Skills for Access

Why this is important

Providing captions enables media that contains spoken or other audio information important to understanding the media's content (for example on- or off-screen dialogue, sound effects, or background music) to be accessible to anyone who has difficulty hearing, or is unable to hear, the media soundtrack. The task of creating an effective set of captions that are appropriately synchronised with the media clip to be captioned can be challenging and time-consuming, and this task can be made significantly easier when using authoring software such as MAGpie.

General Principles

MAGpie (Media Access Generator) is a free software application developed by the National Centre for Accessible Media (NCAM) in the US, and helps web developers add synchronised captions and audio descriptions to web video. It will generate captions and/or audio descriptions for playing on each of the three main web media players - QuickTime, Real Player and Windows Media Player, and also has support for Flash caption authoring.

At the time of writing (Feb 2005), the current version of MAGPie is version 2.01, and is available for Microsoft Windows 98, 2000, NT, or XP or Macintosh OS X.

NB: We have provided general advice on captioning in a separate How To: Provide text equivalents for audio - general advice on captions.

Before you continue

The advice on this page helps you avoid introducing a specific accessibility barrier, but it's not a magic formula. To avoid attempting to follow a technical solution that is not appropriate to the resource and its intended purpose, you need to know the context in which the multimedia resource is being used:

1. The purpose or aim of the multimedia resource in question, and whether it is being used to supplement another resource in the learning environment, or whether its use is required by students.
2. The target audience, their knowledge and expectations, and the type of browsing and assistive technology that they may be using.
3. Whether the information and experiences provided by the multimedia technology are already available in an equivalent, alternative form.

For more background on this approach, see our Guide to the use of multimedia in accessible e-learning.

Technique Details

There are a number of very useful tutorials which provide step-by-step instructions for installing MAGpie, and for creating and combining captions and audio descriptions with media files. These tutorials note that the installation process can be frustratingly difficult to complete successfully unless certain steps are taken in advance of the download and installation. We therefore recommend you follow - in the exact order given - the installation process described in one of the tutorials offered by WebAIM, NCAM or the University of Wisconsin.

Once installed, for a new project, the order in which actions are generally carried out in MAGpie are:

1. Open the media file to be captioned; and save your new project.
2. Set styles and language for caption text.
3. If you have access to a file containing a prepared transcript of the media, this can be imported into MAGpie, thus saving a significant amount of time.
4. Play the media file, listen to the soundtrack, and create a caption for the first 'chunk' of audio information. Select appropriate text from the imported transcript if you have one, otherwise type in the caption text. This may be transcribed speech (the first words spoken by a character - limit this to a sensible amount if they speak at length or rapidly; captions can be split if too long), or important incidental sound or music.
5. Repeat the previous step until all audio content has been captioned.
6. WebAIM recommends not entering the speaker name in the separate area provided by MAGpie, but to incorporate it into the caption text in the form Speaker: dialogue.
7. Now synchronise captions by adding a timestamp to each one. Do this by playing and pausing the video at the point at which each caption will be displayed; use MAGpie to set the current timestamp to the corresponding caption (there are function keys assigned to assist this process).
8. The final step is to export the caption file into a format appropriate to the destination media player (QuickTime, RealPlayer or Windows Media Player). MAGpie can also generate a text transcript file from your captions.

Testing

Once you have created captions for your media file, it is obviously essential that you test the appearance, content and synchronisation quality of the captions in the destination player (different versions on different operating systems as appropriate). Assuming you are familiar with the soundtrack, you should be able to do this yourself to some extent, but seeking feedback from people unfamilar with the resource, preferably who are deaf or hearing impaired (or if they can hear, turn off the audio) is also recommended.