Back in 2014, we highlighted a childrens’ graphic novel, ” El Deafo”, created by Cece Bell, to highlight her own superpowers (strengths) when navigating the world as a child with hearing aids. We love El Deafo as a rare depiction of our childhood selves, navigating the hearing world as speaking deaf children while addressing the
AvaScribe, which live captions in-person conversations, is moving into the desktop and web app space with $4.5 million in funding. In the videocall space, Ava’s captions have an edge over platforms like Google Meet and Microsoft Teams with built-in accessibility. Transcripts are saved after videocalls, for review and re-use. Each speaker has a colour label,
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
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
Demand for specialist teachers of speaking deaf children is so high that all graduates from the teaching program at California Lutheran University (CLU) were hired out of their course before summer 2017 began. Summer camps for verbal children with hearing issues to build peer support and address learning gaps are similarly growing in the US, with
Current teens with cochlear implants will like to read of Singapore-born Dr Joseph Heng and two female students, US-born Victoria Popov, with otolaryngology (ENT) in her sights, and UK-born Genevieve Khoury, in her second year of a medical degree. With clear surgical masks available for healthcare workers with hearing issues, and Bluetooth links going directly from stethoscopes
Soapbox Labs, a Dublin-based startup that builds speech-to-text technology to analyse young children’s literacy in noisy settings like kitchens, cafes and cars, has raised €1.2 million in a financing round backed by Enterprise Ireland, Elkstone Capital and Astia Angels. Potential Redirection For Classroom Captions Data algorithms generated by Soapbox use 600,000 audio samples collected from
Auditory Sciences’ Interact-AS classroom captioning software for mainstreamed students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing has won an award for its 90 to 95 per cent accuracy rate. Technophile deaf students who read at/above fifth-grade level with a strong attention span best track the captioning speed as the teacher or others speak in the learning environment. Interact-AS™ is a