About Accessibility : Why Caption ?

I won't attempt to reproduce some of the excellent work done by others on this site - there are many web resources where you can read more. You might also want to read this FAQ - 'what is captioning ?'.

There are some reasons here and below though which make an interesting summary of why captioning makes sense, and who you can expect to benefit from it. Some of those people include your own organisation !

• What you need to know first
• Deaf and hard of hearing accessibility
• Non-English speaking audiences
• Distance learning and training providers
• Blind internet users and screen readers
• Search engines and audio / video content
• Young children and beginning readers
• Multiple source video and audio

Captioning : What you need to know :

The move towards broadband services is irresistable and uptake is increasing weekly. You have seen the tip of the iceberg in rich-media, with simple 56k video streams - imagine the experience available with universal 512k connections. Now, imagine how that experience translates for people who cannot hear or understand the audio dialogue.

Around 50% of US internet users will have a DSL connection as you read this, and be watching live video over the internet every day. If you are a commercial organisation, can you afford not to promote your message to broadband internet users ?

Individuals or groups of any size wishing to have a voice on the internet can easily benefit from providing rich media with captions. Captionkit is especially aimed at enabling this group to provide a very cost effective way of increasing access to your content.

Captionkit offers an easy way for you to try subtitling for yourself, before committing to an expensive agency.

Many of the points here are very relevant to companies wishing to meet their accessibility targets and statutory requirements for media accessibility in the US.

But captioning is not restricted to companies or broadcasters with money to burn. Any recent computer can encode video, audio and live camera action, enabling broadcasting for people wanting a global audience.

Groups who can benefit from captioned content

• Deaf and hard of hearing users
  
  As of the start of 2003, there are around 28 million deaf and hard of hearing people in the US, and a further 2 million in the UK. Of these a significant proportion use the internet daily for entertainment, information, shopping and all the usual activities.
  
  To these people, internet video and audio content can be a closed book : without an effective way of presenting audio dialogue, they are excluded from the advances in media technology available to other internet users.
  
  Captionkit will stream your text seamlessly with your existing video or audio content, allowing post-production without any need to change your original source material.
  
  
• Non-English speaking audiences
  
  These comprise the largest group of users on the internet, estimates of 800 million are not far off the mark. The majority of content on the web is still in English, and a disproprtionate volume of video and audio content is in English.
  
  While people may wish to understand your presentation, it greatly improves understanding if the language used can be displayed as text. Even a summary of your content rather than verbatim captions will be of help to people with a limited understanding of English.
  
  
• Distance learning and training providers, and blind internet users.
  
  Captions have been shown to consistently improve retention of training material. The availability of text descriptions of technical or proprietary terms is obviously helpful to many users of training material. Captionkit can optionally provide plain text archived transcripts of your captions, suitable for printing.
  
  This feature can also offer benefits to the braille and speech output devices used by blind users. Screen readers can easily translate text captions into braille or spoken content even for non-spoken dialogue and gestures.
  
  
• Search engines and audio / video content
  
  Search engines are a key feature of the internet, and rely on text content. No search engines are known that can index video or audio content.
  
  With captionkit, the scenery has changed : when making a text archive of your captions available and linked to your original presentation, now your video becomes searchable across the internet.
  
  Because Captionkit is designed to be search engine optimised, all search engines can index your content and link to your website, bringing you extra traffic and potential business revenue from across the world.
  
  
• Young children and beginning readers
  
  The maximum recommended rate is 240 words per minute for specialist content, falling to 150 words per minute for childrens content.
  
  Captionkit provides word-per-minute alerts, available at any time when composing captions. This allows you to adjust the language used to suit audiences with different reading rates, or modify captions which exceed reasonable speeds.
  
  
• Multiple source video / audio - quicktime, real player, media player
  
  With many systems, captions will have to be re-done if you change to video in a different source format. Using Captionkit, you can add captions once, for example using a real player source, and later add or change to windows media or quicktime formats without any changes to your captions.
  
  This is a significant time saver over manual conversion from plain text transcripts to proprietary formats, because Captionkit does all the hard work of conversion for you - in a flash !