the timed text working group, W3C has included representatives from different, some of the different media players. I don't, I'm not on the group myself so I can't represent everyone that's in there, but they've been working for some time on a format with the idea being that if we could just have a single standard format that all the different tools would support, we'd be able to make captioning that much easier, and that we wouldn't be worrying about SAMI, real time text, quick time text, XML for the different media players. So it's an XML-based format, and it includes all of the basic components of timing and the text, and it also includes substantial formatting and positioning information. It provides probably more information than is currently utilized by the main media players, but it has some room for growth as well. It is at a point where my understanding is that it's done with a second, last call for public comment so there would be approaching a candidate review level at the W3C. I have really high hopes for it being something that can be adopted widely. You know, there's not any real good reason for people not to, except you know in some cases where media players have something that works already for them. But you know there's definitely value in terms of document interchange working between formats, and you know have great hopes that it will simplify the process somewhat.
Jared: As do I. You know, I have the feeling that if industry were really to adopt this one standard that it really would make all of our lives easier in the generation and distribution of those captions, as well as just general accessibility which is defined very well I think how those captions are actually going to work in different technologies. So that's one thought I had. I would echo your thoughts as well, that I think there's a lot of potential there. So those in industry or those that have influence there maybe that's something we can start asking those that are developing these multimedia tools that we're using, go to time text and adopt that.
A couple of follow-ups to some questions that came in, Kathy kind of answered her own question, Kathy Keller that came in, talking about an emerging field in captioning, and she mentioned to think of it like court reporting, and I would just add to that, that there really is a great need right now for those that are well-trained in court reporting and stenography and transcription. There is a big need for that right now. So we need more people trained in that field, and I think generally if we can get those transcription costs down, the real-time captioning costs down, that's going to be helpful for all of us. Rachelle from San Diego Mirimar Community College also had a follow-up regarding copyright, and she said that at our college we have to get permission to caption from the video owner, and we have been denied on more than one occasion. So just a little bit of a follow-up there, I would certainly, regarding copy right issue, see whatever your counsel is there at your educational institution, but I think there are probably ways to pursue that maybe a little bit further to be able to provide those accommodations. This maybe is getting closer to the end here, a question, Kevin we'll start with you. But what do you see that the future holds in regards to captioning and education? You know, awareness, tools, what needs to be done? What do you see happening in the future?
Kevin: I think the standards that Andrew just talked about are the first step to the future, meaning that there is a standard that all tools will look at, and hopefully adopt, makes it easier for vendors of software products to integrate stuff, they don't have to make something that works with a multitude of products, it should just work for all in theories. And end users like myself can only have to work with one type of standards and learn one type of standards and do it. So that is the future. The other future, and it's been touched on today, I think is the voice recognition stuff. We've seen a little bit of it in the interpreter in college where somebody is actually putting a device over their mouth and they're speaking and somebody is talking, repeating what they are saying and it turns it into text. The speech recognition I see has already been mentioned by Andrew happening, that is the future to help speed this up. And then the use of tools and built-in stuff that's already built into these media creation tools are the future. So hopefully we'll see that. I'm excited about what I've heard today. It's headed in the right direction.
Jared: And Andrew I guess the same question for you. Here we are in this YouTube, Google, Flash video generation and I know Adobe is right at the heart of a lot of this media that's being put out on the web. What do you see as… what does the future hold?
Andrew: Yeah, well, you know I'm hopeful that the future holds a lot more captioning. You know, we have seen, you know, some great new work with Google supporting captioning. In fact there's, they in effect have an additional caption format that they're accepting in order to provide captions for videos that they host. So there's clearly additional interest that is being driven by Google that, you know, and public awareness there's an article in the Wall Street Journal today about the availability of captions online, and it has quotes from you know all the familiar characters who, you know, are commenting about captioning, and you know wanting there to be greater availability. We're, as I mentioned before, there's an effort under way looking at section 508 again which doesn't apply to captions on Google but does for government web sites and for states and universities that have adopted 508, and you know right now captioning is required under section 508, and I wouldn't anticipate that that would be changing. But you know, it's certainly one of the, it's on the radar of people around the industry, and in the public. So you know hopefully that will result in positive pressure and positive results.
Jared: Great. Thank you. And you know, I think that's really what it's all about, you know, talking about those that really need captions, and really providing that accessibility that I believe that those of us in education have a duty and obligation to be providing that. You know, it's not really a question of whether we should. I think, we know that we should, it's just a matter of getting the tools, the resources, the education we need to make it happen. Well our time is drawing to an end here. I would like to thank Andrew and Kevin for joining us here on this web cast. The audio archives for this web cast will be available on the web site very shortly. We will have a transcript available as soon as it's available, should be just within a day or so we'll have that transcript online. A couple of people have sent in questions wondering whether the captions would be replayed or something, they won’t, but we will be providing a transcript. Our next web cast will be in January, we are going to be addressing cognitive disabilities and a lot of the research and really where we're at in regards to cognitive disabilities and accessibility, and where we need to go. It's a field that there's not a lot of work going on in, and so we're just going to pursue that for our January web cast and invite you to come back and tune in. Again thank you to Andrew and to Kevin, we appreciate you being here with us, and to all of you have a good day.