Flash Video Accessibility

Adobe Flash provides support for adding closed captions to Flash (flv) video. The FLVPlaybackCaptioning control make it easy to attach TimedText (dfxp) format captions, and many of the built-in player skins include buttons to enable users to show and hide closed captions.

Examples

The following files are involved in creating a captioned Flash video using the FLVPlaybackCaptioning control:

• Flash Video (video.flv) - the original video may come from any digital source, but needs to be encoded to Flash video (flv) format. The Adobe Media Encoder included with Adobe Flash can be used to do this. 
• Text Transcript (video.txt) - the other key ingredient is a text transcript of the entire video.
• Caption File (video.dfxp.xml) - a Timed Text caption file will be created from the text transcript (see Creating Captions, below).
• Flash Project File (video.fla) - the Flash video will be combined with the text transcript and a player "skin" in the Flash Project
• Flash Movie (video.swf) - the Flash Project will produce a Flash Movie.
• Web Page (video.html) - the Flash Movie will be embedded in an HTML web page and posed on the web.

Creating Captions

The free captioning tool, subtitle-horse.org, can be used to create TimedText (dfxp) format caption files. To try subtitle-horse, do the following:

1. Browse to subtitle-horse.org
2. Enter the URL of our sample Flash video (http://www.dhs.state.il.us/accessibility/tests/flash/video.flv).
3. When the video loads, copy and paste the first caption from our sample Transcript (http://www.dhs.state.il.us/accessibility/tests/flash/video.txt)
4. Play the video
5. When the audio track reaches the end of your first caption, click the video to pause it
6. Copy and paste the second caption from the sample Transcript
7. Repeat steps 4 - 6 until you reach the end of the video
8. From the Titles menu, select Write TT File (unfortunately this is a mouse-only operation)
9. Enter the name of your caption file in the form of "video.dfxp"
10. Follow the instructions to download and save your file locally.