I'm Ray Kimball of the Information Technology Institute at Montgomery College and today we're demonstrating how to synchronize text with multimedia to build accessible web pages for those with disabilities.

First I want to thank the Visual Communications Technologies Department of Montgomery College and especially Joanne Carl who is a member of the faculty and also Kelly Renshaw who is actually producing the simultaneous text that you are seeing here today. We're using a technology developed by Adobe called Adobe Premiere, which layers the text over the video you're watching using a title tool. This is called open captioning as opposed to closed captioning.

Why are we doing this? Well, as you know if you're taking this course, section 508 of the web accessibility rules of the Federal Government requires that equivalent alternatives for any multimedia presentation shall be synchronized with the presentation. And that's Rule 1194.22 (b), if you want to memorize the rule.

But, anyway the two big words that we have here are multimedia and synchronized. The other big phrase is we have to have an "equivalent alternative" for the multimedia, meaning the audio.

So who are we trying to accommodate here? Well, we're trying to accommodate those both with hearing disabilities, and sight disabilities who are unable to see the movie. We're assuming for the moment that we are not accommodating those who are both blind and deaf for example who can neither see nor hear the movie.

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We're assuming that those who can see the movie may not be able to hear the audio, so we're providing the text equivalent. And we're assuming that those who can hear the movie are able to hear my voice. So we'll get to that a little bit farther in this presentation.

Now, we have the problem where we have to synchronize the text. Your textbook says section 508 requires a complete verbatim transcript of the audio material in order the satisfy this particular rule that we are talking about today. So how do we do this? Well your textbook at chapter 13 suggests that we do either closed captioning for those who have hearing loss, that we do a signed interpretation, which I believe, is an alternative not necessarily required -- simply a suggestion, or we do captioning on the web using an XML technology developed by the World Wide Web Consortium called "Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, which is developed or supported by Real Player, QuickTime, some of the video presentations that you run into on the web. That's SMIL, "Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language" if you want to try to remember it you can think of it as a smile. This is an XML based technology which can be written by HTML and the reason that the textbook is saying that you need to include that is so that the text reader for the blind can also read this presentation.

Now what your seeing on the screen in terms of the simultaneous presentation of my lecture can not be read by (a) text reader for the blind. And so that the suggestion that is being made in the textbook is that we also need to provide an equivalent alternative for those who are both blind and deaf. Now that's a big task and that's one of the reasons why you don't see much multimedia on federal presentations.

So as a result were going to look simply at the four square of the rule which would seem to require only that we provide a simultaneous text. And after were done with this video I'll also show you how we can deal with a web based XML version to present something that can be read by Text Reader for the Blind also.

Now how are we solving the problem or attempting to solve the problem created by this rule with today's presentation? Well first we've created the video and we've embedded within it a text line. Now the text line isn't embedded the way closed captioning is embedded in your DVD when you turn on the captioning feature, its actually an open captioning which perhaps one day could be read by Text Reader for the Blind. We're presenting a streaming video which means that it's playing even before its fully loaded, we're using a digital captioning feature that's part of the video itself, it's a separate layer over the video and then as you can see I think to the left or right its hard to tell where the text is going to be but were going to do something else. We're going to also put the full text equivalent on the page even though it's not simulcast. Well, that's enough for this video and now we'll go back to class and continue the discussion.

Video Specifications

Normal Video Quality:

• 30 Frames Per Second
• Digital Quality = 100 percent

Digital Quality of Video on this Page:

• 6 Frames Per Second (80% reduction).
• Quality = 5 percent of analog videotape quality.

Captioning: Open Captioning. Cannot be read by text readers.

Multimedia Editing Software: Adobe Premier.

• Open captioning and transcription typed in manually.
• Separate layer of video and text in production copy.
• Layers are "rendered" (mixed and made into one layer) in final production copy for Quicktime movie.
• Premier then "compresses" the digital information and uses only what it needs from the video. This is called "keying." The text is superimposed.
• Text in final copy is compressed within the same layer as the video, so it cannot be read by text readers.
• Digital multimedia format: Quicktime, by Apple Corporation. See http:www.apple.com

Cost of Closed Captioning: $10,000 per half-hour.