Tech firms back WGBH Internet captioning effort

AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have asked WGBH and its Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) to establish and manage the Internet Captioning Forum (ICF).

The ICF will initially address the technical challenges presented by online video repurposed from broadcast or other previously captioned sources, as well as video created specifically for the Web.

The collaboration is expected to yield:

• A database of previously captioned programs for online media distributors, populated by major captioning providers to make it easier to locate and reuse existing caption files.
• Technical and standards documents, case studies and best practices for accomplishing online video captioning.
• Demonstrations of practices to preserve captions while editing and digitizing captioned videos.

For more information, visit www.wgbh.org.