This morning I met with Sue Kroeger, Director of the UA's Disability Resource Center, and Carol Funckes, DRC's Associate Director. The meeting was a follow-up to Carol's message to the campus community about the new service DRC was providing for adding captions to videos. Over years we've wanted to do much much more with adding captions to our videos but the costs were prohibitive. Heather liked the voice-to-text capabilities in more recent version of Virage, a product we bought around ten years that synchronizes the indexing and encoding of streamable media and content, and are woefully many versions behind. Unfortunately, a proposal to fund the requisite upgrade and licensing was not approved. And vendors who do captioning charge $15 a finished minute. The videos we've added captions to in the past have been enormously labor-intensive and time-consuming and required working from a transcript.
DRC has contracted with Automatic Sync Technologies (AST) whereby we can send videos and expect only a 3-day turnaround time for videos without transcripts. If we have transcripts, it may only take a couple hours. This is impressive and a tremendous service to the campus community. At this time, DRC is putting an implementation plan together. I'm going to be looking at the most viewed videos that we have on the UA's YouTube channel and iTunes U. DRC will be meeting with other units on campus that create videos: Arizona Public Media and UA News to name two big-time providers.
Most recently, LTC's Media Services added captions to the UA's Arizona Days Arizona Nights marketing video. Here's a screenshot but follow this link to view the video with captions embedded in it.
