MAGpie home

This page archives past NCAM projects. While the information remains relevant, some resources referenced are no longer available, so links to them have been removed.

Media Access Generator (MAGpie)

MAGpie (Media Access Generator) was the original, free, do-it-yourself caption and audio description authoring tool for making multimedia accessible to persons with sensory disabilities.

Originally released in 2000, MAGpie was a Java-based application which required QuickTime Java in order to run properly. There were several versions of MAGpie, which enabled users to creating closed captions and audio (video) descriptions QuickTime, Real, Windows Media Player, or Flash presentations.

Courtesy of WGBH

In 2016, MAGpie was replaced by NCAM’s free, browser-based, Caption And Description Editing Tool (CADET). Both MAGpie and CADET were created by staff at WGBH, where broadcast captioning was invented in 1971 and NCAM shares a Technical Emmy for creating a standard for delivering closed captions on the internet.

Funding for MAGpie development
Funding for MAGpie 1.0 came from the Trace Research and Development Center at the University of Wisconsin, as part of its Information Technology Access Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center which itself is funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research.

Funding for MAGpie 2.01 came from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research and the Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation.
Funding for MAGpie 2.5.1 was provided jointly by NCAM and Research in Motion.

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