Hands typing on a vintage typewriter with coffee, pencil, notebook, and crumpled paper on a turquoise desk

Blog

The Scribe’s Press

A Blog About 508 Compliance, Media Services, and Technology

This week, Word Wizards, Inc. announced its recent accreditation by the BBB serving Metro Washington DC and Eastern PA.  As a BBB Accredited Business, we are dedicated to promoting trust in the marketplace. According to a recent BBB study by Nielsen, nearly 83% of U.S. consumers......

Challenge The Harvard University Extension School came to us to develop a template, built in Microsoft Word, that would render the formatting process for a typical student thesis less arcane. Originally, they were considering different specifications for each department. To standardize the process, they decided......

For the past year, we have reported on the forthcoming update to 508 compliance standards. On January 9th, 2017 the final rule was officially posted to the Federal Register. The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) standards and guidelines refresh is intended to improve on the......

Both Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (508) and Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) are made up of laws and guidelines requiring information to be made available to all members of the public, regardless of sensory disabilities. Closed Captioning (CC),  Audio......

  Duff Johnson, Executive Director of the PDF Association recently spoke before the U.S. Access Board regarding the upcoming refresh of the 508 accessibility rules.  The proposed changes include adherence to WCAG 2.0 for all media types and additional conformance to other guidelines based on......

Word Wizards is continuing our coverage of The United States Access Board’s 508 refresh. These rules and standards set the accessibility compliance requirements for electronic publications procured by the federal government, including web sites, video assets, and mixed media productions. For video assets, the current......

The U.S. Access Board, the government agency responsible for providing accommodations for people with disabilities under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, has issued a call for public comments concerning Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This call is in regards to new rules......

The Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (Access Board) is currently working to revise the standards for Section 508 accessibility. This revision is being called the 2015 Section 508 Refresh.   Since the last revision (in 2000), technological advances have increased exponentially – going from......

Since software is constantly updating and evolving, we have to keep up with changes to make the most accessible documents as possible. With that in mind, issues can sometimes arise with the new versions of our most commonly used software, such as JAWS. What works......

This post is the start of a new series concerning Section 508 compliance remediation. Our expert 508 compliance team has encountered several workflow errors while using Acrobat for 508 remediation.  These errors cause some serious headaches for both users and clients. As such, we felt......

At Word Wizards we are all about accessibility.  Our 508 compliant transcripts meet federal standards for multimedia on Federal websites that are accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, as well as to the blind and low vision individuals. ...

  On Wednesday night TIVA, the Television, Internet and Video Association, held a panel at Video Labs focusing on contracts and specifically how they pertain to the video production business. While contracts are something that most of us in the media and video industry are something most......

A special thanks goes out to Tanya Spann Roche,  for giving us this great info.  Tanya is a producer, writer and editor making her a triple threat. Her website is www.thinkspeakact.com So you want to do some video or production work with the US government. Building......

Hello out there in cyber space! On this wonderful Friday at the end of September, I want to share some tips that will help you be a more professional and trusted transcriber, whether you’re working for a company, or you’re a freelancer. Business, government agencies,......

Need to provide closed captions for digital media? Word Wizards has some tips for you that will help make the process go a bit more smoothly. These simple recommendations can help save you time and money during your next captioning project. So before you send......

Today I read an article about the newest update to Phillips’ Speech Processing Software SpeechExec Enterprise. The impressive dictation and transcription management software just got a full overhaul and is now bristling with new features. The following excerpt from the MarketWatch report sums it up......

All e-readers require some form of navigational (or as Amazon refers to them in its Kindle Publishing Guidelines, logical) TOC (Kindle devices also want a separate, inline, TOC as well, but that’s another article). And while InDesign is usually pretty good about building one for......

Recently we were faced with an issue that shouldn’t have been an issue at all: how to create—by hand—an inline Table of Contents (or TOC) for the Kindle portion of an ebook project. Normally this isn’t a big deal; Adobe InDesign is very good at......

When it comes to a project of a sensitive nature, be it legal, militaristic, classified, or otherwise not intended for unauthorized eyes, who are you going to trust? Now, we are not trying to put down firms who have chosen to enter the transcription industry......

Once and a while somebody makes a mistake, details get lost in translation, and your transcript is in jeopardy. When time codes in the transcript do not match the time codes in the reel, there is a BIG problem. What is a video professional to......

Video transcription companies like Word Wizards have been assisting the professional video production industry for a long time, making the lives of editors, producers, and audio mixers much easier. As with any industry, time is money, and wasted time in post can be reduced significantly......

Last week at the 2012 IDEAS conference, Word Wizards conducted a survey to get a better understanding of what the experts think about the difference between compliance and accessibility. We invite you to participate in this survey and share your opinion about this hot ticket......

On behalf of Word Wizards, Inc. I would like to thank our friends at USDA for hosting this year’s Interagency Disability Educational Awareness Showcase. It was our first year attending as an exhibitor and we took full advantage of this opportunity to demonstrate our accessibility......

Word Wizards is gearing up for next week’s Interagency Disability Educational Awareness Showcase (IDEAS). Our organization has developed a broad expertise helping entities achieve section 508 compliance for their documents, videos and interactive forms. After being awarded a GSA contract on the A.I.M.S. schedule earlier......

Time Code, the stuff that editors once dreamed of. A continuous stream of data (usually audio) that allows video footage to be edited digitally in a non-linear format. Providing transcripts synced to time code was once a very technical and labor intensive process. In fact,......

When the Word Wizards go out into the world, we often get asked the question, “what does a transcription company do and why would someone need that?” As always, simple questions require not so simple answers. As defined by Wikipedia, “A transcription service is a......

  After 2 years of applications, tests, reviews, and countless hours, Word Wizards Inc. is proud to announce our acceptance to the highly revered GSA (U.S. General Services Administration) schedule network. Getting approved for the GSA is no small task, and we are extremely grateful......

  Word Wizards Inc., now offers a complete solution for creating broadcast, internet, or YouTube media with Audio Description for blind and low vision individuals. We are working non-stop to help prepare our clients for the beginning of The 21st Century Accessibility Act’s enforcement in......