Captioning is a lifeline in lectures, seminars and conferences for attendees who’re deaf, hard of hearing or use English as a second or other language. Typical users don’t know or use sign language and can capture notes from sessions, thanks to stenographers, palantypists or court reporters providing CART (Communication Access in Real-Time) on their behalf. CART In Higher Education
Fifteen year old student Payton Bogert, who is hard of hearing, is disputing accessibility in the Florida Standards Assessment (FSA) test, with an audio clip in her imminent tests. An ASL version of the audio clip exists but Bogert, who is not fluent in sign language and wants to go to Princeton University, has asked
Voice contact with call centres, or making appointments and reservations, or simple voice-based chats with friends and coworkers are opening to profoundly deaf people, with apps. An app created in Italy, Pedius, joins Transcence, RogerVoice, VoxSense and Speak2See in making spoken dialogue visible on smartphones in group and one-to-one contexts. Read: Pedius app converts speech to text in real time At Ireland’s Web Summit in November 2014,
A new app, Transcence, is intended to give deaf people access to spoken dialogue among friends or colleagues who don’t know sign language, without using an interpreter. Read: A Smartphone-Based App That Lets You Converse With Deaf People Potential users wanting to test the app can register their interest at the Transcence website for when it exits private beta
Captioning service providers in the US are seeing more requests from the education, enterprise and government sectors as video captioning is outsourced to meet defined quality standards for mission-video strategy. Read: Buyer’s guide: Captioning Serices For Online Video Entities which proactively caption mission-videos also discover the benefits of video-captioning. These include searchable transcripts in video footage,
Media firm Frameweld hosted a recent webinar, “The User Experience (UX) of Captions”, to explore how automation at the right places in the caption production workflow is the key to creating a better captioning experience. Slideshow: The User Experience of Captions Key challenges when captioning audio-visual content: Lack of captions is worse than ‘bad’ captions
Fred Suter, a deafened student from Germany who’s studying modern languages in the UK, shares how he uses realtime captions in lectures for 100% access to course material with a laptop, microphone and wifi network. Read: Experience of Communication Support At University For the Sound Advice team, this is exactly how students who’re deaf or hard-of-hearing
A new app enables children with hearing-aids and cochlear implants, to practice their listening and speaking with flash-cards and a range of speech sounds for each letter. Very cleverly, the app has parent tips for its use. Read: New HOPE Words App for iPhones and iPads Video: See the Hope Words App in action The
“Communication technologies [for] people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing are just as much for the general hearing public… in that they foster communication between both groups.” ** Think of SMS texting on mobile phones, web-chat (via text, video or voice), and Facebook or Twitter posts as everyday solutions for universal access. Real-time captioning (CART) and
In late 2010, a group of Transition Year students from Greenhill, Drogheda, decided to enter the 2011 Young Social Innovators (YSI) competition. Their project is about deafness, so they contacted IDK for initial information. The YSI competition is held every March at the RDS in Dublin, to encourage students to use their skills and talents to create a