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CaptionMax is one of North America’s largest closed captioning and media accessibility companies. The company is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with additional locations in New York City, New York and Burbank, California. The company provides captions, subtitles, translation, video description, and as-broadcast scripts for over 450 customers including all major broadcast and cable TV networks, production companies, studios, distributors, educational institutions, government agencies, large corporations and Internet portals. Some clients include CW network productions for CBS Television Distribution, network productions for NBCUniversal, McGraw-Hill, Viacom Media Networks and Sony Pictures Entertainment.
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History
CaptionMax is a privately owned business. The company was founded in 1992 by Max Duckler. In the last 19 years, CaptionMax has expanded from a small, one person shop to a company of over 150 employees and independent contractors working on a variety of accessible media services. Today, CaptionMax owns buildings in both Minneapolis, MN and Burbank, CA.
Partnerships
In 2006 CaptionMax entered the educational multimedia market.
CaptionMax authors hundreds of hours of accessible DVDs and other multimedia formats for interactive educational materials used in K-12 classrooms across the country. This media contains enhancements, such as video description and captioned glossary terms, to help children score higher on comprehension tests.
For the past 15 years, CaptionMax has hosted a Consumer Advisory Board Meeting attended by CaptionMax staff, business professionals in the accessibility world, teachers, and students.
CaptionMax partners with many educational accessibility companies such as AIT, BioMedia, NAD, Nasa eClips, The National Center on Accessibility, and many others. The company also informed the Description Key for the American Foundation for the Blind.
CaptionMax is affiliated with the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology. COAT advocates for accessibility and usability of technology for people with disabilities. COAT’s primary goal is to ensure that legislative and regulatory safeguards are in place so people with disabilities have access to evolving high speed broadband, wireless, and other Internet-based technologies.
CaptionMax also partners with DCMP to provide quality closed captions, subtitles, and video description to their ever-expanding library.
In 2012, CaptionMax started a partnership with Smith-Kettlewell’s Video Description Research and Development Center. The Smith-Kettlewell Video Description Research and Development Center (VDRDC) investigates innovative technologies and techniques for making online video more accessible to blind and visually-impaired students and consumers. Through collaboration with a broad array of partners and stakeholders in the Description Leadership Network, we are developing advanced video annotation methods for use in a wide variety of educational settings, as well as helping educators and other description providers make better use of the tools already available.
CaptionMax also sponsors many national media conferences such as TDI, the NAD Biennial Conference, and the DLN Conference.
Research and Development
In 2006, CaptionMax was awarded 2 5-year Access to Emerging Technologies grants from the U.S. Department of Education. These grants enabled CaptionMax to participate in research and development with other organizations, such as DCMP and Cued Speech Discovery and Information Services.
In 2008, CaptionMax collaborated with the National Center for Supported eText (NCSeT) in an initiative called The Supportive Video Project. The goal of this collaboration was to research enhanced video description options for educational learning.