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Providing Captions for Flash-Based Streaming Video
February 19th, 2008
Kevin Jones, of Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP), funded by U.S. Department of Education and administrated by National Association of the Deaf (NAD), submitted a PDF he wrote, “Providing Captions for Flash-Based Streaming Video”.
“I wanted to let you know about an article I recently published at http://www.dcmp.org/caai/nadh204.pdf which gives instructions for creating captioned streaming videos. The article provides complete instructions for captioning videos using freely available tools, and may be a useful reference article to place on the DeafRead site.
It may also help to focus attention on the need for more captioning of streaming videos, as well as the need for improved caption/subtitle file integration with existing flash-based players (e.g., YouTube).”
Thanks DCMP and Kevin Jones!
BIll | February 19th, 2008 @ 4:31 pm
Helpful to find the other options, since overstream went down again.
Trying bubbleply, but it’s not as easy, and doesn’t have srt export.
http://www.bubbleply.com/player.aspx?pid=27639279-9726-41b6-a7f1-e6afa782e887
Jane | February 20th, 2008 @ 5:47 am
Just do it the professional way and create an XML document to handle captions, then with Flash, create a skin that controls captions and link the XML to the skin parameters. This also makes captions more accessible to the DeafBlind.
Bill | February 20th, 2008 @ 11:25 am
Hi Jane – that idea sounds good – have you seen it in practice somewhere?
Taking that idea farther, the xml could contain additional descriptive data, such naming the speakers, describing the speakers/actions, that wouldn’t have to show up in the captioning flow.
If anyone is a Flash developer, and knows how to make that work, let me know.
Otherwise, I will stick with Overstream.
Kevin | February 22nd, 2008 @ 8:50 am
Bill, you can used the FLV player to display both text captions and audio descriptions in a flash video. The software and tutorial can be found here: http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Making_Video_Accessible. Be advised, however, that it is a much more complex process than simply uploading a video to the web and captioning it using Overstream.
Bill | February 23rd, 2008 @ 6:32 am
Kevin, that was an incredible find! Thank you!
Sure, it will be more complex, and I probably wouldn’t do it for everything, but for interesting, important videos, or a requested need, I might.
Studying right now…..