Making accessible movies a bit more painless

I attended a presentation by Bill Welch, Director of the Office of Disability Services here at Penn State, and he gave us some insight as to what his department does for students. It was very informative for me, as I really had no clue what all they did there. It also gave me a chance to show him something I've been working on on my own since last summer when we got a request from his office to make the LARCH 060 course accessible. We had transcripts, but they had to be listened to and massaged a bit so they matched what was actually recorded. Dave Stong captured the Flash animations as QT movies and we had Auto Synch Technologies create the text tracks that Dave then imported into the movies. I thought that it would be great if there were an easier way for us to do this in the future, so I started working on a little app to help with creating captioned movies. It came in handy with our Blended Learning course PHIL 12, where Dean Blackstock had to create text tracks for movies that were being delivered via Flash video. I was able to get the app to not only make QT text tracks, but also Flash XML text tracks for use with Flash CS3 video, which includes a new caption display component. So, the process for PHIL 12 worked something like this. Dean would use Dragon Naturally Speaking to get the bulk of the pre-recorded video content to text. He'd then listen to it and straighten out any errant words. These transcripts were just saved as text files. He could then import that text into the app and it would separate the text into separate captions. Then it was a matter of loading the movie and clicking a button as each caption is spoken. At the end of the movie you just click a button to create the Flash XML caption file. It can also create embedded QT caption tracks as well as several other formats. When I get the app a bit more complete I'll try to set up some kind of demo and perhaps get it on the lab machines for general PSU use. The app is Mac only, however, it will allow you to create SAMI text captions for Windows Media if you have the Flip4Mac plug-in on your Mac. Perhaps we can streamline the process for ODS to get accessible media to students.