August 2008
Working with Captions
By Mamta H. Tandel, Project Manager, BarrierBreak Technologies
Video plays an important role in the education, as it is increasingly utilized in Web-based learning applications. But, how many of these are accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing and senior citizens? Would people using mobile devices be able to access the audio content in a noisy environment? Is there a way to make prerecorded videos accessible to these people?
The answer is YES, through descriptions of audio, such as text transcripts, captions, or subtitles. In this article, we shall talk about captions and creating captions using Magpie.
Captioning is the process of converting the dialogues, music, as well as sound effects of a particular video into a textual format.
Well, you might have seen movies with text appearing at the bottom of the screen that is same as the dialogues spoken. These are nothing but descriptions of audio.
Captions are commonly referred to as subtitles. However, they quite differ from each other. Following are some differences between captions and subtitles.
| Captions | Subtitles |
|---|---|
| Focus on people with hearing disabilities. | Focus on people who cannot understand the language. |
| Include all relevant sound effects. | Do not include special sound effects. |
| Indicate who is speaking. | Does not indicate who is speaking. |
| May or may not be turned on. | Are usually on. |