Do It Yourself
YouTube and Automatic Captioning
YouTube has made a strong commitment to captioning. Users can caption their own content on YouTube and even offer to caption other contributors' content.
YouTube is now offering experimental "automatic" captioning. There are two parts to this - Audio-to-Text translation and Automatic Time-coding. From what we've seen, the Audio-to-Text feature isn't terribly useful at this time, and the results can be quite amusing. On the other hand, the automatic time-coding feature, where you submit a transcript and Youtube figures out the timecode, is quite impressive when paired with a single speaker with a clear voice. Learn more about how YouTube's captioning works.
Described and Captioned Media Program
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".
Magpie from NCAM
NCAM at WGBH (NCAM stands for the National Center for Accessible Media) offers Magpie. Magpie is "free sofwware for adding captions and video descriptions to QuickTime, Windows Media, Real and Flash multimedia." Magpie enjoys a huge base of educational users and benefits from being cross-platform.
CapScribe
Charles Silverman, who has been CapScribe's creator and developer for the past eight years, continues to evolve and support CapScribe for Mac. You can use CapScribe to create captions for Quicktime, YouTube, and (soon) Flash. If you're interested in using CapScribe, give us a shout and we'll send you a link to download your copy.
OpenCaps from the ATRC
OpenCaps 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 Matterhorn, an "open source platform that supports the scheduling, capture, managing, encoding, and delivery of educational audio and video content."
WebAim.org
Webaim.org offers a number of impressive articles and how-do guides on many aspects of web accessibility, including media access. Coverage ranges from Captioning with MAGpie 2.0 to a series of blogs on the future of web accessibility.
Timed Text Working Group
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.
Caption.org
The web offers a rich collection of resources that you can google with a few key words and lose yourself for days. 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.