Captioning:

MS Movie Maker

Adobe Premier

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Multimedia

Section 508 (b) requires that:

(b) Equivalent alternatives for any multimedia presentation shall be synchronized with the presentation.

Three Captioned Movies

Here are three captioned multimedia presentations and one uncaptioned .avi file for your review:

How to Make Captions using Windows Movie Maker

Another Captioned Movie - Windows Movie Maker - Service Learning

Adobe Premier Open Captioning (17MB File.)

Class2.avi

What are considered equivalent alternatives?

Audio Captioning and audio descriptions of visual information are considered equivalent alternatives.

Section 508 (b) requires that when an audio portion of a multimedia production is captioned, as required in provision (a), the captioning must be synchronized with the audio. Synchronized captioning gives a hearing-challenged person the same equivalent experience (i.e., synchronized audio)

If a website offers audio files with no video, do they have to be captioned?

Probably not.  An audio presentation is not a multimedia presentation, though it is a non-text element.  Audio only must meet the equivalent text standard of 508 (a).  A text equivalent or transcript of the audio must be available.

Similarly, a (silent) web slide show presentation does not need to have an audio description accompanying it, but does require text alternatives to be associated with the graphics.

If a Federal agency official delivers a live audio and video webcast speech, does it need to be captioned?

Yes, this would be a multimedia presentation and would require the speech to be captioned.

Example:

National Endowment for the Humanities
www.neh.gov/media/scottcaptions.ram

National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM)
http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/access/dvs/lion.ram

* * *

Open Captioning - Microsoft Movie Maker -

"I took at stab at adding open captions to a short video clip using Microsoft Movie Maker (under Accessories). It was very user-friendly and took me about three hours to add captions to this clip: http://www.montgomerycollege.edu/ctl/video/moviemaker508.htm

You could do this with a WebCam. For some projects, I have even thought of using a mixture of still images with short, 30-second video clips from my digital camera.

This particular Service Learning video was created by ITV (Instructional Television). They gave us a video tape from a DV camera. Then, we had to go to one of the CAT labs to capture the video in Adobe Premiere. But, now that I'm becoming more familiar with MovieMaker, I see that it is capable of video capture too, although I haven't tried it yet.

Once the Service Learning video was in Adobe Premiere, I saved it as a .WMA file and imported into Movie Maker. Movie Maker lets you import a host of different types of media files. You place the file(s) in your timeline, and then you can extract sections, add narrations, music, captions, etc."

Our thanks to Kim Emery of Montgomery College's Center of Teaching and Learning (CTL) for sharing this cost-effective open captioning approach with us.  Kim was a student in the 508 Accessibility version of this class for Montgomery College staff and faculty in Spring, 2006.

Adobe Premier Open Captioning (17 Mb).

The Adobe Premier Open Captioning multimedia presentation found on the linked page is a whopping 173,685,846 bytes (17.3 Mb - megabytes) and takes 15 minutes to download with the college's T-1 line.

Compare that with the shorter Microsoft Movie Maker .wmv file.  Notice that placement and "readability" are important, but not mandated by the 508 Multimedia rule (b).