Multitudes of people have pivoted since spring 2020 pushed us all into video-calling with family, friends and colleagues, on the fly. Live Captions Keep You Connected Meryl Evans, a marketer who wears cochlear implants, wrote, “The Best Automatic Captioning Tool For Videocalls“ Literally, the tech firms are innovating videocall platforms at speed to stay relevant,
Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) – hosting the National Technical Institute for Deaf students (NTID) – is optimising its realtime lecture captions with help from Microsoft. With deaf student demographics shifting to realtime captioning, by 2016 the number of lecture-captioning hours at RIT grew by 58% to 24,335 – up from just 15,440 hours in
The annual Web Summit event – originating in Dublin, Ireland – gets dismissed by Ireland’s press but has grown into a respectable, mature conference attended by leaders, movers and shakers from the tech and other worlds. Dublin’s 2013 event was the first attended by Sound Advice, with 2014 bringing an attempt to redress the gender
Having attended two Web Summit conventions in Dublin, Ireland (their hometown) – the opportunity to travel to the 2016 event at its new home in Lisbon, Portugal had to be taken. Women In Tech Tickets Ten thousand free tickets were assigned to female founders with their own businesses in the organisers’ attempt to boost the
Positive results for students using realtime captions in classrooms are noted in a case study by PhillipsKPA that uses research findings from the Victorian Deaf Education Institute (VDEI) and the Victorian Government Department of Education and Training (DET). NOTE: Mainstream schools can use this learning for use with students with access issues. Read: Using Real-Time Captioning With Students Who Have Hearing
Closed captions on TV shows in the US, are regulated by new FCC (Federal Communications Commission) controls since March 2014. The four critical elements are: accuracy, synchronization, completeness, and placement. The accuracy clause means TV stations must give captioners speakers’ names in advance, a challenge since captioners are not paid for prep time. Tips for synchronising content
Anyone who requests live captions or CART (communication access in realtime) for an educational or training context, knows the pain points of (1) defining your hearing issues (2) explaining what CART is, and its benefits (3) arranging its provision and (4) establishing who actually pays for it. One blogger, Chelle George, describes in detail the
Parent attitudes are similar when teaching support hours are sought for children with extra educational needs, at mainstream schools in the UK and Ireland. This report from The Guardian defines the challenges of special needs or teaching assistants in the classroom: Read >> Relying on TA support for SEN students is false economy In the words
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
Speech-to-text automation has a huge role in creating classroom captions for students with hearing and other issues, who don’t always note-take in class. To address the multi-speaker shortcomings of automated caption solutions, a program, Scribe, was devised at the University of Rochester. Scribe Tweaks Speech-To-Text Automation – With Humans Scribe works by crowd-sourcing humans to