Making Video Accessible

Not only do we want to tell compelling stories, we want the stories to be accessible. To start, we've been looking at two things: captioning for people who are Deaf or hard of hearing (or have the volume turned down, don't have speakers and so on) and audio description for people who are Blind.

We want to make this easy for people to do with free or cheap software, but haven't found a great way to do either as yet.

You Tube isn't accessible for either, unless you add captions as subtitles and they become part of the video. Google Video has a closed caption feature. I found a service called Overstream.net and used this to add captions to my first digital story.

It took me a while to figure out how to both create captions then add them to Google. Here's what I did:

• I downloaded the free Magpie and used this to add captions.
  
• Then I saved the captions as plain text.
  
• I opened the plain text file and deleted everything that wasn't caption text or start and stop times.
  
• I downloaded the free subtitle workshop and imported the captions text file.
  
• Then I saved it in "subrip" format.
  
• I uploaded the video to Google Video.
  
• Then I used their web features to upload the subrip caption file. Instructions for adding captions to Google video .

None of this was easy, though it was cheap (free software).

Apparently, if you download even more software, you can use the subtitle workshop to burn the captions as part of the video, instead of a separate file. I haven't tried this but Jared has and he described how it worked.

I also uploaded a video using Overstream.net. My first digital story is there with captions. A learning curve here too. I heard about this on a blog by Proud Geek, who gives great instructions based on his own efforts to do captions. I just now found he has a post on how to use Overstream to add captions to Google Video! (Post on Sept 17, 2007).

No one seems to have an audio description feature. Of course you could try to add audio when making the video but we are using free/low cost software so this isn't possible, or at least we haven't figured out how to do it as yet. I want to try to do this using Magpie though.

So much to learn!