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Multimedia Captioning Offers Access and Flexibility

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Every day, the rich kaleidoscope of sounds most of us hear contributes in uncountable ways to the quality of our lives and learning. Language instructs us and allows us to communicate; music enlightens and uplifts us; the unexpected blare of a siren warns us of danger. We take this symphony of sound for granted. But to those who are deaf or hard of hearing, the reliance on sound creates many barriers; these individuals must acquire most of their knowledge visually¿often through captioned material.

Students who are deaf or hard of hearing critically need captioned material for learning. Unfortunately, schools suffer from a shortage of captioned videos, and frequently, the material that is captioned is at a reading level that is too high for the students. But via CAST¿s Multimedia Captioning Project, children at several New England schools are gaining access to visual media with a school-based Macintosh captioning system. As part of this three-year project, funded by the U.S. Department of Education¿s Office of Special Education Programs, CAST has created an affordable, multimedia desktop workstation called CaptionWorks^TM that allows students and teachers to caption any material, including movies, television shows, news programs, educational films, and their own videos.

The project, which is headed by CAST¿s captioning team, Charlie Dunne, Amy Rubin, and Charles Silverman, falls under CAST¿s National Laboratory for Universal Curriculum. It has been developed in partnership with the Clarke School for the Deaf, the Willie Ross School for the Deaf, the Rhode Island School for the Deaf, and CPB/WGBH¿s National Center for Accessible Media. In connection with WGBH¿s pioneering work in closed captioning, CAST is concentrating its own project on multimedia captioning, a system that offers both accessibility and extended flexibility. CAST¿s Captioning Project Co-Director Amy Rubin explains. ¿Our uniquely designed system allows us to use text of any font, color, size, or format and put it right onto video. We¿ve created flexible access to virtually any visual information out there.¿ Teachers can caption the videos they need in the most appropriate way for their students.

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For example, at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, MA, one Upper School teacher is captioning a frequently taught literary classic currently unavailable in captioned form. Although time-consuming, the captioning is rewarding for both teachers and students. ¿It¿s so much better when you can watch (captioned) videos,¿ says Clarke Upper School senior Eileen Lograno, ¿You can truly understand what¿s going on.¿

Upper School teacher Marilyn Buuck has captioned many television broadcasts, most notably a Springfield news story in which Clarke School students were interviewed about the crowning of the new Miss America, who is deaf. ¿Ironically, the story wasn¿t captioned when it aired,¿ Buuck recalls, ¿But we were able to caption it, and it made all the difference to the kids. They were so excited to see their names on TV.¿

The captioning system is also rewarding for students because they can film and caption their own videos. At the Clarke School, students have produced ¿infomercials¿ for student council elections, written and captioned play-by-play descriptions of a school soccer game and captioned school drama productions. For this year¿s play, ¿Peter Pan,¿ Buuck is helping students create simulcast captions, which will be projected on monitors during the performance. And deaf students at the Willie Ross School, in East Longmeadow, MA, are working with hearing students to caption their own videos, with each group creating its interpretations of the action. Says Middle School teacher Michele Cournoyer, ¿CAST has been very flexible in helping us develop a student- oriented, student-directed captioning system.¿

This interaction with the material is highly motivating for the deaf and hearing- impaired. Because many deaf and hard-of-hearing children have difficulty with traditional writing tasks, teachers find multimedia captioning particularly effective with these students because it helps them generate ideas, develop dialogue, and use writing in an original way. At the Rhode Island School for the Deaf, for instance, students are creating a captioned documentary on the local architecture of Providence.

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This new literacy experience has tremendous potential in the classroom. According to Captioning Project Co-Director Charles Silverman, ¿CaptionWorks^TM is providing teachers with the power to do things that have been unavailable up until now.¿ And CAST is exploring innovative technologies to add to the system, including graphics and labels that aid comprehension. For example, symbols that represent emotions can be added to captioned dialogue to reveal a character¿s feelings; or cartoon-like speech bubbles can be used to indicate who¿s speaking. These technologies broaden the impact of multimedia captioning even further; Rubin says that hearing students, including those who speak English as a second language and those with reading and learning disabilities, can also benefit from the system.

At the Clarke School, the Willie Ross School and the Rhode Island School, CAST¿s Multimedia Captioning Project has already had a far-reaching impact. Students there are excited and confident about their ability to successfully communicate in this new medium. For them, multimedia captioning opens up a world of information.