EnACT: A software tool for creating animated text captions

Abstract

Music in captioning is often represented by only its title and/or a music note. This representation provides little to no information of the intended effect or emotion of the music. In this paper, we present a software tool that was created to enable users to mark emotions in a script or lyrics and then render those marks into animated text for display as captions. A pilot study was conducted to collect initial responses to, preferences and understanding of the animated lyrics of one song by a deaf and hard of hearing audience. Participants were able to identify the animated lyrics as belonging to a song and found that the animations helped them understand the portrayed emotions. They also identified the shaking style of animation portraying fear as least preferable. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.