The staff at Able were formerly located in the studios of TVNZ, which owns TV One and TV2. However, as TV3 and FOUR are owned by another company, MediaWorks New Zealand, it was decided earlier this year to transfer them to an independent company. The CEO of Able, Wendy Youens, was formerly Access Services Manager at TVNZ.
The NER model was developed by Pablo Romero-Fresco of Roehampton University and Juan Martinez, a respeaking consultant. ‘Respeaking’ is the term used for a captioner repeating the dialogue of a TV program or other medium into a microphone, which is then turned into captions by text-to-speak software. In the NER Model, N stands for the number of words in the respoken text, E for ‘Edition’ errors introduced by the respeaker, and R for ‘Recognition’ errors caused by the software.
At the end of October, the Department of Communications released the technical report prepared by the ABC. The report was keenly anticipated by blind and vision impaired TV viewers who want Australia to join the US, the UK, New Zealand and many other countries in having a permanent audio description service on television.
Red Bee Media is a significant international supplier of access and related services, and the Australian service utilises new innovations in captioning delivery, including the Subito system. Subito is a system for captioning news and other live or near-live programs. It uses speech recognition technology to align pre-prepared captions with the audio of a program.
