We have just announced a new service, called Timed Text Speech, that is going to save you a TON of time. Timed Text Speech automatically creates a text transcript of your video using speech-to-text technology. So that means… you don’t need to manually type a transcript of your video anymore. Timed Text Speech can do that for you!
For broadcasters and cable programmers already grappling with the FCC’s closed captioning mandates, 2016 and 2017 will bring even more new requirements – this time for video distributed over the internet. These new captioning requirements will extend the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) and are developing at a time when audiences are watching less content over cable (or over the air) and more content on internet-enabled devices (what we call over-the-top or “OTT”).
Last week we brought you a brief history of closed captioning laws, as well as a whitepaper on the current, and future, state of closed captioning regulations. This week we bring in our resident expert on closed captioning software technology, Giovanni Galvez, to highlight some of the challenges with bringing your content up to date.
To help broadcasters better understand and meet federal regulations regarding TV closed captioning, Giovanni’s webinar provides information about closed caption data verification for common digital video files. It also examines the challenges that broadcasters face when transitioning to a file-based workflow.
Closed captioning (CC) laws are changing! Will they affect you? Learn more here as we explore the new regulations on CC and how you can make sure your content is up to current standards. In the meantime, learn a bit about the history of CC from our friend Ryan Salazar from:
Closed Captioning (or “CC” as it’s widely known) is a useful idea that took a surprisingly long time to come about. The passage of two acts in the early 90’s marked the legal ‘birth’ of required CC: the first of the two acts was the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, followed by The Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 (TDCA) in 1991 (Ah, the speed of government). Technology that allowed CC to be possible had appeared well before the early 90’s but until then it was not ‘officially’ required.
CC provides a visual medium for audio signals allowing the deaf or hard of hearing full access to the audio content of combined audio & visual transitions. While some consider them subtitles, the US and Canada are the only advanced nations that have a standard distinction between subtitles and CC. Subtitles in North America are the visual translation (typically in English) of a foreign language, whereas CC is a visual translation of all sound (again with the language printed typically being in English) that also includes a basic description of non-verbal sounds (and language) amid the CC text.
This additional description includes things like a description of sound effects (like ‘loud whistle’ or ‘dog growls’), or music (like ‘dramatic theme song’ or ‘happy tune’), or sometimes the identity and/or tone of a speaker (like ‘menacing tone’ or ‘the lawyer says…’). Subtitles were always included (i.e., the captions were ‘open’) on film or a television show where translation would be needed (until much more recent technology allowed newer films and/or shows the option of turning the subtitles on or off or even changing the language of the subtitles). CC, however, has always been optional; the additional text could be activated as desired.
