Axxlog

Support a truly free and robust BBC Creative Archive

Last August, Greg Dyke, the former director general of the BBC, announced that the BBC would soon launch its “Creative Archive” – a project to put much of the Beeb’s programs on the Internet, so that the licence-paying British public could have access to it….

Here are some of the elements critical to the creation of a real, useful, relevant Creative Archive:

• It must be accessible: files must be made available in open, standards-defined formats without “digital rights management” or other technology locks that will keep Britons from creatively re-using the BBC’s offerings.

Well, yes, but indeed DRM has implications for accessibility. And in any event, when I hear the word “accessible,” I take out my screen reader.

Is the BBC quite aware of the work involved in captioning and describing decades’ worth of video?

Don’t get bitten by Jaws

“Hmm, $40 for a 60-day evaluation of Jaws. OK, I’ll get it, learn it, and then I’ll be able to test for accessibility by people with poor vision.” Wrong. Very, very wrong. As a sighted person, I found it exceptionally difficult to make any sense at all of web pages using Jaws, even those that had been thoughtfully designed for accessibility. There was just too much information coming at me….

A person using a Jaws is actually using three applications at once: the web site or web application, the browser, and the screen reader. If you’ve tried to teach a complete web novice such as an older relative then you may be familiar with the issues this creates, trying to help them understand when they should be looking at the grey bar at the top and when to concentrate on the meat of the page. Now add in a third thing to concentrate on, and remember that you can’t see any of it.

Webcredible boosts UK postal watchdog Web site accessibility

The new website aims to conform to level AAA of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines…. The usability needs of non-disabled visitors were also a major consideration in the design. When a site visitor prints a page from the website navigation, formatting and images disappear and the page prints perfectly on paper. Page download time has additionally been improved.

Postwatch was keen to avoid creating a separate text-only version and used the expertise of accessibility and usability specialists Webcredible. “Creating a separate text-only version is the worst thing a company can do when it designs a website,” said a representative of Webcredible. “Not only does it marginalise blind and disabled web users by segregating them from non-disabled users but it can also be costly and time-consuming to implement.

“Web accessibility is not rocket science. It is far easier to implement than most organisations believe and needn’t place any limitations on the design of a website,” he added.

Duocom Receives Two International Awards of Excellence

The Best Overall Staging for a Corporate Event, Large Venue award is considered the “Best Picture Oscar” of the AV Rental & Staging industry and was awarded for Duocom’s work on the 14th World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf, held in Montreal…. Simultaneous Interpretation of three visual sign languages (French, American and International SL [which does not exist]) [and] numerous spoken languages, as well as closed captioning into French and English[, were] required.

Kodak Demos E-Cinema Solutions at CineExpo

The Kodak system will handle multi-language audio tracks, subtitling, and closed captioning.

Oh? How? And will audio description be deemed a “multi-language audio track”?

Alan Spencer comments on lack of captioning

However, in all my fights to get a release that would satisfy each and every fan. it appears I’ve let a sizable quotient of you down. The reason I didn’t service your needs is because I was unaware I even had to: Sledge Hammer: Season One has not been closed-captioned. I apologize to all fans of “Sledge Hammer!” who are hearing impaired; as I was under the false assumption that closed captioning was mandatory….

The good folks at Anchor Bay, the majority of whom have been lobbying for captioning all along, certainly didn’t set this precedent. They’ve been fighting it. This shameful policy was established by their previous parent company because it saved to few dollars…. There is a bit of good news: Anchor Bay has new owners. Key people, many of who have been on the receiving end of complaints regarding this policy they weren’t responsible for, are attempting to ensure that all their titles are made available to the hearing impaired from now on.

(Cf. Neil Gaiman: Neverwhere; Neverwhere commentary.)

With Cabbie, all’s fair

Some of what they’re saying is anybody’s guess, a mixture of hip-hop
slang and God-knows-what-else. What is clear is that Martinez is ragging on the interviewer about his singing voice and his taste in clothing….

The interviewer is Cabral (Cabbie) Richards and getting pro athletes to let down their guards is what he does…

As for the Cabbie-speak that obviously appeals to the players and to Sportsnet’s target audience, even Sanderson doesn’t understand it. “We got a call from our closed-captioning people one time asking for a script. They couldn’t figure out what he was saying. But there is no script, it’s just Cabbie.”

I always find it amusing when Sportsnet claims to give a shit about captioning.

Narration lets blind enjoy films

[T]he theaters are also looking at installing a $5,000 “rear-window captioning” system for hearing-impaired moviegoers…. [Dave] Sarle had written letters to every movie chain in Utah before he got an OK from the Megaplex 12 Theatres at the Gateway to install the DVS. [T]he sister theaters at Jordan Commons might also install DVS “if we get enough call for it.” Already, he says, The Gateway theater has attracted at least one blind patron who had never been to a movie before.

Great: Another blind person agitating to get his needs served at the expense of deaf people’s.

Is Dave Sarle a hero or a hypocrite?

Good on yez, Dave, for fixing things up for blind people. But whatever possessed you to even suggest that only description should be installed?

And what possessed WGBH to sell them such a system? You’re actively excluding deaf people. Actively including blind people does not excuse it!

Subtitle expert has £20m float in view

“It may not be high profile but it’s a great business,” says Ms Sheridan, who starts marketing IMS today for a planned flotation on the Alternative Investment Market, valuing it at up to £20 million.

(Another story claims IMS “made profits of £800,000 on turnover of £6.5 [million].”)

1. “Deaf, partly deaf push for better closed-captioning”:

   With the help of a sign language interpreter, he explained that weather and traffic reports and some breaking news reports have incomplete closed captioning, making them difficult to understand.

   That’s what happens with captions spooled off a Teleprompter. They don’t even count – literally. (See longer article.)

2. “Crystal was so five minutes ago”

   Crystal sang of “Mystic River”: “There’s a beating; it’s like a Disney-Eisner meeting.” But the closed-captioning on Disney-owned ABC instead said, “It’s like a Disney-Pixar meeting,” leading some to believe the network wasn’t forewarned warned about the shot at Disney chair Michael Eisner.

   Do you think if Marc Okrand were still wandering the halls bragging about flying out to Hollywood to oversee captioning of the Oscars this sort of thing would have happened? Kaplach!

3. “Media as ‘bridge’: It’s for players to decide”:

   On the idea of subtitling television programmes for the deaf, for example, Singapore Press Holdings’ (SPH) MediaWorks executive director Wee Leong How said the ministries’ reply had already noted that broadcasters had explained previously that they faced resource and time constraints for such a move.

   What the hell do you expect from Singapore? I’m surprised they do not flog deaf people there, or perhaps simply imprison them.

4. “SRK is king of Phahurat”:

   Indeed, even the VCDs and DVDs of the original versions are subtitled in English for the benefit of those who do not understand Hindi. According to dealers here, the subtitling is done primarily in Pakistan. “It is done in Malaysia as well but the quality of the stuff coming in from there isn’t good enough,” says one of them.

   And it’s a whole lot better over here, is it?

5. “Does the Terapin record closed captions?”: It can’t. VCDs use MPEG video, which doesn’t have a vertical blanking interval. In theory, captions could be stored away somewhere, rather along the lines of DVDs, and regenerated, but I expect that horse has long since escaped the barn.

6. Two items on same-language subtitling:

   1. “Open Letter to the World Bank e-forum on ICT for Rural Development”:

      There are two extremely important initiatives on literacy in India. One is software in Indian languages from Tata Consulting, which has helped more than 80,000 users in areas where computers are available. The more important initiative is captioning of Bollywood movies in the language of the movie. This allows illiterate people in the audience who sing along to follow the text and gradually pick up basic literacy. This practice is helping several hundred million people in India, and will help many more as it is more widely practiced. Closed-captioning of TV would help even more.

   2. BBC Prime seeks to benefit from pushing education angle”:

      Dunsford explained that BBC Prime is pitched as a tool of learning English. He said the key to localizing the channel is airing most of the programs with subtitles.

      After the initial surprise of seeing subtitles, people are getting used to the idea, he said. If you have a certain level of understanding, the subtitles can be used to help improve your understanding. If you have no understanding, you can still watch and enjoy the programs.

      For many years, the channel was unable to even consider adding another cost in terms of subtitling, as it was not financially viable, Dunsford recalled. Only as BBC Prime expanded its distribution across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and became a financially successful channel, was it able to look at investing back into the channel through localization.

      In Hungary, without the subtitling we would not have the distribution, he said.

      Dunsford declined to reveal the costs of subtitling or launching in Hungary, but maintained that subtitling opened a new way of promoting the channel in the country. The work was outsourced to the local arm of Broadcast Text, a multinational broadcast subtitling company.

      Well, this is probably bullshit, of course. Any programming from the recent decade would have been closed-captioned to begin with. If the BBC were truly concerned about cost, they’d simply decode the captions, perhaps using the flawed DTT system of re-typesetting them in Tiresias.

      Oh, but wait? You don’t want captions? You want same-language subtitles, bottom centred, with no sound effects or non-speech information and heavy editing? Right. That’s really gonna help an ESL learner.

David Pescovitz, “Wirelessly Enabling the Disabled”:

Currently, the best captioning technology offered by some movie theaters is Rear Window, a scrolling LED display

Nothing scrolls. It’s pop-on captions only.

mounted at the rear of the theater that displays mirror-images of the captions already embedded in Hollywood films.

They’re not “embedded,” and they’re certainly not embedded in all Hollywood films, as implied. Captions and descriptions reside on a separate CD-ROM that can be played by itself, or its contents can be copied to a hard drive. In either event, the player, reading timecodes that are embedded in Hollywood films (on the frame margins), and triggers caption display and description playback. There are no separate prints, and in fact you can use any print you want of a specific movie.

Hard-of-hearing audience members watch the film through transparent reflective panels mounted on the chairs.

They’re translucent. They could be transparent for reasons of optics, but they aren’t. They’re smoked plexiglas.

“It’s awkward,” Mitchell says. “Even if the text is provided on the screen itself (at the bottom), you have to constantly look at the words and you miss the picture.”

That’s disingenuous. Any offscreen captioning system would generate the same complaint, as would all captioning systems, period, if you think about it.

Anyway, since I’ve watched more movies with Rear Window captioning than anyone else, I can categorically deny that “[i]t’s awkward.” If you’re in a good seat near the display, and if the reflector is in good shape, and if the LED display hasn’t been beaten to shit, the system works extremely well. It’s not very good for neophytes, though, or anyone with presbyopia, since it becomes difficult to switch focus between the captions and the movie.

The Center’s solution is simple, yet effective. Captions already embedded in films are transmitted to a PDA,

They’re not embedded in the film.

either belonging to the patron or borrowed from the theater. A tiny monitor that clips on any pair of eyeglasses virtually suspends the caption in the wearer’s field-of-vision.

This is the same as the Virtual Vision approach that was tried and rejected. You know, two different Technology Review articles have run on this topic, one of them written by me. (The other one, which I have here in front of me, is “Wireless for the Disabled,” December 2003/January 2004 [abstract], with no byline.)

Of course, live settings require a typist to provide the captioning.

No, a stenotypist. A stenocaptioner. CART, if you want to be more precise.

As speech recognition software improves though, it’s easy to envision a PDA-based portable captioning system so hearing-impaired individuals can read their real-world conversations without breaking eye contact.

Two generations hence, possibly, yes.

In that case, though, how does the “hearing-impaired” person talk back? Isn’t this the converse of reading out phrases from a foreign-language phrasebookbook, but not understanding what the natives say to you?

By the way, until I try this system and know it works, I think the idea of staring down in your lap at a PalmPilot to read captions is a non-starter. How is this really better than Rear Window? It apparently is not. I’m sure our dear British friends will lap it up, though, as is their wont.

See also

• Wearable Captioning homepage
• CSUN presentation
• Behind the booth
• Test of Closed-Caption Systems at Langley Theater

I admit to having been somewhat asleep at the switch on this one, but now that it’s getting some attention, I can provide historical background. You realize this is the third time it’s come up, right? The ghost of Baywatch haunts us still, primarily by appearing on Jerry Springer to plug its tell-all memoir.

The U.S. Department of Education has apparently decided that certain programming will receive sponsorship for captioning and certain other programming will not. DoEd has funded captioning since at least the late 1970s – The Captioned ABC News, which I watched (now almost notoriously) in my pyjamas as a young fella, was partly funded by DoEd, for example.

Current online coverage:

• “Censor Scooby-Doo? Words fail” (mentioned here already)
• “Small decision illuminates big ones”: “Here’s an unpublished government decision made in concert with unnamed individuals and only made public through the efforts of a nonprofit advocacy group”
• Neil Gaiman (does he watch captioning?)
• National Association of the Deaf press releases and backgrounders (from way back in October 2003):
  • “Television Captioning Censorship Hurts Family Values” (very much an unfortunate choice of words)
  • “NAD Applauds NCD Opposition to Captioning Censorship”
    • Letter from NCD to DoEd chair
  • Lists of approved and rejected shows

This is a rehash of a couple of scares that began in 1996.

1. First people were upset that DoEd sponsored captioning of that masterpiece of “educational” television, Baywatch (1996).
2. Later, some were shocked and appalled that Jerry Springer’s captioning was sponsored and wanted that funding pulled (1998). The case was argued that – to use my own words – deaf people and captioning viewers have the right to watch the same trash as everybody else.
3. U.S legislation to take effect in 2001 (IDEA – PDF or text) would have solely restricted DoEd to funding the captioning of programming deemed “educational, news, and informational.” In 1999, DoEd canvassed for public opinion on the topic of “what the term ‘educational, news, and informational’ encompasses in reference to the description and captioning of television, videos, and materials.”

I can’t find any information about what happened between that point in 1999 and late 2003, when the now-notorious accepted and banned lists were put together.

A few issues people aren’t talking about

1. DoEd grants, if memory serves, pay for only half the cost. You’d think this would result in twice as much total captioning, but I see no evidence of that whatsoever. Supremely popular TV series (yes, including Baywatch and Jerry Springer) that earn tons of money for producers are overrepresented in the history of DoEd funding. I have no evidence at hand that producers double the number of series they caption with DoEd funding. Instead, it simply reduces their costs. (And for producers with a single show on the go at any given time – the norm for mom-’n’-pop producers – the money, if only in the form of cost deferment, is pure gravy.)
2. Moreover, DoEd funding represents a gravy train for captioning agencies.
   1. CaptionMax, Vitac, WGBH, Caption Colorado, and NCI list DoEd funding, for example, though funding may not be current.
   2. As the FCC delicately put it, “Historically, there appears to have been a heavy reliance on federal funding of closed captioning and video description, particularly through U.S. Department of Education grants.” It’s a teat they are reluctant to wean themselves from.
   3. Remember, not all the grant money goes toward actual captioning; there’s also “administration” involved.
   4. And no matter who pays for the captioning or in what ratio, these are businesses earning money off the service. Margins are reportely quite tight with some of the nonprofit captioners, but that is not necessarily the case with the for-profit shops.
3. In the current list of disapproved shows, I can spot only a couple whose producers might genuinely be too poor to pay for captioning, and the only one I think is really too poor for it is In the Life (captioned this year by WGBH, previously by NCI). Clouding this argument is the fact that the shows are so skimpily described that I have not heard of many of them, which is as you would expect, as these are grants dealing with future programming.
4. Furthermore, there is no requirement that highest-quality captioning be used. I have a vague memory, but cannot point to examples, of DoEd-funded reality-TV shows that should have been captioned via pop-on or at worst by live display that were done by real-time captioning instead. (The one I have in mind is Blind Date, but I’m gonna have to look that up.)
5. It is at best debatable that captioning needs to be supported by government grants, something I’ve been saying since 1996.
   1. Is captioning still merely an added feature, something we do if we feel like it or if somebody else is willing to pony up half the cost?
   2. Why are people still pretending that an inaccessible program is the true underlying form, while captioning and description are extraneous and discretionary supplementary features?
6. If hundreds of other shows are captioned without DoEd funding, how important is it anymore? We have nothing like it in Canada, for example, yet we have proportionately more captioning on Canadian programs than the U.S. does on its own.
7. TV is expensive; captioning has been around for 30 years (closed captioning for 25); it’s possible find adequate captioning at reasonable rates, shitty captioning at fantastic rates, and very good captioning at high rates.
8. Nobody seems to be asking if similar lists have been compiled for audio-described programming. Described TV is still in its infancy a mere 15 years after it began, and it’s much more expensive than captioning. I can see a weak argument for government funding of description. In fact, I would not severely object if only description were funded.
9. Likewise, a separate program to caption (often open-caption) educational videos that are unlikely ever to be broadcast makes sense to me, as long as those or similar videos are also described. The Captioned Media Program is administered by NAD and funded by the Department of Education ($17.25 million from 2001–2006), a conflict of interest its Web pages on the current contretemps do not bother to mention.
10. A denial of sponsorship for captioning is not “censorship,” as the NAD hysterically claims, and for the love of God, it has nothing to do with “family values.” Reduced funding may contribute to a denial of accessibility, but it does not prevent the show producers from expressing themselves.

More news as it develops. But in the meantime, if you are a resident of the United States, ask yourself this: Do you want the government of the day approving and rejecting television programming in the first place?

1. “Council move upsets deaf TV watchers”:
   

   After seven years of faithfully recording every word spoken for instant captioning on the screen, the council has dropped the contract of Jane James, who has her own firm, Captioning Professional, and by all accounts was doing a fine job, no complaints…. It was a city move to save money. By going on the cheap, the council will save $65,000. That sounds good unless you’re deaf. Then it’s obvious Oakland’s deaf community takes the hit.

   The council went out to bid on captioning services and a new contract has been given to Rapidtext of Newport Beach, which records meetings by “remote listening.”

   Rapidtext puts listeners on the phone when the council meets, usually on Tuesday nights. The listeners work from their homes and can be plugged into the meetings from any city in the country, including the East Coast. The firm’s base is in Newport Beach. This is not a “Buy Oakland” deal.

   As for the service, the listeners don’t know who is speaking when they record the comments so the verbatim words are not attributed on the screen to particular council members. Not yet, anyway.

   Last week, the screen showed little arrows to indicate there was a change in speakers. But viewers didn’t know who the speakers were.

   James watched the new system and said there were many gaffs, including one identifying a city staffer as a council member. At the same meeting, the microphone went dead. “They lost all of what was said during that rather long time,” said James. [...]

   Switching from the Captioning Professionals contract for $150,160 to Rapidtext of Newport Beach for $90,000 will save $65,000. [...]

   But James says the committee shouldn’t consist of only deaf folks because they won’t be able to discern if the spoken words are accurate.

   “This committee will be like a blind man being an art critic,” says James.  ¶

2. “Censor Scooby-Doo? Words fail”:
   

   The Bush administration has decided that people with bad hearing have bad judgment, too, and need special guidance from the federal government.

   So the U.S. Department of Education is declaring about 200 television programs inappropriate for closed-captioning and denying federal grant requests to make them accessible to the hearing-impaired.

   The department made its decisions based on the recommendations of a five-member panel. Who the five members are, only the government seems to know, and it isn’t saying. But the shows they censored suggest a perspective that is Talibanesque. [...]

   “They’ve suddenly narrowed down the definition of those three kinds of programming without public input,” says Kelby Brick, director of the NAD’s law and advocacy center. “Basically, the department wants to limit captioning to puritan shows. The department wants to ensure that deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals are not exposed to any non-puritan programming. Never mind that the rest of the country is allowed to be exposed.” [...]

   The Department of Education is refusing to reveal the names of the panel members whose opinions determined the caption grants and also won’t disclose the new guidelines. By every appearance, the government has changed its definition of what constitutes a caption-worthy program. But it’s keeping the new rules secret.

   “They apparently used a panel of five individuals and then made the censorship decisions based on the individuals’ recommendations,” Mr. Brick says. “We have found the identity of one of the panelists. This individual tells us that he never knew he was on such a panel and that his views would be used for censorship. No panel was convened. The five panelists were contacted individually and separately.”  ¶

3. Watch CNN at the library. Why, it’s almost like being at home!
   

   A 42-inch Sampo [!] plasma television was recently added the lounge area of the Java City Café. The television cost the library about $3,000…. “Academic libraries are no longer just warehouses for print collections,” [a functionary] said. “It’s not enough to provide only books and newspapers anymore.”

   Library policy requires the television to be tuned to CNN, which underscores its function as an information source, Pitschmann said. He said the library is open to changing to another news source if students say they’d prefer another channel.

   “Obviously we can’t just allow someone to walk up to the television and change the channel,” he said.

   The volume on the set is muted, requiring the viewer to read the closed captioning subtitles. Pitschmann said turning the volume up isn’t an option since people study in the area and because the volume may disturb adjacent study areas in the building.

   Students expressed mixed reaction to the television, some saying they find it beneficial and others saying library money could have been better spent.

   “It’s better if you can actually hear it,” said Jennifer Lee, a freshman biology major.

   “Because it’s silent, you don’t catch everything [the newscasters] say,” said Laurie Crunk, a senior art history major.  ¶

4. “Captioning lures court reporters”: I wish non-experts would rid themselves of the psychosis that all captioning everywhere is done by court reporting. I know some people want that to come true because it’s ever so much cheaper, but let’s not encourage them. And who “clicks” on a TV menu? And is the captioner’s job really to provide the bare minimum? Again, let’s not give people ideas here.
   

   An estimated 500 people around the country, most working out of their homes, type the captions…. The government has been phasing in closed captioning since 2000, and is requiring that it be offered to virtually all new programming beginning Jan. 1, 2006. [...]

   Years ago, people who wanted to see broadcast captions had to buy devices to hook up to their television sets. Televisions now can automatically bring in captions, unless the user clicks on a menu to turn off the feature.

   Skilled real-time reporters willing to work at least 40 hours a week can make $100,000 a year and up, leaders in the field say. Salaries can average around $60,000 to $65,000, DiLorenzo said. [...]

   The transcriber can type “unintelligible” or “inaudible,” use a phonetic spelling or skip a name in favor of a general reference to a player, for instance.

   If they fall behind, they eliminate less-essential parts of a sentence and summarize. While a court reporter must produce a verbatim translation, a captioner is supplying just enough narration for the listener to keep up with the images.  ¶