This document summarizes the lessons learned from a one-year campus-wide captioning project at Purdue University. It discusses providing captions for administrative videos on YouTube, commencement ceremonies, lectures through Echo 360, and athletic events. Key lessons included that using a captioning vendor was more cost-effective than machine transcription for YouTube videos, captioning in one area led to benefits in another, new collaborations provided unexpected solutions, vendors had capabilities to provide automated captioning, and non-obvious solutions were sometimes more creative and effective.

1. Getting Captioning
Started on Campus:
Lessons Learned
Dean Brusnighan
Assistive Technology Specialist
Purdue University

2. Background
• A one-year, campus-wide, proof-of-concept
project
• Provide captioning in broad categories:
• Administrative video
• Academic video
• Intercollegiate Athletics

3. Agenda
• YouTube
• Commencement Ceremonies
• Echo 360
• Intercollegiate Athletics
• What I learned

4. Administrative Video

5. YouTube
• Set up a test to compare costs:
• fixing machine transcription
vs.
• paying a captioning vendor (Automatic Sync
Technologies)

6. Compare processes
Machine Transcription
• Download MT file from
YouTube
• Fix word recognition and
timing errors
• Upload to YouTube
AST captioning vendor
• Quickly review video to
identify problematic words
or names
• Submit video to AST
• Review returned caption file
to fix errors, if any
• Upload to YouTube

7. Compare costs
Machine Transcription
• Editing time per video (avg):
• 114 minutes
• Employee cost:
• $8.50/hour
• Avg Cost per video:
• $16.20
AST captioning vendor
• Editing time per video (avg):
• 31 minutes
• Employee cost:
• $8.50/hour
• Employee Cost per video:
• $4.47
• Avg AST Cost per video:
• $8.01
• Avg Cost per video:
• $12.48

8. What I Learned #1
• A captioning vendor can be a better solution
than alternatives in some cases.

9. What I Learned #2
• Providing captions in one area can lead to
unexpected benefits in another area
• Undergraduate Admissions now has captions on
almost all of their online video content

10. Administrative Video

11. Commencement Ceremonies
• At Purdue, available on:
• Local access cable TV
• Simultaneous webcast
• What did I start with?
• Fear of the unknown
• My fears were unfounded

12. What I Learned #3
• New collaborations to provide captions can
come from unexpected places.

13. Academic video

14. Echo 360
• Lecture capture system
• Business relationship with AST allows automated
submission of each lecture recording
• Waited for an opportunity where captioning was
needed

15. Echo 360 (cont.)
• A distance education student needed captions in
2 classes
• Collaboration with the IT unit in charge of Echo
360 was critical
• Effort required to set up the “automatic”
submission
• In 2 or 3 business days, the caption file was
returned & integrated into the recorded lecture
• Student found the captions very helpful

16. Echo 360 Captions

17. What I Learned #4
• Ask questions of vendors and look for built-in
collaborations to provide captioning.

18. Intercollegiate Athletics

19. Intercollegiate Athletics
• Ohio State case
• Desire to caption the words of the PA announcer,
during the game and during breaks
• Purdue Athletics explored potential for captions
on scoreboards
• Not possible at this time
• Could captions be provided directly to mobile
devices in sports venues?

20. Captions Using Twitter
• Challenging to keep posts below 140 character
limit
• Student testing showed that posts took about a
minute to show up
• Too long for game captioning

21. Captions Using CoveritLive
• CoveritLive is a web based live blogging tool
(www.coveritlive.com)
• No limit on number of characters in post
• Posts show up in a few seconds on most web-
enabled mobile devices
• Blackberry issues
• Season ended before student testing could be
conducted in Spring 2010

22. Captions & CoveritLive (cont.)
• Athletic Dept very supportive of this project
• Purchased 3 iPod Touches to loan to students
• Testing with students will begin soon
• Blackberry issues continue

23. What I Learned #5
• When the obvious solution won’t work, it can
lead to a more creative solution. It may be better
than the obvious solution.

24. What I Learned Recap
1. A captioning vendor can be a better solution
than alternatives in some cases.
2. Providing captions in one area can lead to
unexpected benefits in another area
3. New collaborations to provide captions can
come from unexpected places.
4. Ask questions of vendors and look for built-in
collaborations to provide captioning.
5. When the obvious solution won’t work, it can
lead to a more creative solution. It may be
better than the obvious solution.

25. Questions