I was at WGBH in Boston last week meeting with the folks at the National Center for Accessible Media, the birthplace of closed captions for broadcast TV, and the central front on all matters pertaining to online accessibility.  I mentioned that some of our government clients and prospects have expressed concern about the hassle/expense of creating captions.  Their response was that it’s not optional—all government Web sites are required to make every page (and every video!) on their Web sites universally accessible, and there was an indication that the Dept. of Justice would be cracking down soon.  Ensuring that more sites have more video that is accessible is certainly good for the online video industry as a whole, but the prospect of the DoJ “policing” this seems counter-productive.  Will they fine agencies for non-compliance?  That’s robbing Peter to pay Paul, and will leave the non-compliant agencies with even fewer resources to apply toward compliance.  Perhaps they’ll hand out “captioning vouchers” to assist agencies that fall short of compliance.  Not likely.

The perception is that captioning videos is hard.  It’s not really hard.  Thermodynamics at MIT was hard.  Captioning videos is cumbersome at best, expensive at worst.  Many of our video players can display captions, provided there’s an associated .dfxp file.  DFXP (distribution format exchange profile) is a W3C standard, but there are various acceptable ways of displaying the time, the duration for caption display, etc.  The proper display of the captions is dependant on well-formatted .dfxp files.  In my assessment of various third-party caption providers, more than one sent me .dxfp files (dyslexics beware!) which could not be recognized by our content management system.  If companies that create caption files as their main day-to-day business can’t get it right, what’s the average Web video producer to do?  There are options for outsourcing (assuming the file extensions can be kept straight!) but this can entail considerable expense, and still requires the user to create the association between their videos and the caption files manually.  There are free tools, such as the NCAM’s MAGpie, but many government agencies don’t have spare manpower to put toward this effort.

At The FeedRoom are working on tools that will make it easy (and cheap) to get captions from third-party caption providers, as well as tools to assist in the creation and/or editing of caption files, that can be associated with videos from within our Studio content management system.  We fully expect that more and more clients will be embracing captioning, and not just our government clients—having a time-stamped transcript is also quite handy for searching within a video.  Anyone with a message to spread would be well-served to make certain their message can be received be the widest possible audience.  Providing captions is a good first step toward universal accessibility.  -MP

The United States Department of Health and Human Services, a FeedRoom customer for more than three years, is breaking new ground in making video accessible to everyone, including those with handicaps and other special needs. HHS is one of the early adopters of our unique FeedRoom Access player, which takes advantage of closed captioning, among other key accessibility features.

During the past week HHS posted a 90-minute captioned video of one of the White House’s five Regional Forums on Healthcare Reform. A major step forward in making content accessible to all. As a lead-in to the overall White House commitment to healthcare reform, President Obama offers a brief message, again, captioned for wider audiences.

Congratulations to HHS for leading the way in making information on this critical issue available to everyone.

- Brian K.