In 1972, the first captions for broadcast television appeared on WGBH in Boston. For over 40 years, WGBH has remained an industry leader in providing media access to people with disabilities. They run a non-profit R&D organization called the National Center for Accessible Media, and they released a free captioning tool called MAGpie in 2000 to help increase the number of captioned videos online.
The National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH have launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise money to build CADET (Caption and Description Editing Tool) to replace the now-outdated MAGpie. Many features that were only available in high-end captioning software will be available in CADET, such as timing assistance, WYSIWYG placement, keyboard shortcuts, and many others. Users will be able to perform the four steps of captioning (transcription, editing, timing, and review) separately or simultaneously depending on their skill level, and create captions that are far more reliable than the automated speech-to-text captions so often found online.
In short, CADET will be user friendly and yield very strong results. Best of all, CADET will be free, and it will enable anyone to produce high-quality caption files that are compatible with any media player on any Web browser. To learn more about the campaign and the goals for CADET, visit the project’s Indiegogo page.