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
Fans of real-time captions weren’t short of news recently, with three developments from real-time classroom captions, to life-with-subtitles apps on smartphones and on Google Glass: Ai-Media Firstly, UK-based captioning firm Ai-Media announced backing from Nesta Impact Investments to develop its high-quality live captioning service for students with different learning challenges, while giving teachers real-time feedback
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
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
Sound Advice presented on classroom captions at CESI 2012 February 24-25, with the theme of TEACHnology: merging teaching and technology. Miriam Walsh very kindly co-presented on captioning videos for education, as an intern with Sound Advice. See The Presentations Miriam Walsh’s slides (she became an Apple Educator!) Saturday’s session (February 25) was web-cast via seewritenow.ie.
Teaching supports like captioning on a tablet PC, can allow deaf students to learn in operating theatre practicals where everyone is masked and gowned. The University of California solved the issue of a deaf student lip-reading masked colleagues in theatre, by using a tablet PC to provide live-captioning (CART). The PC device was wrapped in clear plastic
Last April (2009), Irish Deaf Kids (now Sound Advice) received an Innovation Voucher worth €5,000 from Enterprise Ireland, to be used to solve a business issue. The Innovation Voucher initiative, introduced in 2007 by Enterprise Ireland, aims to create links between Irish knowledge providers and small businesses. To qualify for an Innovation Voucher, a company