Adding Captioning to a Conference Room

Added January 2010

Purpose

The purpose of this tutorial is to describe how you would include real-time captioning in a web conference room.

Introduction

A transcriber will use a utility to transcribe the content of the spoken conversation. That transcribed conservation will be sent to users with hearing disabilities so they can fully participate in real-time in on-line meetings and webinars. The remainder or this tutorial will explain how this is accomplished. For those only interested in viewing captioning you may skip down to the Transcribing and Viewing Captioning section.

    Installing the Captioning Utility (A Windows Application)

  1. Request Captioning Utility Registration Key from techsupport@talkingcommunities.com.
  2. Download and install the Captioning Utility: Download Captioning Utility and install the utility.
  3. Register Captioning Utility (all individuals who will transcribe need to do this):
    1. Start Captioning Utility: START ==> All Programs ==> TCClosedCaptioning ==> TC Closed Captioning.
    2. Click the Help menu.
    3. Click the Register option and provide the User Name and Key information.
    4. Click Register.

    Build HTML script to view captioning

  4. Add the following line to the body section of the HTML script:
    <a href="http://talkingcommunities.com/closedcaptioning/?yourname">View Captioning</a>
    replace yourname with the User Name you used to register the utility.
  5. Copy the HTML file to a web site.
  6. Set up the conference room:
    1. Log into the Web Room Administration for the room.
    2. Add the fully the qualified URL for the script to view the captioning into the Logo URL (in client) field. In the future you will use the Banner URL field.
    3. click Update.

      4. Transcribing and Viewing Captioning

      Transcriber
    4. Start Captioning Utility: START ==> All Programs ==> TCClosedCaptioning ==> TC Closed Captioning.
    5. Click the Start/Stop Captioning button - This is an icon with a tick mark. When the captioning has started the tick will be green - when it is stopped it will be grey.
    6. Move to the text input area and begin transcribing - you don't have to press Enter to send.


      7. Conference Room User
    7. Enter the Room
    8. Click on the View Captioning Link. You will begin to see the captioning immediately in the area to the right of the audio controls. You may want to widen the Text Chat and User List area to increase the size of Captioning Window. The room administrator can specify the co-browser be positioned on the right, left or on top. When the co-browser is position on the top the area available for closed captioning is larger, therefore the need resize the windows may not be required. (In the future the captioning windows will be positioned below the co-browser.)

    Additional Information

    The above information is for Window users who have installed the Windows plugin for the web conferencing technology. As the Captioning Utility is a Windows application, a transcriber must be using Windows. The technology, as well as a Windows plugin also provides access to the conference room via a JAVA based web application. The captioning feature is not yet integrated into the web based access however these users, including Macintosh users, can fully participate by doing one addition step. They would need the URL used to launch captioning viewing and load that page into a separate browser window where they can watch the captioning.

    The content of the transcription may be saved and opened for additional processing such as printing.

    The Utility can optionally retrieve content from speech recognition software.