jesse_the_k | Entries tagged with assistive tech: captions

The New York Times has now published four of James Morrison’s short films on the lived experience of disability.

I Have Face Blindness. This Is How I Recognize You features Paul Kram. He discusses how people sometimes assign negative moral value to his not recognizing their faces. He explains how he systematically notes and uses non-facial information.

Morrison’s filmmaking is so effective: by showing many well-known faces upside-down, I’m dislocated from my familiar visual world. My favorite is he notes the delightful coincidence that prosopagnosia and faceblindness are both 11 letters long!

direct YouTube link

( play it here )

Back in July 2021, I raved about James Morrison’s NYT Op-Doc short film "Look me in the eye." I’m thrilled the New York Times has published three more of his short films.

First up: I Stutter. But I Need You to Listen focuses on writer John Hendrickson, a writer who stutters.

Morrison’s 8:15 film (pro captions and audio description) shines with visual representations of stuttering, while demonstrating what happens during disfluency and how quickly we can become better listeners.

direct YouTube link

( play it here )

The audio description script is narrated in synthetic speech, which is an odd choice.

( more on Hendrickson )

Proximal to the 32nd anniversary of the ADA’s passage, The Verge hosted Accessibility Week, with the accurate deck: Technology promises a universally accessible world — and only sometimes manages to deliver.

The ten features run from service journalism — how to turn on your screen reader — to the barriers created by web design. One of my favorite reporters, s.e.smith, had this to say regarding online animation:

Every time I click a link, I have to ask myself if it’s going to be Bozo the clown or something delightful and captivating that I will be happy to have encountered.

All of us find the internet stimulating, but I find it extremely stimulating, specifically when it comes to animated and moving content — and not in a good way. Something about the wiring of my brain makes it difficult to process animations or repetitive movements, like the blinker you’ve left on for the last five miles, turning them into an accessibility issue: a website with animated content is difficult and sometimes impossible to use because the movement becomes all I can think about.

https://www.theverge.com/23191768/animation-accessibility-neurodivergence

Take A Walk

on spotify

apple podcasts

on YouTube, with colorful abstract motion graphics

This lovely 32-minute audio offers walking talk from a wide range of people and places. There’s a parent walking with her just-learning-to-talk-toddler. Disabled walkers include a guide-dog handler and a wheelchair user. An astronaut talks space walk, an adventurer walks up Kilimanjaro, and a drum majors twirls his way forward. It showed up as the latest 99% Invisible https://99pi.org episode this week, but it’s part of the Fall 2020 issue of Pop-Up Magazine.

https://www.popupmagazine.com/watch/

This issue combines film, sound, photography and music. I loved all of it; some of it’s mind-blowing.

[Closer Captions]

Deaf artist Christine Kim Sun focuses on sound in her work. Here she writes a poem about one day, creating the kinds of captions she’d like to see instead of boring tags like [music]. There’s only ambient sound in this, since Christine presents in ASL with open captions.

direct link
( embedded 8-minute video )

Check out her other stuff at https://christinesunkim.com/works/

BBC sound effects archives.

Sixteen thousands sound effects in WAV files available for personal, educational or research purposes. I’ve missed the homely mechanical sound of a little hammer bashing a copper bell. Here are 115 loops associated with telephones-- dialing, rings, answer machine tones at https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=telephones

are my go-to for letting go of panic in the current moment.

Technology Connections

More than 100 in-depth explorations of everyday technology. Videos range from 8 to 25 minutes, with superb hand-made captions. They're presented by "Alec," aka Mr Connectify. He's a middle-aged midwestern white guy with civil engineering training. He does a great job explaining the design of everyday tech, as well as the societal trade-offs involved in the things we use to bolster our "better living with electricity!" lives. I started with

Closed Captioning: More Ingenious than You Know because of course I did. It finally explained why original-style Line 21 captions aren’t carried over HDMI! It wasn’t a conspiracy — but it was thoughtlessness.

On the street, The LED Traffic Light and the Danger of "But Sometimes!" weighs the long life of LEDs versus the advantages of filament bulbs.

The Senseless Ambiguity of North American Turn Signals turned on a very bright light indeed. I’d subconsciously realized that many autos don’t have yellow turn signals, and this video explains why that’s terrible.

Why Do Switches Make Noise? Even though we’re living in an electronic age, light switches click and clack. Find out why!

Space Heater Nonsense Can’t do better than Alec’s pull quote

Unless my understanding of the universe is deeply flawed, something about space heaters just doesn’t add up. In this video, I talk about that.

The Technology Connections YouTube Channel

What's your go-to soothing video/music/reading?

thanks to Susan & Teddy Fitzmaurice, with grants from a wide variety of folks, ADA 30 - Michigan is a festival of disability voices. They're currently at week 4 of 9. Until 27 September, you can attend their daily free programming, mostly 2pm CDT (1900 UTC).

These are all virtual events. Closed captioning and ASL interpretation will be available for all. Audio description will be added for primarily visual events. There is no cost to participate. But you will need to register at Eventbrite to get a password

registration link is labeled "Eventbrite" at the home page[1]

https://mi-ada.org

Don't let "Michigan" stop you: program includes items of world-wide interest, such as personal narratives, advocacy strategies for IEPs, history lecture, accessible movement and dance, films, and much more!

I particularly recommend today's session with Tom Olin, Photojournalist of the disability movement. He was there for the noisy disability activism in the US, for the last 40 years. (24 August 1900 UTC)

Too many to list them all; this one looks great

True Inclusion is Revolutionary: Disability Inclusive & Accessible Organizing Practices

Learn with member Dessa Cosma how Detroit Disability Power is mobilizing Detroit’s disability community to fight for inclusion, rights, and respect, alongside and included with mainstream activists and protesters fighting for justice. (3 Sept 2020 1900 UTC)

[1] home page is also the landing page for all events, with a single link via workshop title. Very accessible information design -- thanks to Susan's lived experience with intellectual disability.

MerylKEvans is a Deaf digital marketing professional — she’s been online since 1993, and she’s been on countless video calls. Here’s her take on the best in automatic speech recognition-driven captions, as of 22 April 2020:

https://meryl.net/best-automatic-captioning-tool-for-video-calls

contribute to the discussion at access_fandom

You’re So Brave I’d Rather Be Dead

I love Barry Deutsch (aka Ampersand)’s cartoon style: ligne claire with bodies that look real, including many fat folks like him. Most recently is his excellent 6-panel cartoon on the endless theme of non-disabled people telling us "I’d rather be dead than live your life."

https://amptoons.com/blog/?p=25717
Images with full description as well as DVD commentary on how he came to create it.

NYTimes Sunday Magazine in Paper Braille!

Since August 2016, the NYTimes has published a Disability op-ed at least monthly.§ The vast majority of contributors bring a social justice perspective on living with impairment in a disabling society.

The NY Times’ Sunday Magazine this week is an all-disability issue, celebrating the ADA’s 30th anniversary. Thanks to yourlibrarian for letting me know they’ve been making a newspaper-wide push for accessibility, including producing braille editions of the Sunday special. (I was pleased to discover that they’ve been captioning all their videos for the last few years.)

https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/07/the-new-york-times-special-section-on-disability-is-available-in-braille-and-audio-and-has-its-own-style-guide/

Mighty Painters Tape

One of the joys of working on WisCon access was deploying blue painter’s tape to create a reality that worked for all of us. Blue tape marks wheelchair parking spaces in program rooms, front row seating for those who need it, and keep-clear aisles to improve traffic flow.

My favorite podcast hosts an article on painter’s tape creating physical distancing in public spaces

Absent context, images from the Tape_Measures feed on Instagram could look like a series of art interventions. In light of a global disease outbreak, though, they are clearly signs of the times showcasing how a low-budget tool can help reinforce social distancing practices.

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/roll-tape-documenting-ad-hoc-measures-to-encourage-social-distancing/

tape_measures

Better Batteries, Better Wheeling

New Mobility magazine focuses on wheelchair users, particularly power. I published an article there in 1999! Now published by the United Spinal Association It’s free, it’s got lots of detailed information, and stories from wheelers around the world. (Sadly not a lot of service-journalism on wheelchair manufacturers. They would be the #1 advertisers, of course.)

This article explores the fundamental differences between the very heavy deep-cycle marine batteries in traditional powerchairs, and the much lighter laptop-like lithium batteries powering the Whill CI, SmartDrive, and the new under-60 pound folding personal mobility devices.

[gear hacker] Mackay estimates he gets 30 miles on one charge, which is about the same distance he expects from his supplemental 24-volt, 75-amp-hour, lithium-ion marine battery — but the similarities stop there. The lithium-ion one weighs 70% less than its lead acid counterparts. Additionally, the two power sources deliver their charges very differently.

Lithium-ion batteries maintain max power output until they are depleted, whereas lead-acids put out less power as they near empty, resulting in a noticeable slowing of the chair. “In my experience, the lithium-ion battery gives me the same range as lead-acid. But because it puts out full power until it quits, it gives me an average of 1 mile per hour extra speed over a course of 20 miles,” says Mackay.

https://www.newmobility.com/2020/07/better-batteries-better-wheeling/

§ Marking a welcome 180° swerve away from the Times I grew up with — where the only disability coverage appeared in the heart-breaking inspo-porn-fest that was the NYTimes Neediest Cases.

Many academic libraries/databases have been made world-readable in the past few months while students lack campus library access. Curiosity led me to the Association for Computing Machinery’s digital library (open access until 30 June 2020), where I was delighted to learn of the journal called ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

Use the advanced search interface if you’re ready to go diving.

I found research explaining why automatic captioning is so unsatisfactory. "Word Error Rate" is the metric YouTube and other automatic speech recognition systems use as they trumpet their production of "automatic captions." Deaf & HoH users often call them "craptions." Total number of incorrect words divided by total number of words displayed doesn't map on to the info we need to understand spoken language visually. Some words we can easily infer; when names, locations, and crucial verbs go missing, comprehension plummets. This article explains in great detail, and proposes alternative metrics which could measure whether automatic speech recognition is good enough.

Predicting the Understandability of Imperfect English Captions for People Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

SUSHANT KAFLE and MATT HUENERFAUTH, Rochester Institute of Technology

ACM Trans. Access. Comput., Vol. 12, No. 2, Article 7, Publication date: June 2019. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3325862

abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has seen major advancements in its accuracy and speed in recent years, making it a possible mechanism for supporting communication between people who are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) and their hearing peers. However, state-of-the-art ASR technology is still imperfect in many realistic settings. Researchers who evaluate ASR performance often focus on improving the Word Error Rate (WER) metric, but it has been found to have little correlation with human-subject performance for many applications. This article describes and evaluates several new captioning-focused evaluation metrics for predicting the impact of ASR errors on the understandability of automatically generated captions for people who are DHH. Through experimental studies with DHH users, we have found that our new metric (based on word-importance and semantic-difference scoring) is more closely correlated with DHH user's judgements of caption quality—as compared to pre-existing metrics for ASR evaluation.

And isn’t it weird that academia is still using obscure abbreviations like ‌ACM Trans. Access. Comput. when nothing’s printed so there’s no space to save?

I find Facebook useful for groups, since it provides a relatively low tech barrier to their creation. (Tragically, it seems to offer no easy moderation.) In the Audio Description Discussion group, creator Alison Meyers, posted their funny 6-minute video. It demonstrates the benefit of narrative audio description, complete with color-coded open captions.

I’d read about color-coded captions, where each speaker has a distinctive color, and this is my first time seeing them in use. Very helpful. Do you use audio descriptions?

Check it out! An educational six minutes: the visual is a black screen until the end.

( video embed )

( goofiness within )

Thanks to

angelictroublemaker for linking me to this video: a baby seal hesitating about slipping into the frozen ocean, and making "cry baby" noises about it. That's wonderful enough, but the captions are hysterical.

Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture—Sean Zdenek( 5 of 5 )

( BB-8 chirps and it's good )

( Integrating Captions into the Artistic Process )

this word is used, like “queering,” to suggest ways that the experiences we bring to a topic can generate a new way of doing things ↩︎

...we have spent altogether too many hours juggling AV boxes. ( Now all caption formats viewable on our HDTV )

I have discovered how to increase my glee and reduce my anxiety. ( free my brain by doing healthwork first )

I started a good book (or at least, its first 60 pages meet that criterion). ( Not on Fire But Burning )

MyGuy found a beautiful, framed 1800 print of an iris at Goodwill this morning.

More news as it happens; maybe politics next time.

What's your favorite thing right now?

I'm looking for a DVD/CD player which decodes the old-style, line 21, white-on-black closed captions. (Not the SDH subtitles chosen from a disk menu.) I've read rumors that the PS3 provides this feature. ( Run this simple test to confirm the rumor )

If you like thinking about vids, or movies, or TV, or anime ...

Hie thee immediately to "Every Frame a Painting,"

tonyszhou's marvelous YouTube series. Each captioned episode explores how moving-image directors do their jobs: how they handle setting, or a focus on a particular director, or why Vancouver never plays itself. ( YouTube embed here )

I've been reading all of a wonderful blog from Mel Chua, who is too many things to summarize, but in her own words, "a human jumper cable." If you work with, teach, learn, or hang around any number of deaf people, please read this
( helpful info on speechreading and its demands. )Mel addresses How to succeed in engineering school as a disabled person in a poem

begin quote
Don't get angry.
Don't have feelings.
Don't realize how tired you are.
Don't realize that what you're doing is extra labor.
Stay oblivious. Focus on your classwork.

Don't ask for help.
Don't look dumb.
And never show signs that you're struggling.
That any of this is any harder for you.
That any of this ever hard for you.
end quote

In ADA enforcement* news, ( NAD sues Harvard and MIT over inaccessible online education ) Why is a lawsuit "enforcement"? Because the vast majority of Americans with Disabilities Act rights are gained not from the law itself, but by someone suing to claim those rights have been violated. Sometimes, the U.S. (Federal) Department of Justice has worked with individuals and classes to bring suits, and only then do Federal lawyers advocate for disability rights. There is no "ADA Police" because violating our rights isn't a crime.

For the last decade, I've been fortunate to receive the Inclusion Daily Express, an email-based news service. As their blurb promises

begin quote Inclusion Daily Express saves you time while keeping you up-to-date on what people with disabilities are facing, saying and doing. Each daily edition features six or seven important disability rights stories—many you cannot find anywhere else—along with links to dozens of other articles, press releases, opinion pieces and disability columns. quote ends

Inclusion Daily is well worth the annual cost of US$160. That might seem too much to pay, but you can specify ten email recipients for each subscription. If you're part of a working group, an agency, a school district, just one sub can keep everyone in the loop, you choose whether it's weekly or every weekday.

I've been able to keep up on disability-related news from all over. I find the info inspires me to action, provides examples, educates about other people working on "my" issues, and helps me know my place in the movement and the world.

You can try two weeks for free, and see if it's for you.

Here's a sample of what I found in the last two weeks, thanks to Inclusion Daily Express

( Terrible Captions on UK TV )
So, I use captions. I loathe the state of live captioning, and I'm dismayed at the falling quality of offline captioning, as more services enter the market with seemingly no understanding of what good captioning means. From thousands of miles away, this article raises the question: Does the US's FCC* investigate caption quality? Do they supply a "how to do it" manual? Could I do something to help increase caption excellence?

*parallel agency to UK's Ofcom

( Suing for Wheelchair Access to Hotel Shuttles )
Now this is highly relevant to my SF fan interests. Most cons are held in hotels; every hotel shuttle I've seen can't carry a powerchair. Sharing this info with other fans enables them to better advocate.

( Irish= Disability Advocate's Long Life )

sasha_feather taught me, there have always been social justice advocates. Martin Naughton was a "man of his time" as much as the hospital administrators who couldn't conceive of someone using a wheelchair outside the hospital. Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily's editor, casts his net very wide indeed. Sometimes the articles sampled don't represent an ideal perspective on disability rights. But always, they include the living experience of people with disabilities in the world, and that's always welcome in my in-box.

If you've studied abroad and you have a disability, this post is for you.

The U.S. Senate has so far refused to sign the global U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Senator Tom Harkin, a steady advocate for disability rights, has recorded this video to reassert his commitment to U.S. ratification of the CRPD and calls on the community to support the effort by sending in our stories.

( Watch captioned video here )

Do you have a disability and have had difficulty studying or traveling abroad? Did you go abroad for work or school and find challenges when you arrived? Were you unable to go because of your disability?

Your story could help our work towards ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities -- by putting a FACE to why it is important! The CRPD is an international human rights treaty, modeled after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and has been ratified by 145 countries. With your help, we hope to make the U.S. #146! If you have a story, please share it at
http://bit.ly/shareCRPD

You can also share your support of CRPD on Twitter and Facebook with the hashtags #selfie #CRPD!

I'm in love! and here's why: This fabulous captioned video. Its message is vital: a way to rethink our approach to sex.
( clicky for the deets )

I can't imagine a better way to spend six minutes.

We've been using a hodge-podge of modern and "classic" technology( for AV and it died. )

Anyone reading interested in guiding me through this decision, or pointing me to a helpful user-run forum where these issues are discussed?

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adventures with Jesse the K

Entries tagged with assistive tech: captions