Captioning Tips

• These tips and links to resources are based on the content developed for the online and classroom course Captioning Essentials, http://mn.gov/mnit-accessibility/captioningessentials/.
• The course is free and an excellent source of resources.
• Click My Syllabus for a list of pages/topics. For example, Caption File Formats is listed under Module 2.
• The resources section of this course contains most of the links to captioning programs and other resources referenced in the presentation: http://mn.gov/mnit-accessibility/captioningessentials/resources.html.
• In addition, the course provides a fairly extensive glossary, including common terms such as CART, caption file format extensions and links to the file types and other relevant information: http://mn.gov/mnit-accessibility/captioningessentials/glossary.html.

Terms/Definitions

• Captioning: the textual display of aural information on video
• SDH: subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

Legal Info

Federal

• Telecommunications Act of 1996 (mandated captioning for TV programming): http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html
• Section 504 of the Rehab Act (federal precursor to the ADA): http://www.ada.gov
• Section 508 amendment for federal IT guidelines: http://section508.gov
• 21st Century Telecommunications Act
  

Minnesota

The Minnesota accessibility standard implements both Section 508 and the WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

Links

• Link to YouTube video presenting the business case for captioning.
• DCMP (Described and Captioned Media Program): cited as a resource for captioning companies, sample style guide, etc.
  • Click links to Captioning Key for style guide and related info
• YouTube links (for help, scroll to bottom of web page for Help link then search from there)
  • Adding/editing captions
    

Live/Realtime Captioning

Search for a live captioning provider: visit the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA) website then click the Professional Directory link at the very top right of the page.

Captioning web services, such as encoding for CART and other displays of live captions (most realtime captioners may handle the contracting for you):

• StreamText
• Speche

Recorded/Offline Captioning

Note most of these links plus short descriptions are also available on the Captioning Essentials Resources page. So Ive just listed a few top resources here.

Web-based tools

• Subtitle-Horse (allows you to import a transcript)

Software tools

• Subtitle workshop (probably the most powerful free tool available)
• Movie Captioning (excellent low-cost tool)