Persistent Notes to the Describer

CaptionSync's Audio Description feature allows you to keep persistent notes for the describers. This article shows how.

Our guidance for describer feature allows you to send notes and specific instructions to the describers. But there are several use cases where the Persistent Notes can be very useful:

1. When the notes are the same for all the media files and it is cumbersome to add them manually each time.
2. When there are URLs to documents, PDFs, etc., different for each item, but that can be determined based on the filename of the media submitted. In this case you can use Macros, as described below.

Adding Persistent Notes to your account:

• Go to Settings -> Persistent Notes, and click Add New Persistent Note:

• Add the Title and the notes, and select Describer from the Note For drop-down menu. Make sure you use a small Title.
• Click Add Persistent Note.

• If you have attachments you need to send to the describer, you can make them available online, and then add the link to the file to the Persistent Notes. You can use services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Hightail, etc, and publish your file as "public" and "unlisted". Then paste the URL to your file in the Persistent Notes, and explain what it pertains to.

• You can have as many notes as you need, but only one can be default at a given time (or they can all be disabled). Any notes you add via the respective user interface (in the Guidance field) will be added to the Persistent Note active at the time, and all will be sent to the describer.

• Make sure your notes are up to date and select them according to the content being submitted.

• When you make the Audio Description request you can select any of your saved notes (or deselect the default) at submission time. Expand Add Guidance for Describer to find the Persistent Note drop-down menu, and select the note the describer(s) should use. The Persistent Note row turns yellow when a Persistent Note is being used. If you prefer to add guidance for the current request, instead of using any of the existing Persistent Notes, you just need to select None, on that drop-down:

Disabling Persistent Notes:

You can't delete Persistent Notes, but you can edit them and deselect them as default. To ensure they're not associated with any new Audio Description requests, you just need to uncheck them as default. They will still show as an option in the Persistent Note drop-down menu.

Using Macros:

There are two macros available:

• {FileBaseName}
• {CleanBaseName}

They must match exactly, including the mixed case and the curly braces.

The former substitutes the base filename of the media file you submitted. The latter removes the dashes and the like. For example, if you submitted sci-101-lecture-5.mp4, {FileBaseName} would be sci-101-lecture-5 , and {CleanBaseName} would be sci101lecture5 respectively.

So you might, for example, want to have a note that says:

  Notes can found at http://10.34.56.1/pdfs/{FileBaseName}.pdf 
with the username "describe" and password "summer" .

Then, when you submit lecture-0001.mp4, lecture-0002.mp4, summary.mp4 , the notes will be:

  Notes can found at http://10.34.56.1/pdfs/lecture-0001.pdf 
with the username "describe" and password "summer" .

  Notes can found at http://10.34.56.1/pdfs/lecture-0002.pdf 
with the username "describe" and password "summer" .

 Notes can found at http://10.34.56.1/pdfs/summary.pdf 
with the username "describe" and password "summer" .

Important Notes:

• Our describers analyze each video carefully to determine what visual content should be described. Their goal is to keep the description as concise as possible so as not to take away from the flow of the video. So, although the describer will endeavor to accommodate your requests, they may not always be applied.

• Detailed information about our Audio Description practices is available in our What to expect from Audio Description results article.