Announcing STAMP: a new accessibility add-in for PowerPoint 2010

PowerPoint 2010's audio and video features are increasingly used in presentations, making it difficult for people with hearing disabilities to fully comprehend them. Today, we're pleased to announce the release of STAMP, a new add-in which lets PowerPoint 2010 users quickly and easily add closed captions to video and audio files, making PowerPoint presentations richer, more understandable experiences for people with hearing disabilities.

You can add closed captions in two ways:  by creating the captions within PowerPoint or by importing an existing industry standard Timed Text Mark-up Language (TTML) file.

STAMP's closed-captioning features are also invaluable in creating presentations for all people in all kinds of settings. Consider, for example, subtitling videos or audio files in a foreign language teaching or corporate training environment.  Closed captioned video and audio make a bigger impact across a variety of settings because more people can more effectively engage with their content.

With STAMP, people who already work with captioned video and audio files associated with TTML files can import them directly into their presentations.  For people who don't have access to an existing TTML file, but still need to create captions (or adjust imported captions), STAMP provides a simple caption editor within PowerPoint 2010. Captions within STAMP are saved with the file or can be exported for use by others.

STAMP was first released as a beta version last spring and received lots of helpful feedback from people in the accessibility community.  Based on their feedback, we made significant improvements to it, including:

• New caption editor layout and controls
• Ability to export captions
• Additional features such as font formatting, paragraph alignment and duplicate start/end times
• Optional default settings (e.g., auto-import media)

STAMP supports Office 2010 and works with all the languages Office currently supports around the world. 

Learn More and Download

To download STAMP, go to the Microsoft Accessibility site.

For more - including keyboard shortcuts, editing or deleting captions in the Caption Editor, and how to align, show, hide, or remove captions - take a look at the article Sub-titling text add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint (STAMP).

We want to hear from you, so leave us a comment and let us know what you think.