This presentation at the AHEAD (The Association on Higher Education And Disability) Accessing Higher Ground conference, addresses captioning basics, accessibility laws for higher ed , as well as captions formats, and integrated captioning with lecture capture systems and video platforms.
Video Captioning Q&A
Q. I have a question about the formats that you'll produce it in. So, if somebody's buying your services, they can request any or all?
The way our process works is we will create a core word to word time synchronized transcript. So there'll be a transcript with a time code behind every word. And from that, we create all these derivative formats, all these different caption formats, timestamped transcripts, all of these interactive formats.
But at the core is just this timestamp. And we store all of those indefinitely. So you could come back years later and do something different if you're publishing with a different player. It's all available.
Q. You say "word-for-word time synchronization"? How's that done? How's that possible?
A. It's interesting. So that's an outcome of the process that we've built. So each one of these words, for example, has a time code behind it. So I can click on any word, and it'll jump to its respective point in the video. And it's just an outcome of the process. When we put it through our speech recognition process, the draft that comes out of that already has a time code associated with each word.
So then, when our transcriptionists go to clean up that draft, it already accounts for the time codes that are already in place. And so actually, when we create captions files, those are actually less precise. We have to break them up using natural language processing. Yes?
Q. First I wanted to say, I love your tool, your SFV to SRT converter. I go to your website and I use it almost every day. So that's really a great thing. And what we're interested in outsourcing for some more technical videos in our nursing program and things like that. What if, when we get the caption file back, some editing needs to be done past that. How does that work?
A. That's an excellent question. In most cases, we find that the transcript is very, very high quality and the accuracy is very high, that editing isn't really required. But in rare cases, you're right. Sometimes you'll need to maybe change the spelling of someone's name if the transcriptionist wasn't able to research that. Or you might actually want to redact part of the transcript, or you might want to block out somebody's name.
And you'll actually be able to freely make changes to that text, and it'll automatically account for the time synchronization. And the neat thing about it is that each word is linked to the video. So let's say you want to listen to a word over and over again, you just click on it so you can hear it better and it'll play from that point. And then as soon as you click Save Changes, that will propagate through to all the output files.
Q. Do you have a standard for quality of the audio that you'll accept? What do you do when you get a video from a campus that's really, really poor quality?
Once in a while we get content where either there was a lot of background noise, or maybe have many people talking over each other, or music playing, or it wasn't miked properly. So in that case, what we usually do is we have to assess a small nominal difficulty surcharge, but it's pretty rare.
A. The captions plugin that you described that currently is available when you use 3Play services-- where does the interface have to take place? Could that happen on Echo360? Does that have to happen on your own server that you host?
Basically, you would just install that by embedding it just with a few lines of JavaScript code. So the same way that you embed, for example, a YouTube player on a website, you would then put in the embed code for the captions plugin, which would then reference the player, and then it would just communicate automatically. You can also host the transcripts and these plugins and have it streaming from your location. There are some advantages and disadvantages to doing hosted versus us hosting it.
Read the full transcript & additional Q&A: http://ow.ly/qwjND
About 3Play Media:
3Play Media provides cost-effective, premium quality video captioning, transcription, and translation solutions to hundreds of customers in higher education, enterprise, media companies, and government. Our mission is to simplify the captioning process by providing a user-friendly account system, flexible API's, and integrations with a multitude of video players, platforms, and lecture capture systems. 3Play Media is based in Cambridge, MA and has been operating since 2008.
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