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Coming later this February*, March, CapScribe, the free video editor for captioning and description, will be available. You'll be able to use CapScribe on your Mac to create captions for Quicktime, YouTube, and Flash videos. If you're interested in using CapScribe, give us a shout and we'll notify you when it is finally released.
*UPDATE: CapScribe isn't quite ready for release. I'm trying to make the time to repair a bug that will sometimes freeze the caption project.
Charles Silverman, who has been CapScribe's creator and developer for the past eight years, is committed to supporting and evolving CapScribe. Community news and future releases will be available right here.
CapScribe isn't quite ready for release at this time. I had hoped to have a version available but haven't had the time to track down a show-stopping bug that on rare occasions, freezes up access the the captions that have been created. If you email us, we'll let you know when it's up and running again.
In the meanwhile, check out the following resources:
NCAM/WGBH's (National Center for Accessible Media) Magpie is "free sofwware for adding captions and video descriptions to QuickTime, Windows Media, Real and Flash multimedia."
The OpenCaps software from the ATRC (Adaptive Technology Resource Centre) is initially modelled after CapScribe, but designed to run in a web browser. Presently in beta, it works in Firefox on Macs and Windows. OpenCaps is also designed to work as a plug-in with the OpenCast Project's Mattahorn, an "open source platform that supports the scheduling, capture, managing, encoding, and delivery of educational audio and video content."
YouTube has made a strong committment to captioning. Users can caption their own content on YouTube and even offer to caption other contributors' content. YouTube has even offered experimental "automatic" captioning. Learn more about how YouTube's captioning works.
We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the Described and Captioned Media Program's Caption it Yourself web site, which contains a great collection of information about captioning and description, and, of course, captioning it yourself. the site offers, in its own words, "Basic Guidelines for Busy Teachers, Families, and Others Who Shoot Their Own Video".
The web offers a rich collection of resources that you can google with a few key words and lose yourself for days. To mention a few: Caption.org is a advocacy site with lots of current information, and many links to other interesting sites as well. Topics range from legislative initiatives to issues involved in captioning the internet. The Timed Text Working Group of the W3C's mission is to "is to produce a W3C Recommendation for media online captioning by refining the W3C specification." This group is responsible for the DFXP standard, a subset of which is used by Flash.
It's one thing to provide caption tools and another to put captioned content on a web site. Kudos to the National Film Board of Canada. The NFB may be the first large organization in Canada to begin captioning and describing its online media. Check out the NFB's collection of "over a hundred captivating and informative documentary, animation and fictional films with these features."
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