Archive for March, 2007
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I’ve recently started using Twitter (I’m “Kosmonaut“) which is a mini-blogging and social networking service that allows users to type short messages (140 characters or less) using mobile phone SMS, the Twitter web interface, and/or Instant Messenger. These messages are brief and generally answer the “what are you doing?” question, though the messages can be used to relay information such as “I’m going to be at Bar X at 9:30, come join me.” Messages are delivered to other users who have added you as a “friend,” and can be customized to only go to people you select as friends. You can also specify Twitter message delivery to go to your IM, SMS, RSS, or email as you wish, and you can turn off delivery from people who are too chatty for your tastes but still want to keep them friended.
I’ve found it to be pretty useful in that it’s a good way to send immediate information about plans and organizations to a group of people in a condensed format; instead of 20 messages, you only have to send one. As a deaf person, I see this application as being very helpful at large venues like SXSW, E3, the Sundance Film Festival, SIGGRAPH, etc where information is usually passed around via word of mouth. In these largely hearing environments, the deaf and hard of hearing can miss out on “what’s cool,” “must see!” and where the good parties are. Twitter has the capacity to be the proverbial “ear to the ground” in these situations and make the communication playing field a little more even for the deaf.
In addition, I discovered that Twitter has an earthquake alerting system for the San Francisco Bay area. This is a good idea. In emergency situations, televisions, telephones, and the Internet may not work. In these kinds of situations, information usually comes over a radio, but that does not work well for the deaf. When other technologies fail during a disaster, mobile phones and SMS are often the last ones standing. Therefore, why are they not utilized more?
I started looking for more “emergency alert” Twitters, and did not find any others, but I see great potential here. If you know of any more emergency Twitters, please let me know.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I’m in Los Angeles right now attending the CSUN Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference. I’ll be networking and debuting this blog there.
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Stagetext is a company in the UK that provides live captioning for theater performances. The captions are displayed on a LED screen that is placed at the foot of the stage.
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Spinvox is a new service that provides speech-to-text service for voice mails. Voice mails are typed up and emailed or text messaged to subscribers for a fee. While deafies get this service free already with IP-Relay and i711, what makes Spinvox stand out is that they’re working on Skype integration.
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Mobilesign is a searchable database of British Sign Language developed by the University of Bristol’s Centre for Deaf Studies. The signs can be downloaded and viewed on a mobile phone display.
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The Motorola Talkabout T5SMS is a two-way radio that has a QWERTY keypad and utilizes text messaging. Very useful for deafies at Burning Man or anywhere a two-way radio comes in handy. Link: opens as PDF. Taken from here, but the site appears to be down, and I don’t see the T5SMS model on Motorola‘s web site. Odd.
