SAME LANGUAGE SUBTITLES VITAL!

EVER enjoy a foreign film with great captioning until they start speaking in English for a short time?

Then subtitles stop – ugh! This happened to me the other night on Amazon prime videos. It also happens on Netflix. Double ugh.

What we need to advocate for is SAME LANGUAGE SUBTITLES, and we need same language subtitles on ALL VIDEOS of course.

For example, videos and live streams online now from so many GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS all over the world, including from the White House.

We need same language subtitles to enjoy all our British TV shows. Many times the accents are a little confusing. Read this about the dilemma: https://web.archive.org/web/20080321131957/http://www.tvweek.com/blogs/blink/2007/05/translated_from_the_british.php

Add your comments please. Join the CCAC. Let’s advocate. Let’s Talk Captioning! Equal communication access is the law, and the right thing to do. Go to http://CCACaptioning.org

COMMUNICATION IS LIFE.

CCACAPTIONING@GMAIL.COM

CAPTIONING ADVOCACY NEEDS YOU

Guess we’ve been very busy -long time since new blogpost – doing, among other things, Captioning Advocacy!

CCAC has strength in numbers – you are needed too. JOIN today. Why not? Email anytime if you have a question about being a member.

CCACAPTIONING@GMAIL.COM

CCACAPTIONING.ORG IS THE WEBSITE

CCAC MISSION – INCLUSION OF QUALITY CAPTIONING UNIVERSALLY

p.s. we welcome guest blogposts about captioning!

Summer Solstice and Captioning Advocacy

The long days now in our part of the world seem ideal for expanding our CAPTIONING ADVOCACY activities. How about joining us – helping – in any small way or larger way that works for us both!

CCAC is all volunteers. We need new members and added energies all the time – as much as we welcome donations.

Some CCAC behind-the-scenes chores are listed below – and if you want to suggest a new way or a new idea about how to accomplish the CCAC Mission- please tell us!

Some of the current CCAC captioning advocacy projects are listed below also – and we’d love to have your participation. Email soon.

CCAC Mission – Inclusion of Quality Captioning Universally
Web – http://CCACaptioning.org
Email – CCACaptioning@gmail.com
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Captioning Advocacy Projects all welcome new helpers! Get in touch with questions and ideas for:

CCAC GRANTS FOR LIVE EVENT CAPTIONING – CCAC gives money to educate, raise awareness and make captioning inclusion happen, Apply now! http://ccacaptioning.org/ccac-sponsorship-for-cart-a-new-captioning-advocacy-program/ – help us “market” this offer of Free Captioning.

CAPTIONS CAPTURE THE VOTES Campaign to encourage all government leaders on all levels to make their messages and live events accessible with quality captioning. http://ccacaptioning.org/captions-capture-the-votes/ Volunteers needed.

MEDIA – VIDEO – CAPTIONING ADVOCACY includes so much. Recently, CCAC talked with YOUTUBE/GOOGLE directly. #WHccNOW campaign on social media for White House to add quality CC to all social media videos. CCAC contacts Senators pushing OBM for WEB ACCESS. Every day, volunteers contact many video content owners to use Quality CC, offer to add quality CC to short videos for free or at cost. Media – part of life!

CCAC also participates in Cinema and TV media advocacy, distributes media captioning news, and more…more…more (e.g. April 2016, success for Florida TV station).

AIR TRAVEL ACCESS campaign, info on http://ccacaptioning.org/captioning-transportation/ – CCAC confers directly with USA DOT and we hope to see this develop in 2016. CCAC Let’s fly together – contact us to help. Volunteers welcome.

CAPTIONING TRAINING INFORMATION project. – info here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/144wc5uxvxjjnvB-akUcs3V1Sj15Q8PDKqbLP7IMYg8A/edit
NEW CCAC MOVIE – WE ARE THE CCAC – ENJOY here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5cTKUxgG2M

GOVERNMENT MEETINGS NEED LIVE CAPTIONING – ONSITE AND ONLINE. City council to state level to national – quality CC required.

Ongoing smaller captioning advocacy by many CCAC members every day! We contact TV stations, Internet video producers, schools, churches, employers and others Join discussions in CCAC member forum online. For two examples, Sesame Street new videos need quality CC when published; Leading non-profit for Women in Politics needs CC for all webinars, and many others.

CCAC activities to help with also:
Advocacy projects as above, or a new one you want to do. If there is an area of everyday life where captioning is lacking, why not put yourself forward to lead or participate in a small team which can co-ordinate advocacy activities?

Writers and contributors: If you like writing, you can submit articles about captioning to us for publication or we can help you submit them to external publications to raise awareness and increase provision of captioning

Film-makers: If you have camera equipment and editing skills, you could make a short film or slideshow about your experience of captioning that CCAC can promote via social media and our websites.

Administration and book-keeping: We need volunteers to help us keep track of new members, donations, sponsors, and more essential tasks for the organization.
Web developers and digital marketing experts: We need help to design new web pages and digital promotional materials

Social media leaders: A lot of our work takes place over social media and we need people to monitor and stimulate activity on our various channels

Grants leader: CCAC gives grants for live event captioning to stimulate provision. We are seeking a volunteer who can help deliver outreach activities to support this alongside a fabulous small team in place now

Hearing loss and related Groups Collaborations and Liasons: We need volunteers to continue and develop new working relationships between CCAC and other organizations that support people with hearing loss, deafness, disabilities, education, media, etc.

Fundraising: CCAC is a non-profit organization that needs to raise funds in order to grow its activities. We would be very keen to hear from people with fundraising skills who may be able to assist us in this

Marketing the CCAC and the CCAC Mission – all tasks above are part of this, yet here, someone to use an identified open source system to keep track of it all and more. Yes you can!

REGISTRATION OPEN! CAPTION STUDIES CON AUG 1-2 2016

THIS IS THE FIRST CONFERENCE OF IT’S KIND! YOU ARE INVITED TO REGISTER NOW AND SEND THIS MESSAGE TO ALL YOUR NETWORKS WHO MAY BE INTERESTED IN CAPTIONING TOO – YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE DEAF OR HARD OF HEARING TO LOVE AND USE CAPTIONING!

All information about the Con is here: CAPTIONSTUDIES.WOU.EDU
It’s Free, all Online, and Captioned too.
REGISTER NOW USING THIS LINK: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1wrt3nZWYz-U_d2Ti3_8DKzr54DTIPMYHiABPNUSzzag/viewform?c=0&w=1
CCAC is very proud to be one of the sponsors of this exciting event and in fact, we are jumping for joy – see you online Augusst 1 and 2. Let’s Talk Captioning!

CCAC IS PLACE 2 B 4 CAPTIONING ADVOCACY
CCACAPTIONING@GMAIL.COM
CCACAPTIONING.ORG

Global Accessibility Awareness Day – Let’s Do it!

I’m sitting in Logan Airport in Boston today and it looks like I have 45 minutes (only! darn) of free wireless connection here in terminal C. Time to type quickly – and a short post about the importance of this day – May 19th – #GAAD

It’s the 5th year of raising awareness about how vital – we say life-saving too – is an accessible web – the world wide web – for all of us.

So much of life is “e-” now – e-learning, communications, shopping banking and importantly, human relationships! For us also, for the CCAC, it’s vital for captioning advocacy, much needed.

A short video we like a lot about this GAAD stuff is here:

And more information here: https://www.w3.org/WAI/perspectives/captions.html

And here: http://www.globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org/

Coincidentally for the CCAC – big news – and also with a salute for this special day, we are in the process of changing our webpages, so chock full of good information – to make them accessible – bear with us as it’s the first time we are using a consultant to help with this. Soon!

CCAACAPTIONING.ORG
CCACAPTIONING@GMAIL.COM

LIFE IS ON THE WEB THESE DAYS – ALL MEDIA INCLUDING LIVE EVENTS ONLINE – STREAMING – MUST HAVE QUALITY CAPTIONING – ASK FOR IT AND KEEP ASKING

Live, Online, Free, Captioned – from CCAC for YOU

Quick Reminder about two events we are happy to be part of. Did someone say “Internet and Society” today? We are society – with you. We use the Internet  – with you. CCAC mission is “inclusion of quality captioning universally.” .

MAY 18:

Webinar:  http://www.hearingloss.org/content/lets-captiontheworld

It’s in the evening EST yet we hope to see many of you with us. Time for questions will be there!

AUGUST 1 an 2:

Caption Studies Conference: http://captionstudies.wou.edu/ is a first! The webpages are all updated regularly. Check out the schedule and the presenters page. Be sure to register soon.

Step by step – CCAC advocates, educates, raises awareness, and keeps doing it. We invite you to join to add your support and energies. We’re all volunteers.

CCACATIONING.ORG

 

CAPTION STUDIES CONFERENCE! HEAR THIS!

IT’S HERE! DRUM ROLL! CCAC is very proud to announce the USA’s first CAPTIONING CONFERENCE! All invited to participate online this August 1-2. Stay tuned and see below as information from the source (WOU) spreads on conference webpage, in CCAC Members’ Forum, Social Media, and more. So exciting: http://captionstudies.wou.edu/

MORE:
Caption Studies 2016 Conference Announcement [ http://captionstudies.wou.edu/ ]

The first annual Caption Studies conference in the United States takes place August 1st and 2nd of 2016. Hosted by Western Oregon University, the first conference will feature two days worth of speakers and panels presenting on an array of different caption-related topics—from closed-captioning to captioning research to CART to a caption user focus group. The three strands emphasized at the conference are advocacy, practice, and academic/research. There are presentations from group of stakeholders.

A free virtual conference, i.e. all panels and presentations will be streamed to the web and shown to anyone interested, the conference strives to model best practices for accessible conferences and accessible content online. All videos will be captioned, and all live events will have live, real-time CART captioning.

The conference keynote is Dr. Sean Zdenek, long-time closed caption and accessibility researcher from Texas Tech University. Zdenek’s book, Reading Sounds, was recently released to much support and acclaim.

For more information go to: captionstudies.wou.edu. [http://captionstudies.wou.edu/] captionstudies.com and captionstudiesconference.com both redirect to this same URL.

You can find us at Twitter as @captionstudies. [https://twitter.com/captionstudies]
We plan to use the hashtag: #caption16
The conference Facebook page is here: [https://www.facebook.com/captionstudies/?ref=bookmarks]

If you would like semi-regular announcements regarding the Caption Studies conference, such as when conference registration is open, if and when different speakers or presenters have confirmed, or when more information about 2017 becomes available, watch our Twitter feed. You can also sign up for email notifications here: http://eepurl.com/bWCP0v. All emails on this list will only be used for conference related announcements.

This conference is generously supported by Western Oregon University’s College of Education, Strada Communications, 3 Play Media, and the CCAC.

CaptionStudies17 is tentatively planned to take place face-to-face at Western Oregon University in late July or early August 2017. If you are interested in potentially presenting or sponsoring some part of the conference, please be in touch.

WHAT DO WE DO IN THE CCAC? WE ADVOCATE, EDUCATE, RAISE AWARENESS, PARTICIPATE, COMMUNICATE, COLLABORATE AND INSPIRE! #CAPTIONWORLDNOW

ccacaptioning@gmail.com

When will Facebook show CC for all videos?

Some videos, with Open Captions (OC) give us access to videos on Facebook. Others, don’t seem to have any captioning at all. Boo!

How many of you have tried to contact FB about this?

What more can we all do to find full equal communication access on social media that most of us use every day (too much – smile)?

Please volunteer soon!

CCACAPTIONING.ORG

CCACAPTIONING@GMAIL.COM

CCAC = CAPTIONING ACTIVISM + COMMUNITY

JOIN TODAY.

 

CCAC Talks To YouTube/Google About Quality CC

(See Follow Up Blogpost on December 13)

CCAC Members and Friends,

Here’s a letter that two of our volunteers sent to YouTube/Google last week. It’s one part of CCAC continuing MEDIA captioning advocacy. YT/Google acknowledged it today, saying it was sent to the team…

We wrote to them again due to their newly-launched “community” (crowd) captioning feature. It looks awkward and not coordinated with what may be easier and faster quality captioning systems they already have in place for videos.

The goal is that all video content (huge, as you know, on YT) and everyplace online has quality captioning, when published. Access and inclusion with equal communication access, from day one, we believe that is a fundamental human right for mega-millions globally.

==

Letter:

Hello …

To follow up on an earlier question (see below), …(we have) have put down some thoughts for you and Google/YouTube to consider.

Captioning is our language – and the world’s language too.

Regarding the newest captioning feature from YouTube – fan-based community captioning – we offer the following suggestions we hope will be useful.

Issue 1: Enable these features by default

Content owners have to manually navigate through a number of layers to their community settings and turn this feature on.

CCAC suggests that this should be always ON by default and that you enable the channel owners to turn it off instead.

Issue 2: Starting from scratch

YouTube expects fans to transcribe the whole thing from scratch / ground zero.

Since many content creators already have a transcript in some shape or form – such as a script or production running sheet etc, a more efficient workflow is to source an accurate transcript first and then use Google’s voice recognition technology to auto-sync it into a caption file.

But as far as the CCAC can see, there’s no way for fans to upload an accurate transcript in this manner (or a finished caption / subtitle file).

Issue 3: There’s very little scope for collaboration

Fans are expected to work in independent silos and there doesn’t seem to be any ways to work together with other fans.

For longer videos, it would be far more efficient if there was ways to break them down into smaller, more manageable chunks that could be performed by different fans simultaneously.

Issue 4: There appears to be no way to fix the automatic machine generated cc.

CCAC suggests that for videos of shorter duration and with good quality audio, editing to correct the machine cc is a good way to create good quality captions.

Our group would like to help in any way we can to beta test this, support your efforts, and we welcome your interest and support for the CCAC.

Let’s talk further.

Lauren and Michael

http://CCACAPTIONING.ORG We Ask for Quality Captioning Universally. #CaptiontheWorld. Volunteer captioning advocates internationally, official 501(c)3 non-profit, join us.

==

Special thanks to CCAC member Michael Lockrey for his dedication to quality captioning issues, and all the volunteer time he donates to CCAC and others.

Readers here – we agree with their first reply to us, i.e. that video content owners, ideally, need to see and approve the CC before publication, yet this may take months or never happen unless Google/YT leads the way and pushes it ON by default – do it or the video will not be published. To use quality CC, any content provider can find low cost or free systems on the YT pages – it’s the right thing to do. Without quality CC, we have ramps for communications that are full of dangerous gaps.

CCAC Teams Welcome Volunteers

Feel like DOING something useful for Captioning inclusion? Join a CCAC Team! Meet others, add your ideas and energy for the mission – Inclusion of Captioning Advocacy Universally.

All MEDIA and LIVE EVENTS need quality Captioning, our language, the world’s language.

Live Events are often now streamed online – not only webinars, also conferences, other meetings. Access via quality captioning for all of these please  – ask, educate, raise awareness and ask again.

CCAC Teams each have a focus – one of the several ongoing (or new) CCAC CAPS – captioning advocacy projects. See http://CCACaptioning.org/advocacy for this list of current CAPS.

Please volunteer soon!

Three teams are using Google Hangouts (GH) now – the chat system. Sometimes the whole team is there, live, real time, and sometimes only a few, or even one person who adds her or his input after reading the discussion. It works! Using a gmail address is best.

Interested? Hope so! Email CCACaptioning@gmail.com