Best Practices In Online Video Captioning
Shooting, posting, and serving video are relatively easy. Even editing video is easier than it used to be. But captioning has never been easy and has not gotten any easier with the advent of multimedia.
Even if you know how to caption a videoclip or program, it’s technically difficult, and sometimes expensive, to add the captions to the video. We must be aware that we need to be catering to the broader handicapped audience as much as the standard visitor.
Multiple players, video formats, and text-file types bring about incompatibilities. Your chosen video format may limit what you can do with captions, and in any case your viewers will need a player that can run your video and the captions. This is particularly cumbersome with many divx caption formats. However, of all the captioning techniques, the divx is among the best.
The form of captions – typography, placement, chunking, speed, identification of non-speech information, and other factors – varies widely according to player type. Yet captioners are, at the same time, surprisingly limited in their options for captioning form; authors have much less control than in other captioned media. Of particular interest is the complete absence of fonts that are designed for online captioning and proven to be legible, readable, and usable by viewers.
Authoring tools are hard to use, sometimes unreliable or expensive, and inaccessible to people with disabilities other than hearing impairment. (No captioning software is known to adhere to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines, for example.) The Youtube captioning service provides a pretty good interface, but still involves much manual labour that needs to be resolved.
Web authors who wish to provide captioned video in order to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines may find that certain other browser incompatibilities cause them to violate the Guidelines in some other way. Also, the Guidelines permit Web developers to provide simple transcripts rather than actual captions.
Online captioning is almost exclusively an English-language phenomenon. Which is why, when sites like www.ted.com have multilingual captions, you must stand back in awe! Captions in other languages are hard to find; character encoding can be unreliable.
There is no easy way to convert captions into transcripts or Web pages with semantic, valid XHTML or similar markup. This has implications for the reuse of captioning in a learning repository.
Most online captioning is closed, using video players’ own formats and functions to hide captioning inside or alongside the video stream. Closed captioning replicates the model used nearly all the time on TV, on video and DVD, and at the movies, but may be unnecessarily complex and expensive much of the time in online captioning.
