Jeffrey Daniel Frey’s Blog

Closed captioning podcasts, subtitling podcasts, captioned podcasts, or podcast subtitles are all ways of saying the same thing. Video podcast captioning is simply words added in some form or another to your podcast. These ideas don’t just have to be for video podcasts, here is the step by step process on captioning audio podcasts in iTunes: http://www.automaticsync.com/caption/podcaption.htm

For the rest of this post, I want to focus on video captioning. Yesterday I talked about transcription services and and how transcripts can be made for audio/video podcasts.

Also, to get a bit more background, see my post on Podcasting Accessibility where I go into why and how you would actually approach captioning your vodcast (overlay, silent film method, or extra text bar). Anyway you do it, adding words to your audio or video podcast is a good idea because:

1. it makes your podcast accessible to the over one million deaf people in the United States, and over 28 million people that suffer from some sort of hearing loss
2. it can be used as a tool for people learning English as a second language and those working to improve their literacy skills
3. it can be viewed by people on their computer or mobile media device in places where the audio would be intrusive or they did not have or could not use headphones (i.e. @ work)

Examples of Closed Captioned Video

• tecnocato closed captioned podcast – tecnocatos is Spanish for tech-addicts… here is a great example of someone using cutting edge technology and a bit of ingenuity to caption a podcast. Though their subtitles are a slight hack, and take some doing, it works very well. If you’re interested in doing subtitles like these, I found out that he uses Textation and he used LiveStage to create a QuickTime sprite that turns the captions on and off. If you have a copy of QuickTime Pro, you can extract the sprite and use it in your podcast.
• A homemade closed captioning example – here’s an example of a simple captioning example being used for the right reasons.

Closed Captioning Software

• http://www.cpcweb.com/Captioning/cap_splash.htm – not a bad captioning option… still a fairly manual process even though when you buy the product, it ‘feels’ like it will save a lot of time. Auto captioning is, from who I’ve talked to and what I’ve used, seems to be just as much work as having your podcast transcripted with time signatures, and putting the text into a quicktime text stream yourself.

Doing Your Own Captions

• http://www.webaim.org/techniques/captions/quicktime/ – why retype what’s already been typed? Check out the link for a step by step on adding captions/subtitles to your quicktime movie.

Closed Captioning and Subtitling Companies
I always like to suggest companies for those of you who have the ambition, but not the time. In this case, you’re also going to need cash… because it’s not cheap.

• http://www.visualdatainc.com
• http://www.vicaps.com/

Thanks for the positive feedback on the posts this week. I will post a how to setup a self transcription studio setup tomorrow.