Television

US project aims to assess quality of live captioning

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A major American access provider, WGBH’s National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), is collaborating with Nuance Communications to develop a prototype system which will automatically assess the quality of live captions on news programs.

In the US, most live or real-time captioning is done by stenocaptioners, who use a phonetic keyboard to create captions as a program is broadcast. (In Australia, live captioning is performed both by stenocaptioners, and by captioners using speech recognition software). The quality of live captions can be variable, and earlier this year, NCAM conducted an online survey which asked caption users to rate different types of caption errors, and the degree to which they make news programs hard to follow.

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Television

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Caption levels on US TV commercials surveyed

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American access advocate Sean Zdenek has conducted an informal survey of caption levels on US TV commercials. As in Australia, there is no legal requirement in the US for advertisers of products and services to caption their commercials.

Zdenek monitored the commercials during two hours of programs on Comedy Central, and found that 33% of them were captioned. This figure is in line with a survey of Australian TV commercials conducted by Media Access Australia in 2007, which found that 35% had captions. In Australia, many of the major advertisers, such as McDonald’s, KFC and Toyota, have been captioning their commercials since the early 1990s.

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Television

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Review of a Panasonic DMR-XW380 Hard Drive DVD Recorder

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In November 2010, Media Access Australia was loaned a Panasonic DMR-XW380 Hard Drive DVD Recorder to review. Chris Mikul and Ally Woodford reviewed the unit for its caption viewing and recording capabilities.

Set up

The Set Up was straightforward, relatively quick, presented no stumbling blocks and pre-empted the steps better than some other set ups we’ve experienced.

Once installed, we tested the caption font on a broadcast program. The captions were found via the STTL button and the font was acceptable; we’ve seen better but we’ve also seen worse.

Taxonomy:

Television

Video

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Encore magazine looks at accessibility

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In the November issue of Encore magazine, which is out now, Georgina Pearson tackles the subject of accessibility in cinema and TV in Australia.

Pearson spoke with accessibility advocates such as Media Access Australia’s CEO Alex Varley, and Ai-Media’s CEO Tony Abrahams, and explains some of the accessibility challenges faced by people who are blind, vision impaired, Deaf and hearing impaired.

“According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1 in 6 Australians are Deaf or hearing impaired and there are over 300,000 Australians living with blindness or vision impairment,” writes Pearson.

Taxonomy:

Television

Cinema

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