Workshop presentation for the OZeWAI 2004 conference.
Peter Batchelor
Internet Technology Services
Email: peter@batchelors.net
Web: www.batchelors.net
Phone: 03 8430 3532
(D)
MAGpie is a tool used to improve the accessibility of audio and video presentations, by adding captions to video and audio files, and audio descriptions to video files.
This is done be creating additional files that are displayed in parallel with the original audio or video file. MAGpie can create the markup necessary to organise these parallel presentations in two markup languages: SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) or SAMI (Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange).
SMIL is a World Wide Web Consortium markup language for authoring accessible multimedia presentations that integrate streaming audio and video with images, text, or any other media type. SMIL is commonly used for delivering captioned text and/or audio description, synchronized with an accompanying video file. Current versions of the Quicktime Player and the RealMedia Player, as well as some other applications, support SMIL, although there are slight differences in the SMIL files used in RealMedia and Quicktime presentations.
SAMI is similar to SMIL, but was developed by Microsoft and is supported by Microsoft products.
Captions and audio descriptions may be developed for QuickTime, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player. QuickTime and Real make use of W3Cs SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) standard, while WindowsMedia Player uses SAMI (Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange).
SMIL and SAMI presentations may be developed using a simple text-editor, but tools like Magpie, from the National Center on Accessible Media (http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/magpie/), can help automate the process and can produce SMIL and SAMI output suitable for captioning and audio description projects. Please note that both SMIL and SAMI can do much more than just display captions and audio descriptions, but this is the aspect of the markup languages that MAGpie is restricted to.
See http://www.webaim.org/howto/captions/real/real for a quick introduction to creating SMIL captioning and http://service.real.com/help/library/guides/production8/htmfiles/smilref.htm for a more detailed reference.
The MAGpie home page is http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/magpie/index.html. This page contains links to the required files, descriptions of the installation process and help on using MAGpie.
The following pages will guide you through using MAGpie to create captions and audio descriptions for a video file. The video, text and audio files are all included in a directory called assets.
Visit http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/magpie/magpie2_download.html and download and install the various applications that are used for MAGpie. The applications must be installed in the specified order:
Once the software is installed you are ready to start a captioning project.
Index | New Project | Project Track | Captions and Audio Descriptions | Testing | Exporting