August 2008
Working with Captions
By Mamta H. Tandel, Project Manager, BarrierBreak Technologies
Why Captions?
Captions are essential for people who are hard of hearing or deaf. Captions are also beneficial to those who find it difficult to understand the language and for people who suffer from situational disabilities such as users accessing information in a noisy environment. In addition, users browsing through the information using devices, which do not have speakers or headphones attached, will also benefit by reading the captions.
Accessibility laws and guidelines such as Section 508 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) require Web content and related information to be accessible and emphasize on providing captions for the audio content in synchronized format.
WCAG 1.0:
Checkpoint 1.4 - For any time-based multimedia presentation (e.g., a movie or animation), synchronize equivalent alternatives (e.g., captions or auditory descriptions of the visual track) with the presentation (Priority 1).
Section 508:
§ 1194.22 Web-based intranet and internet information and applications- Guideline (b) Equivalent alternatives for any multimedia presentation shall be synchronized with the presentation.
Types of Captions
Captions are mainly of two types namely, Open and Close captions.
- Open captions are captions that are always visible and cannot be turned off.
- Closed captions are captions that the users can turn off or on depending upon their requirements.
How to Add a Caption?
There are different tools and technologies that allow adding captions to multimedia presentations, such as Windows Media player, Quicktime, RealPlayer, and Adobe Flash. Whether the audio content is prerecorded or live, captions can be provided to the presentation.
Magpie is one of the free tools available to add captions, which can be used across different media players. There are five steps that need to be followed to add captions in Magpie:
Step 1: Importing the Video File
To import the text in Magpie:
- Launch Magpie.
- Click 'File' and select 'New Project'. (The Properties window appears.)
- In the General tab, in the 'Project Name' text box, enter a name for the project.
- In the Media tab:
- Click Browse and select the video file.
- Set Time Unit to 100 milliseconds. (This helps us to give more accurate timecodes.)
- In the Stream tab, set the following settings:
- Current style name: Default caption
- Font name: Arial
- Font size: 12
- Initial paragraph alignment: Center
- Click 'OK'.
Note: The project will be saved with the extension .mag. The project includes a monitor to play the video and we can type in the text that should appear. In addition, the timing can be adjusted.