Video and audio clips are popular on the Web, but often inaccessible to people who are deaf or blind. NCAM has created a new editing tool, the Media Access Generator (MAGpie), which will make it easier to produce accessible multimedia. It will be distributed in the summer of 1999 via software developer kits, the Web, and CD-ROM.

MAGpie will allow multimedia authors to transcribe and position caption text, assign timecodes to the captions so they appear and disappear at the appropriate intervals, and preview captions before creating the final file, to correct mistakes or reformat the text. MAGpie will generate captions in any of three formats: Apple's QuickTime, W3C's SMIL, or Microsoft's SAMI. MAGpie will perform similar feats for audio descriptions.

MAGpie can be used in schools as well. NCAM's research has demonstrated that writing captions is a valuable classroom activity. Students who create captions for short video clips tend to write more; as a result, their writing skills improve more rapidly. MAGpie will make it easier for students to produce their own accessible multimedia.

Support for MAGpie comes from the Trace Research and Development Center at the University of Wisconsin as part of its Information Technology Access Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research.


Media Access, Spring/Summer 1999:
The Phantom Menace Comes to NCAM | Accessible Digital TV | Enhanced Arthur 2000 | CD-ROMs, Useful for Everyone | MAGpie: Hot New Web Tool | Caption Center Links TV Viewers to the Web | MIT and Online Learning | From the Director | "Messages" at the Museum of Science

Priority Access: Serving NCAM Business Partners
NCAM Helps Prepare Business Partners for the Future | Millennium Partners | Collaborative Partnerships Increase Access | Equal Access: From the 1950s to the Future

Copyright © 1999 WGBH Educational Foundation

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NCAM | WGBH Educational Foundation