Archive for the 'wishlist' Category
Listen to this as a podcast:
Officials in Los Angeles are looking into implementing a text message system for 911 emergency services that would allow people to send not only text messages, but also photos and videos from their cell phones when immediate assistance is required.
Officials told the L.A. Police Commission that they were beginning to seek money to install the new system, which they believe could aid crime fighting by providing callers with alternative methods for alerting authorities and police with new visual evidence.
‘Sometimes a person calls 911 and says they just saw a robbery and they’ve snapped an image or video of the getaway car,’ said Sgt. Lee Sands. ‘We want to find a way to get that to officers in the field as fast as possible.’
Text messages can also help.
‘There are circumstances when a person during a kidnap or robbery can’t talk to an operator but they can message them,’ Sands said.
In New York state this week, police stopped an alleged kidnapper after his victim was able to text-message her sister and report she was being driven on the Long Island Expressway.
Previously:
Text messaging and 911
Twitter
Emergency notification service for email and SMS
Floridians can now receive hurricane warnings via SMS
911 centers need to upgrate to accommodate new technology and be accessible to the deaf
Listen to this as a podcast:
The gym I work out at has five television sets in the cardio room. I noticed that when I went to work out, sometimes the closed captions would be displayed on one set, but not all five sets. And sometimes the closed captions wouldn’t be turned on at all. For the past few weeks, the captions have been completely off. When I went to talk to the employees about this, they all claimed they couldn’t do anything to the TV’s because only a manager has the remote and the managers are never there when I am (I go around 6 PM) so I couldn’t ask them directly. The employees kept claiming that they had left notes for the managers, but the captions still did not come on. Since I can’t listen to music, I was getting pretty bored while I worked out on the elliptical trainer.
Finally, about a week ago I had enough of this runaround, so I asked for the manager’s phone numbers. I called them, and the woman I spoke with claimed that the company installed the TV’s so only the company can control the TV’s, not the employees, but couldn’t tell me why the captions still were not coming on after numerous messages left by me.
My partner bought me a TV-B-Gone and we decided to try it out recently. It’s a small handheld device the size of an electronic car key that is an universal remote control with one button: off.
First, we went to the front desk to ask for the captions to be turned on and they gave us the usual spiel; only managers control the TV and the manager wouldn’t be back until Monday morning, blah blah blah.
Photo credit: TV-B-Gone
Well, fine; if I can’t have captions, then no one is going to have TV. Let’s see how fast those TV’s come back on when I turn them all off. So, I went in the cardio room and discreetly turned off all the televisions. Eventually, someone let the employees know that the TV’s were off. They came in the workout room and stared quizzically at the blank screens, but didn’t turn the TV’s back on. They remained off for the duration of my workout.
When I went back to the gym the next day, the same problem was there: TV’s on, no captions. So, I turned them off again. And I kept doing it for a week and half without getting caught until they finally got the hint somehow, and now all the TV’s have the captions turned on.
You know what I’d really like? For someone to invent a Captions-B-On device. That would be perfect.
Previously:
iTunes and closed captioning
Closed captioning on movie trailers
Listen to this as a podcast:
Via Kotaku:
Kotaku reader A_Zombie contacted us about an email to industry trade association Entertainment Software Association (ESA). He contacted them regarding the lack of subtitles in gaming. Not sure if ESA is the place to go with this concern as the ESA is the industry’s “voice.” Regardless, here’s the letter:
Dear Sir or Ma’aam,I am a deaf 20 year old that loves to play videogames. I’ve been playing videogames ever since I first played the Atari 2600 with my father as a young child. Back then, games were not as complex as they are today. Sometimes, as a deaf gamer, I struggle with many mission based games such as Quake 4, Star Wars: Rouge Squadron Rouge Leader, Perfect Dark 0, Need for Speed: Carbon, X2: Wolverine’s Revenge and many others. The reason for the frustration is for the lack of subtitles in the above mentioned titles. Quake 4 is a perfect example of my frustrations of what I am supposed to do next because the mission objectives and ways to beat certain bosses were given over the intercom and it was mostly garbled. Perfect Dark 0 was frustrating for me because I had no idea what was going on with the story. At one point I was fighting in buildings shooting at mobsters and all of a sudden I’m fighting a midget skinless Chinese dude with a sword in some alternate dimension. That did not make sense for me at all because… who was that Chinese dude?
He’s got a point. If you know the right person to give this letter to, please do. Thanks!
Listen to this as a podcast:
In October 2006, Showtime announced that they would be launching a new mobile video service. Of course, my first thought was, “will it have captions?” From the above link:
NEW YORK, NY- October 9, 2006 – Mobile Streams and Showtime Networks Inc. announced today that Mobile Streams has built an Off-Deck WAP portal to provide mobile users with access to content from SHOWTIME programs for the first time. WAP, or Wireless Application Protocol, is a secure specification that allows users to access information instantly via handheld wireless devices such as mobile phones, pagers, two-way radios, smartphones and communicators. Mobile users with 2.5G or 3G handsets will be able to access the mobile offering, subject to carrier and handset capabilities.
My Sidekick doesn’t display video, so if any readers out there can play video on their phone, would you mind testing this out for me and posting the results? Showtime’s mobile content is accessible via http://wap.sho.com. Thank you!
Previously:
Mobile TV
iTunes and closed captioning
Listen to this as a podcast:
I’ve posted about this before, and I’m going to keep posting about it, especially after reading this article in the New York Times:
In Bessemer, Ala., city employees could not get through to their own 911 system when a colleague had a seizure, at a time when the city and others like it are struggling to upgrade their systems at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Yet even the newest systems cannot adequately handle Internet-based phone services or text messages, which emerged as the most reliable form of communication during Hurricane Katrina.
“Everyone expects 911 to work perfectly 100 percent of the time,” said Patrick Halley, the governmental affairs director for the National Emergency Number Association, whose state-by-state tracking shows that New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are in the forefront of adopting new technology. “And the public doesn’t really care about 911 until they go to use it and expect it to work perfectly and it doesn’t.”
They’re aware of the problems that the current system causes for the deaf:
Experts are laying the groundwork for what they call Next Generation 911, which will better handle Internet-based calls, text messages, cellphone photos and other forms of communication already in common use.
“Deaf people are using text messaging,” Rick Jones, the operations director for the national association, said by way of example. “They can’t talk to 911.”
I hope the new changes come soon – and well before someone desperately needs them.
Listen to this as a podcast:
Jott, which I blogged about earlier today, has another feature where users can leave a short voice message that will be typed up and posted to their blog. It only allows about 30 seconds of spoken text, which is a shame; if the time was unlimited, this would solve the issue of a lack of text transcripts available for podcasts.
Listen to this as a podcast:
This week, Orlando hosted CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association) 2007, which has been described as “the Super Bowl of mobile conferences.” One of the top forecasted trends for mobile phones is mobile TV. Subscribers of mobile TV are able to watch specially-formatted television programs on their mobile phone screen that are delivered over the cellular network. Mobile TV is streamed over 3G or GPRS networks. DVB-H creates a true broadcast transmission, such as digital satellite, and works best on devices that have low battery consumption, such as cell phones. DVB-H is not found everywhere, but is gradually becoming more and more available. Mobile TV has been available in international markets since the early part of the 2000′s, and will now be coming to the American market.
Qualcomm announced at CTIA that they have rolled out their new Mobile TV technology in the US, which will bring television to cellular phone screens. Currently, Verizon Wireless is the only US carrier to sell television service on cellular phones with their new VCAST Mobile TV service debuting on March 1st.
Will mobile TV come with captioning? I haven’t seen mobile TV in action myself, but here is what I have found so far:
- I discovered that a company called SDI Mobile provides subtitling services for mobile TV.
- Envivio makes a mobile TV encoder called 4Caster C4 that comes with EIA 608 closed captioning, DVB Teletext, Subtitling and VBI pass through.
Verizon’s VCAST mobile TV service currently can only be displayed on the following two phones: the Samsung SCH-U620 and the LG VX9400. However, I can’t find anything that says these phones display closed captions. I’ll contact Verizon and find out the status of their mobile TV service and captions.
If anyone is planning on going to the Mobile TV World Forum in London next month, please talk to the vendors about closed captioning and encourage them to bring subtitling and/or captioning to mobile TV.
Listen to this as a podcast:
In the past year and half, the popularity of YouTube has increased across the Internet. YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, share, view, watch, and rank videos on the Internet. The videos are displayed into Adobe Flash (.flv) format.
Many videos on YouTube do not have captions or subtitles, although there are a few that can be found. Most of them are foreign language videos with English subtitles.
On March 8, 2007, the Access Division of WGBH announced that they had created a component for Flash called CC for Flash that can be used to display captions in a Flash video player. This new technology will allow developers more ease in adding captions to Flash videos. In addition, millions of deaf and hard of hearing users will be able to experience Web-based video in Flash, and search engines will be able to utilize captions as search metadata for SWF content.
CC for Flash can be written into any SWF file and played back in Adobe Flash Player, which works on most recent Mac and PC systems. Both CC for Flash and Adobe Flash Player are free.
Taken from the press release:
CC for Flash: The Details
- Uses external files produced in the W3C’s Distribution Format Exchange Profile (DFXP) of the Timed-Text Authoring Format.
- Imports existing formats such as Apple QuickTime’s QTtext, with support for Microsoft’s SAMI format soon to follow.
- Exposes many of its internal functions through ActionScript™ language so that the author can control and customize many of the features.
- Can play back caption metadata that has been embedded in the video by tools such as Captionate.
- Can be linked to any video playback components in Flash or directly to Netstream objects in the SWF of the FLV file.
- Allows the author to set the caption display box coordinates and default text attributes, like background color, text foreground color, font face and size, opacity, etc., at authoring time. At playback time, any text attributes that are explicitly defined in the external caption file will override the defaults.
- Captions can be added after the video content in Flash is posted, allowing for flexibility across production and distribution environments.
- Allows captions to be searched.
- Comes with an optional player, ccPlayer for Flash, which allows those unfamiliar with Flash programming to embed video content in Flash into a Web page with minimal effort.
- Is compatible with Flash MX2004 (7) and 8 authoring packages.
I’m looking forward to seeing more captioned videos on YouTube.
Listen to this as a podcast:
It just occurred to me the other day that when you’re deaf or if you have a speech impediment, trying to order at a drive-through window can be a challenge.
Suppose a touch screen menu was added to all drive-through windows so people can enter their order on it and proceed to the cashier? I think that’s a good idea. This way, the restaurant’s drive-up time averages don’t get compromised by someone who can’t communicate into the drive-through window intercom and has to drive up to the cashier to place their order. The customer gets their order fast and without any errors due to miscommunications.
Listen to this as a podcast:
A government official in Chicago called for 911 emergency services to be able to accept SMS/text messages. This option is already available in Japan and should be available in the United States. Currently, the only way for the deaf and hearing impaired to contact 911 emergency services is to call directly on a TTY/TDD. But what if you aren’t near one? TTY/TDD machines can only be connected to a landline. Emergency call centers do not allow calls from Relay services, so that is not an option. Being able to SMS/text an emergency call center would be a very useful option in an emergency, and lawmakers need to take note.
