Chapter 11. Producing and Deploying Closed Captions

Whether you work in a government facility, in academia, or for a contractor supplying video to the government, your work must meet the accessibility standards of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (see www.section508.gov). As one regulation states, "All training and informational video and multimedia productions which support the agency's mission, regardless of format, that contain speech or other audio information necessary for the comprehension of the content, shall be open or closed captioned." That's a big net that catches a lot of government and academic videos.

This chapter starts with a look at closed-captioning issues such as what to caption, and how closed captions differ from DVD subtitles. Once you decide to caption, your next step is to set captioning standards to ensure consistency within and among your video productions. The following section will examine the most important issues to consider when establishing your captioning standards.

Then I'll describe the captioning workflow, starting with how to format your files for import into a captioning program. Using a remarkable program called MAGpie, we'll synchronize a set of sample captions to a video file and integrate the results with Windows Media, RealVideo, and QuickTime videos.

If you're producing both streaming videos and DVDs, you'll need to produce one text stream to work with both formats. As a final step, I'll identify the tools and suggest a workflow for doing just that.

Before going further, let me acknowledge the kind assistance from two captioning professionals who helped shape this chapter. First, thanks to Cynthia M. King, Ph.D, executive director, academic technology at Gallaudet University, for providing access to her staff and a thorough "tech read" of the chapter. Also, Andrew Kirkpatrick from the Media Access Group at WGBH in Boston provided invaluable insight into the inner workings of MAGpie2, the captioning tool from the Media Access Group, and how closed captions are implemented by Apple, Microsoft, and Real in their respective formats. I also appreciate Andrew's careful "tech read" of this chapter.