MovieCaptioner 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 exporting Transcripts compiles all the captions into one concise text file, with or without timecode.

I've written about MovieCaptioner before - it used to be called MovCaptioner - but there have been significant improvements in both the interface and in the type of captions MovieCaptioner can read and create. The website now lists all these types of imports and exports:

• QT Text
• QT Unicode (export only)
• QT SMIL (export only)
• Flash DFXP
• JW Player
• CLF Player (Canada)
• Adobe Encore
• Sonic Scenarist SCC (for Final Cut Pro, line 21 close captions and iPod/iPad captions)
• Spruce (STL)
• SubRip (SRT)
• SubViewer (SUB)
• Windows Media (SAMI, export only)
• Text Transcripts
• HTML Transcripts (export only)
• YouTube SBV (import only)

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 MovieCaptioner 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.

MovieCaptioner will also import YouTube's auto-caption files so you can correct them and then re-upload them to YouTube for efficient and accurate YouTube captioning.

SynchriMedia offer several video tutorials for MovieCaptioner including a nifty one for how to use MovieCaptioner and [msd] together so you can caption your film quickly without even needing to type!

- Ricky Buchanan

There have been a plethora of stories in the mainstream news and in blogs about the iPad and the amazing positive effects it's having for people with various disabilities. Children with autism are the subject of many of these stories, but there are plenty of others who are getting amazing results from their iPads too.

I haven't been able to keep up with all the stories, but here's a round-up of some of them. If you know of more, please leave a comment at the bottom of this post:

The Wall Street Journal itself has written about the iPad for people with disabilities: Using the iPad to Connect: Parents, Therapists Use Apple Tablet to Communicate With Special Needs Kids is a great article and includes quotes from Steve Jobs and also a video showing some use of the iPad:

Making weird cool - Robert Rummel-Hudson talks about why he thinks the iPad is a game-changer for AAC and why it's important to have devices that don't say "I have a disability!" as soon as you walk into a room with one.

Zach's A Mac - Zach is a 3 1/2 year old boy with cerebral palsy who's learning to use an iPad.

The iPad: a Near-Miracle for My Son With Autism - Shannon Des Roches Rosa writes about her son Leo and how the iPad has helped him.

iHelp for Autism by the SF Weekly is a long and well balanced story which explains some of the iPads possibilities as well as its limitations, talking to teachers and other experts as well as parents of kids with autism. This article also includes sections about Leo and Des Roches.

Opinion: Why The iPad Isn??t For Me - Paul has quadriplegia and is an ardent iPod Touch user but for him the iPad would be a step backwards in terms of accessibility. In this article he explains why.

Karen Janowski has written Why I Love the iPad for Education: Initial Observations. Karen is an assistive and educational technology consultant who writes excellently and makes many good points.

The Muscular Dystrophy's Magazine, Quest, has published Barbara Twardowski's The iPad: A Disability Friendly Device? which evaluates the iPad for people with various types of disabilities. It's a balanced look at the pros and cons of the device, and lists ATMac as a website useful for people using an iPad so it must be a good article ;).

From the wonderful Katilea, an adult AAC user, we have several great posts about her new iPad:

• Proloquo2Go and iPad: A Marriage made in Heaven!
• Physical Accessibility on iPad in General, for People with Fine Motor Difficulties
• AAC: Mainstream V Dedicated Devices
• iPad useful for Ataxians?

N0thingbuteverything has written several articles about the iPad as used by her 5 year old son, 'S', who has cerebral palsy:

• Proloquo2go and the iPad Review - a detailed review of Proloquo2Go and the iPad
• Proloquo2go?what I learnt next - More reviewing of Proloquo2Go, as well as a wish list of things she'd like to see in future upgrades.

Kate Ahern from Teaching Learners With Multiple Special Needs has written iPossibilities for Those with Significant Special Needs and their Teams listing many apps suitable for those at the more severe end of the 'special needs' spectrum.

Caleigh's Mum writes about her daughter's use of the iPad with Proloquo2Go for communicating. Caleigh has cerebral palsy and there are several videos of her using the iPad included too:

• Caleigh's Communication Part 4 - iPad
• iPad + Proloquo2Go, 1 Month Update
• Caleigh's Communication - The Review

Heidi has established a whole blog - Junior's Voice - about her son's journey with the iPad as a communications device. He uses the iPad via eyegaze with a helper holding the iPad to "read" the eyegaze and physically touch the screen in the right places.

Finally one of my favourite bloggers, Glenda Watson Hyatt, who has cerebral palsy also got herself an iPad and has been surprised by its usefulness:

• The iPad as an Affordable Communicator: Initial Review
• The iPad as an Affordable Communicator: A Follow-up Review
• Writing Under the Stars: A Follow-Up iPad Review

In personal news, I have just got my own Mac back after it spent two weeks out of action after the video card, so I had only the iPad and my iPod Touch to keep me occupied. I learned a lot about using the iPad which I'm going to show you in future posts. Unfortunately I also got tendonitis in my hands from using them too much, and I have a hernia repair operation scheduled in a week's time, so I'll be at least partially out of action for a few more weeks and ATMac will be slow. Please be patient with me while I work on healing!

Hope you enjoyed the stories above - what other iPad disability-related stories have you seen?

- Ricky Buchanan

The National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH has written guidelines for content providers who would like to create iTunes U media which is accessible for those people who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind or visually impaired.

Step-by-step documentation is provided on creating fully accessible media, including:

• Closed captions and audio descriptions that the user can turn on or off as needed.
• Open subtitles and descriptions that are available to everyone watching or listening.
• Closed subtitles for adding multiple language tracks to video files.
• Accessibile PDFs.

The guidelines are available in PDF format, accompanied by video and audio clips illustrating the various accessibility features.

Note: The paragraph below is no longer accurate, as I'm happy to say the authors of the guidelines worked with me to find and remedy the cause of this inaccessibility. The guidelines are themselves fully accessible now.

In an unfortunate irony, the guidelines themselves appear not to be fully accessible - the PDF which is available seems not to always expose the letter "i" to the accessibility software, leading to quotes like the following being passed to my accessibility software:

By taking the steps to make these media fles fully accessible, iTunes U content providers will ensure that all students and others can fully beneft from these valuable educatonal resources.

This unfortunate error aside, the guidelines are well worth reading for anybody who's interested in making their audio or video content as accessible as possible. The guide is aimed at iTunes U users but it's just as applicable for podcasts or almost any other person or organisation producing multimedia content.

The guidelines appear thorough and starts by explaining what captions, subtitles, and audio description are, including examples of each. It then describes how to include these in your video or audio files, with many step-by-step tutorials with screen shots showing the exact procedure needed to add captions, subtitles and audio description.

Highly recommended!

- Ricky Buchanan

A weekend round-up post for all those small bits and pieces that aren't big enough to merit their own post, or don't quite fit into ATMac but are still interesting.

Firstly, I hope that you are enjoying the new site layout! I have become aware that it unfortunately triggers a bug in Internet Explorer that makes the left column abnormally narrow. Being a Mac user, I'm really not conversant in Internet Explorer quirks so I'm having trouble fixing it - if there's anybody out there who is good enough with CSS to figure out what's wrong, I'd greatly appreciate a hand! In the mean time, I apologise to those who are stuck with the improperly displayed page. I'll get it fixed as soon as humanly possible.

Secondly, we have a readership poll in progress:
[poll id="2"]

I thought it would be interesting to find out why people are reading the blog and what your backgrounds are, I'd love it if everybody filled it in. If you have an idea for another poll we could run, please leave a comment.

MacWorld magazine recently ran a series on "Portable Office" style computing, and as a sidebar have an article on Travel Terrors. It's a series of stories about mishaps with equipment while travelling, and very amusing to read. There's some great additional stories in the comments after the article, too. Have you had any assistive technology mishaps that you laughed about afterwards?

I've had one comment from a reader who preferred the "old" layout with the full articles displayed one after the other. The good news is that something very similar is still available if you select the blog page and bookmark that. The articles displayed there are identical to those on the "regular" front page, just that the layout is more top-to-bottom full articles like a traditional blog. There's a link to the blog format at the top of each page on the website, if you ever want it.

I'd advise you to explore the other pages linked at the top of the site too - we have greatly enlarged the resources area, and the archives are much easier to access. Coming soon will be a simple way to display the archives by category, so you could pick all the articles aimed at Windows users, or those with hearing impairments, or developers, for example. Stay tuned for that.

Lastly somebody let me know that the graphic I've used as the header is not of great quality. It's only a minimally adjusted screen capture, but I don't have the skills to do it properly. Anybody be willing to work with me to produce a higher quality graphic for the header please leave a comment or contact me by other means.

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

Ricky Buchanan

Guest post by David Niemeijer of AssistiveWare.

A few years ago, many people complained about the lack of a screen reader on the Mac as the biggest missing assistive technology feature. Apple introduced VoiceOver in 2005 in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) putting these complaints to an instant stop.

Following the introduction of VoiceOver a new item surfaced at the top of the wish lists: speech recognition. True, English voice commands had been part of Mac OS for a long time already and third-party developer MacSpeech had a product called iListen, which provided voice dictation. However, neither the built-in speech recognition nor iListen came close to Dragon NaturallySpeaking running on Windows only. After the Intel Macs were introduced and Parallels came up with a way to run Windows inside Mac OS X some people even started running Dragon on Windows in Parallels to dictate and then copied the results over to the Mac-side. That's how desperate some Mac users were. Earlier this year MacSpeech brought powerful speech recognition to the Mac with its introduction of [msd], which is powered by the Dragon engine. Case closed.

Now that a built-in screen reader and a powerful speech recognition solution are available, what is the next biggest assistive technology feature missing on Mac OS X? Please share your thoughts on this. Yes, do not hesitate, key Apple people read this blog too, so now is your time to be heard :-)

- David Niemeijer

[msdbanner]