Authoring Video Captions made Easy

The ability to author closed captions has been largely an underground art-form for the average user, problematic to create and time intensive. The standard path for educational institutions is to outsource this work and given the costs assocated with this it is often unlikely to happen, meaning institutions have relied on transcripts alone to convey audible content. This was the situation faced by the Inclusive Resources Development team at La Trobe University. We required the ability to create simple caption files for video content via an easy to use interface that would allow academic and general staff to create captioned videos themselves with minimal training and in a timely manner. The result of months of development was EasyCaptions, a simple means of creating plain text captions, without an indepth need to understand how captions work. Providing a transcript is available, captions can be generated in near realtime. This session will showcase our journey and the end result, EasyCaptions.