Captioning Solutions for Handheld Media and Mobile Devices
Detailed Overview
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Millions of Americans of all ages use cell phones, PDAs or dedicated portable media players to access content related to almost every aspect of daily life. Video content on portable devices ranges from streamed television programs and "Webisodes" to elementary school science experiments, from university lectures to health and behavior management information for heart attack survivors. Companies increasingly use video podcasts as cost-effective methods for delivering product and training materials to their employees or customers. Emergency management agencies are developing alert and information systems that send content sent directly to portable devices.
However, the 22 million Americans who are deaf or hard-of-hearing cannot benefit from this content because mobile-video technologies do not address the technical requirements for packaging and delivering captions. Even video-enabled mobile devices that have the technical capability of downloading captioned content from the Web do not provide user interfaces to allow caption display.
NCAM will research these barriers and develop captioning solutions that will serve as models for the mobile media and technology industries and for public-policy developers. The project team will identify the problems that currently exist in the creation and delivery of captions to mobile devices, then will test and prototype required accessibility changes in production tools, formats, delivery methods and display technologies. Prototypes will model technical solutions for compression, packaging, identification, retrieval, downloading and processing of captioned video to portable devices. Prototypes will also model caption display options and explore customization capabilities. Testing with consumers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing will evaluate the usability of project solutions.
Project activities include:
- creation of demonstration models that show multiple methods of creating, distributing, downloading and displaying captioned content on handheld devices;
- publication of usability research on accessible interface and caption-display options;
- distributing information for content creators, service providers, and third-party tool developers to create and transcode captions;
- detailing the requirements necessary for non-proprietary as well as proprietary text and video formats to render captions.
For more information, contact:
Geoff Freed
Project Manager
Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media
WGBH Educational Foundation
1 Guest Street
Boston, MA 02135
617 300-4223 voice and fax
geoff_freed@wgbh.org
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