This site provides resources for captioning online video. This is a time when new technologies are becoming more available for captioning online videos. Since the law was passed, YouTube and Google Video have now added this feature, so we can expect the captioning of online videos to increase dramatically in the future.
Here are some options for captioning your online videos:
Because many of these are new technologies, there may be some bugs in the process. If you have questions or comments about these technologies, we invite your feedback so that we can make this site more useful to political candidates seeking to make accessible advertisements.
ProjectReadOn.com This is a service where you can pay to have videos captioned, and then they will provide you the code to add them to your web site. The video below is captioned by Project ReadOn and was created by Deaf Performing Artists Network to the music of John Mayer. With this service, you can upload a video to YouTube or similar online video hosting service and then have the video captioned. (There are samples of political campaigns that have ads subtitled on this site. However, in the interest of not seeming to endose a particular candidate, we are offering a non-political video as a sample.)
Google Video and You Tube also offer a list of services which can assist with captioning. You can access that list here.
GoogleVideo and YouTube, both owned by the same company, now support the captioning of videos. It requires putting a script into a format with segments separated by time codes. It is a simple process described on Google Video's web site. The process is the same for YouTube as it is for Google Video. You can see a sample below.
This free service allows you to submit a Flash video and then do the subtitling of it yourself. It then gives you the option of sharing this video with the code you need to have it play directly on your site. You can see a demonstration of how this works by clicking here. The ad below was subtitled with this service. The transcription process on this site also allows you to create files which you can download and then transfer to YouTube or Google Video to easily caption videos in those formats.
A similar service to dotSub, this allows you to create subtitles for video that is already on the internet, such as on YouTube or Google Video. You can then embed the video on your web site from Overstream, or can add the subtitles directly to the orginal online video. Here's a link to a closed-captioning experiment using this service.
MAGpie is a free software which allows you to caption video. It works on both Windows or Mac platforms and can be used to caption QuickTime, Windows Media, or Real Media formats. This option gives you more control over the size of the captions. It also allows you to host the video on your own website, and be able to show it even if you are not connected to the internet.
Disclaimer: This website is not for an actual candidate but used for demonstration purposes to explain about Minnesota requirements for making political advertisements accessible through the use of captioning.
