Video Captioning For Accessibility

Caption Live WebCasts With Chat Captioning

Chat Captioning is designed to be used in a live webcast where the presenter or lecturer has already been trained in speech-to-text conversion software of their choice and want to capture the audio stream, convert it to text, broadcast the text live to chat participants, time-stamp it and format it as a QuickTime Text Track for export to the clipboard and subsequent merger with the digital video. However, speech-to-text software is not required. Chat Captioning still allows the user to type their chat postings in two basic ways as explained below.

When you first register and/or login, you'll be in a multipoint-to-multipoint' chat, which means that anyone can join and post to the chat from anywhere in the world, but the captioning features will be hidden until you enter the chat administrator mode. To enter the chat administrator mode where you can generate and capture a QuickTime text track, you will need an administrator password (Use 'admax1' for this demonstration). Once you enter the Chat Administration mode, only the chat postings you submit will become part of the QuickTime text track. Other chat participant's postings will appear in the chat text box, but not in your QT text track or complete transcript.

In chat administration mode there are two methods for posting to the chat and adding to the QT text track. The first is the typical 'type-and-click' method, where you'll type your posting into a text box and click 'Send Message' to post to the chat. The second is the 'streaming text' method, wherein you can either type or use a speech-to-text program such as Dragon Naturally Speaking to automatically post text phrases of a particular user-defined length to the chat without having to click 'Send Message'. Learn more about how to use these features.

Once your QT text track is complete, you may copy the text into the clipboard, paste it into your preferred word processor, and save it as a .txt format file to merge with your digital video using QuickTime Pro's Player. Details for this final step are available on Apple's web site.

Chat Captioning was created using Macromedia Director, and it is delivered through a web browser using the Shockwave plugin. If you do not already have it, you may download the Shockwave plugin here.

(Please note: this chat is currently being served out of only a single port of the ECCSE server, which means that anyone connecting will be part of the same chat. The captioning features are not affected by other chat participants' postings. If you would like to set up your own dedicated chat captioning service, please contact us with your requests).

****Run Chat Captioning****

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