Accessibility to Multimedia
Originally posted August 10, 2008
508 STANDARD – Multimedia content on a page must also have accompanying alternative text or a description. For audio, this includes a text transcript or synchronized caption for the audio. The transcript is not a separate file, but part of the page. Captioning helps the deaf or hard of hearing to comprehend the content. The captioning can also help index the page for search engines. The W3C introduced SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). SMIL is a markup language for closed captioning. RealPlayer and others have used the standard to provide manual formation of text for audio captioning.
DigitalChalk, Hunter College and IBM Research have built an automated transcription engine that creates synchronized text for audio and video files. DigitalChalk displays the captioned text and provides a real time editor for adding text for blind viewers of video. This function will be available 4Q2008. This work was the result of a grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR).