Web Accessibility at the University of California

Captioning Services and Tools

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Outside services may be hired to transcribe and caption videos, or in-house staff may use software tools to create transcripts and captions. The following services and tools have been found to be useful although the University does not endorse these products.

Services

• Automatic Sync Technologies (commercial): This company offers an automated captioning service that allows for a wide variety of output formats for captioning Web media or broadcast media (videotape and DVDs), or adding search and navigation features to Web media.
• Cogi (commercial): This company provides both transcription and captioning services and offers competitive pricing.

Tools

• Camtasia (commercial): This recording software creates video and audio recordings and also creates captioning using speech-to-text capabilities. It works best with recordings made with Camtasia; imported media results in less useable data. See the tutorial for extracting the audio from a video file to MP3 format.
• Captionate (commercial): The Manitu Group offers this low-cost tool, which allows you to embed captions in Flash Video files (.flv). You can request a free 10-day demo version. You will need to use a caption-enabled Flash Video player (.swf) in order to display the caption text on a web page.
• Express Scribe (free): This free audio player can assist in the manual creation of transcripts. See the tutorial for using Express Scribe.
• MAGpie 2 (free): The National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) offers this Java-based captioning tool, which allows you to add captions to QuickTime, Real Media, and Windows Media Player video formats.
  
• Overstream (free): This free Web tool enables the production of a caption stream that plays in sync with an online video without altering the original video. This is a good choice for YouTube videos, since downloading, captioning, and re-posting YouTube videos, may violate copyright law. See the Overstream tutorial.