Learning Center

How Do I Get My Media Captioned?

Learn the questions to ask and what to do with your caption file

Know Your Legal Rights

Legal issues facing persons who are deaf and hard of hearing

Making Captioning Perfect

As you might guess, we get a lot of kidding about our name, "Caption Perfect." Admittedly, we've never been perfect and don't really expect to be, but our goal is to make our captions the equivalent quality to that found in the publishing world. We want to continuously improve the quality of our work, and we want clients who expect the same. Of all our clients, the National Association of the Deaf's Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) has held us and its other vendors to the most exacting standard, and this demand has improved the quality of all of our work. We generally follow a series of steps to make our captions the best they can be, and below is a description of the process we use for the DCMP.

Captioning Types, Methods, and Styles

The evolution of captioning techniques

Captioning Guidelines for the DCMP

These guidelines list DCMP captioning specifications and requirements.

Caption It Yourself: Basic Guidelines for Busy Teachers, Families, and Others Who Shoot Their Own Video

Captions (sometimes called “subtitles”) are the textual representation of a video's soundtrack. They are critical for viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing, and they are also a great tool for improving the reading and listening skills of others. Unlike subtitles, captions provide information such as sound effects and speaker identification.

Digital Beginnings: Young Children's Use of Popular Culture, Media and New Technologies

This report presents the findings of a study that took place from September 2004 to July 2005. The study explored young children's (aged from birth to six) use of popular culture, media, and new technologies in the home through a survey of 1,852 parents and caretakers of children.

The Language System of Audio Description: An Investigation as a Discursive Process

Philip J. Piety's study investigates the language used in a selection of films containing audio description and develops a set of definitions that allow productions containing it to be more fully defined, measured, and compared. It also highlights some challenging questions related to audio description as a discursive practice and provides a basis for future study of this unique use of language. From the Journal of Visual Impairments and Blindness (JVIB).

Audio Description Text for Indexing Films

Access to audiovisual materials should be as open and free as access to print-based materials. However, we have not yet achieved such a reality. Methods useful for organizing print-based materials do not necessarily work well when applied to audiovisual and multimedia materials. In this project, Canadian researchers James Turner and Suzanne Mathieu studied using audio description text and written descriptions to generate keywords for indexing moving images. In the second part of the study, they looked at the possibility of automatically translating keywords from audio description text into other languages to use them as indexing, with encouraging results.

Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet 2008

Larry Goldberg, the Director of Media Access for WGBH in Boston, delivers a testimony to Congressional members of the ''Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2007'' subcommittee regarding the efforts undertaken by WGBH and NCAM to ensure accessibility in the digital age. Topics covered include the following: a brief history of captioning and audio description, some of the accessibility challenges faced by producers in moving their content to the Internet, the development and goals of the Internet Captioning Forum, and the need for standardization of captioning formats for the Web.

The CBC Captioning Style Guide, 2003

These guidelines pertain exclusively to off-line roll-up closed captioning, as distinct from other styles of off-line closed captioning. Written by the CBC, they are intended to supplement those guidelines set forth in "The CAC Captioning Style Guide: General Guidelines for Off line Pop On Captions," which should be taken as the authoritative reference in the event of any omission from the present document.

Implementing Closed Captioning for DTV

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules impose obligations on broadcasters for captioning of digital television (DTV) programs, but there has been some uncertainty over exactly what is required. This paper sets out the main requirements defined by the FCC rules, summarizes what broadcasters should be doing to meet those requirements, and provides guidance on implementing the various links in the chain from caption creation through to emission. A method for transport of DTV closed captions is described using data services in the vertical ancillary data space of serial digital video signals, and several methods for feeding caption data to the ATSC encoder are identified.

The Midas Touch of Accessibility (And How the DCMP is Still Making History)

Educators Flocking to Finland, Land of Literate Children

Imagine an educational system where children do not start school until they are seven, where spending is a paltry $5,000 a year per student, where there are no gifted programs, and class sizes often approach 30. A prescription for failure, no doubt, in the eyes of many experts, but in this case, a description of Finnish schools that were ranked the world's best in 2003. Finland topped a respected international survey, coming in first in literacy and placing in the top five in math and science. How did Finland, which was hobbled by a deep recession in the 1990s, manage to outscore 31 other countries, including the United States? Read this article to learn the answer. One factor listed: "Children grow up watching television shows and movies (many in English) with subtitles. So they read while they watch TV." By Lizette Alvarez, April 9, 2004, The New York Times.

Television Goes to School: The Impact of Video on Student Learning in Formal Education

Today's children are growing up surrounded by television and video. Visual media is already an essential component of classroom instruction, with almost all teachers employing video in some form in their teaching. As the presence of broadband, digital media, and streaming video increases, the likelihood is that video will become an even more essential classroom resource. A resource provided by the Education Department of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, January 2004.