MovCaptioner keeps repeating a segment of the movie until you are done typing what you hear. Just hit the Return key and it will save your caption and automatically advance to the next few seconds of the movie, allowing you to zip through your captioning tasks in no time flat.

You don't need to be a QuickTime guru, either. The caption track is added automatically with the click of a button.

I wrote about MovCaptioner before, but there have been significant improvements in both the interface and in the type of captions MovCaptioner can create. The website now lists all these types:

• QuickTime text, unicode and SMIL
• SMIL Caption Tracks
• Flash Caption Tracks
• SubRip SRT and SubViewer SUB Caption Tracks
• Spruce STL (imports into DVD Studio Pro)
• Adobe Encore Caption Tracks
• SAMI Caption Tracks (for use with Windows Media)
• Transcripts in Paragraph Form or Line-by-line With Timestamps

I think the creation of Flash captions is especially exciting, given the number of uncaptioned Flash movies out there on the internet. Now that Flash supports simple captioning, and programs like MovCaptioner let captioning be done for such a low price, there's absolutely no reason not to caption Flash movies and tutorials you make for your website.

- Ricky Buchanan

CapScribe is an open-source application to help you add captions and/or audio description to audio and video files. Here's their explanations of what captions and video descriptions are:

Captions provide viewers with text-based, verbatim dialog, background sounds, and sound effects, key for deaf and hard of hearing viewers, and beneficial for hearing viewers as well.

Video descriptions provide verbal descriptions of what is happening visually in the video. Description makes it possible for people with vision disabilities to more fully comprehension the video. Sighted people may find video description benficial as well!

It's great to see an application like this available for free - captioning and video description programs can often run to hundreds of dollars, well out of the reach of casual or non-professional users.

- Ricky Buchanan

Some utilities for dealing with subtitles or captions:

SubCleaner
Blurb:

SubCleaner can:

• remove unnecessary characters & formatting errors
• limit the number of chars per line & the number of lines per subtitle
• convert MicroDVD, SubViewer, SubViewer 2.0, and TMPlayer subtitle formats to SubRip (.srt) format.

SubSync
Blurb:

You have encoded your favorite series, a friend sends you the subtitles, but the filenames don't match, so your favorite player won't be able to detect the subtitles when playing the videos. Don't worry - SubSync will save you tedious copy-pasting by renaming the subtitles (.srt files) with the same name as the corresponding videos (.avi files).

- Ricky Buchanan

MovCaptioner keeps repeating a segment of the movie until you are done typing what you hear. Just hit the Return key and it will save your caption and automatically advance to the next few seconds of the movie, allowing you to zip through your captioning tasks in no time flat. You don't need to be a QuickTime guru, either. The caption track is added automatically with the click of a button. And clicking the Transcript button compiles all the captions into one concise text file. If you can type, you can make your movies accessible.

- Ricky Buchanan

If you want to add subtitles to your movies to play on your Mac, iPhone, iPod, or Apple TV then you're better off with Bitfield's new iSubtitle program which is compatible with Apple's soft subtitle format. Submerge is still useful for merging subtitles for non-Apple playback though.

Merge your subtitle files with your movies. Then you can easily watch subtitled movies in iTunes, Front Row or on your Apple TV.

This is a great example of software that is written for a non-disability use - watching movies in a language that the user doesn't know - but which has an AT use also - for people who are deaf or hearing impaired. ATMac is aware that translation subtitles are not as complete as those designed for closed caption use, but this program appears to work with either type and they are better than nothing when closed captions are not available.

- Ricky Buchanan