Pat Trice Fall 2009 Skill Development Workshops
Richmond/Hampton/Roanoke
Fall 2009 Skill Development Workshops
Flyer & Registration (MS Word):
http://www.deafhh.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/pat-trice-fall-2009-workshops.doc
Closed Captioning Challenges Viewers
By Craig Johnston, 8/7/09, TVTechnology.com
For the full article with illustration: http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/85298
DTV closed captioning has a number of challenges to overcome, as complaints from viewers about missing captions, garbled captions and improperly formatted captions have been streaming in. And while problems with DTV captioning will be detailed in this article, an over-arching statement should be made up front: the sky is not really falling.
The issue of DTV closed captions is being addressed; manufacturers are cooperating; and tools are being created.
Closed captioning was developed in the 1970s to provide a text display of spoken audio in television programming for deaf viewers that could be optionally displayed. The analog system of closed captioning-CEA-608-usually provided simple white capital letters over a black background, a character set that included upper and lower case Roman letters and a limited number of accented characters for French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German, along with a simple display of up to 32 characters per line.
In the analog 608 system, the captioning text and control information was hidden in line 21 of the NTSC vertical interval, where it could be retrieved and displayed by a closed caption decoder that was either built into the TV or other device, or sold as a standalone unit. The line 21 encoding was relatively bulletproof, able to survive off-air, cable and satellite transmission, as well as professional and consumer tape recording and playback.
DTV CAPTIONING OFFERS ENHANCED FEATURE SET
Development of DTV provided the opportunity to significantly improve closed captioning, and the CEA-708 DTV captioning standard, which was adopted in the late 1990s, provides an almost unlimited Unicode character set that expands on the previous closed captioning character set. This enhancement now provides captioners with the capability to display characters from previously unsupported languages such as Chinese and Japanese.
Those authoring 708 captions have the option of placing multiple windows for text on the screen, and the system provides a myriad of options for the viewer to customize caption display. These include fonts, font sizes and background colors, along with positioning on home video display devices.
The FCC requires that a DTV transmission contain both CEA-708 and 608 captions to be encoded into the MPEG stream. The 608 captions are intended for the DTV decoding boxes.
NEW CAPTIONING ALSO DRAWS COMPLAINTS
There have been no shortage of complaints from viewers about the new DTV caption, according to Marc Okrand, who is the National Captioning Institute (NCI) director of Live Captioning. However, few of these have come from those viewing off-air DTV signals. Rather, they come from cable and satellite TV viewers, who say captions are missing or are garbled.
“We’ve gotten complaints that say channels 1 to 100 are fine, but on channels above that letters keep dropping out,” said Okrand.
One big change for caption viewers to adjust to is in how they control caption display. With the DTV system, the captions have to be decoded where the MPEG stream is decoded, and with the exception of off-air signal reception, that means at the cable or satellite set-top box. Viewers who are used to hitting a button on their TV remote to display closed captioning will not find captioning there, so a major education effort is indicated.
“Cable boxes are not captioning friendly,” said Okrand. “You have to go into the cable box menu in order to turn the captions on and off, not just hit a button.”
He said that although NCI has heard few complaints about off-air broadcast caption decoding at this point, that may be because viewers have only just begun watching DTV.
DTV captioning issues have mostly remained under the radar, as so much effort and attention went into the June transition to DTV itself. However, on May 18 an FCC technical working group held its first meeting to deal with DTV closed captioning and video description issues. [DTV video description issues are beyond the scope of this article, and will be discussed in a later issue of TV Technology.]
“What we tried to do with the working group is bring together all of the technical experts, both on the equipment manufacturers side, broadcasters’ side, cable and satellite, experts in from the user community,” said Julius Knapp, FCC Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) chief, and co-chair of the working group. “And in a collaborative way, better understand what the problems are, what their costs are, and how we can fix them.”
Larry Goldberg, Director of Media Access at WGBH, home of The Caption Center, and himself a member of the FCC’s working group, calls the meetings a good route to solution of the DTV caption problems.
“The FCC has all of the players in the same room…there can be no ducking,” Goldberg said.
NEED FOR EASY ACCESS
One of the first moves that Goldberg predicted is for cable and satellite TV companies to put caption display in the first level of their menus.
With tens of millions of set top boxes recently deployed to bring DTV to viewers, that may seem to be a costly step.
“Set-top boxes can download new firmware,” said Steve Blumenschein, president of XOrbit, developers of the CaptionSmart MPEG file captioning service, which delivers its product via secure online.
Right now, almost all of the live text seen on TV screens displaying 708 captioning is being upconverted from 608 captioning. Alan Hightower, a Wegener software developer, said that some of this comes down to legacy equipment and costs.
“I don’t think broadcasters want to bear the cost of authoring separate close captioning content for both standards,” he said.
Until recently broadcasters have been required to provide 608 captioning for their analog channel, so they authored in 608 and upconverted to 708.
However, XOrbit’s Blumenschein identified another reason for not starting with 708 and downconverting to 608, which, for example, would require a computer program to figure out how to handle text in multiple windows.
“If I do 708 and try to downconvert to 608, it’s not going to work very well, because I’m going to lose a lot…I don’t know how to deal with the lost information,” Blumenschein said. “I know I can drop it, but I don’t know if it was important and what I should do to imitate it.”
IT’S TIME TO MOVE ON
One company that does offer 708 authoring software is Computer Prompting & Captioning Co. (CPC). Jason Livingston, CPC technical support specialist makes a strong case for taking advantage of the capabilities of the 708 standard rather than upconverting from 608.
“That’s kind of like saying I’ve got a VHS tape and I’m going to upconvert it to HD and I’m now broadcasting HD,” said Livingston. “Yes, you’re broadcasting HD but you’re not getting any of the advantages of HD by doing that.”
CPC also gave TV Technology a heads-up on its new MacCaption Monitor and Caption Maker Monitor (Windows) products, which takes caption monitoring functionality from its authoring products and sells it as standalone caption monitoring capable of monitoring caption encoded in the MPEG-2 stream.
Monitors can be placed at various points in the workflow and signal path to determine where a captioning problem originated. Volicon also provides closed caption monitoring as part of its Observer broadcast monitoring system.
“As part of its monitoring, it captures audio and video and associated metadata that is related to this broadcast,” said Volicon CTO Gary Leamer. “The broadcaster is able to provide proof of broadcast to the FCC, and that includes closed captioning.”
AUTOMATIC ERROR DETECTION AND CORRECTION
Two builders of closed caption encoders have used their experience with captioning and what can go wrong with it to build devices that do automatic error correction.
“We actually never intended to be in the caption correction business,” said EEG president Phil McLaughlin, “But we looked at the problems and said ‘hey, we can fix this.’”
EEG’s CB512: HD Caption Legalizer/ Relocating Bridge can compare the 708 caption text to the 608 text to help fill in garbled sections, and can reformat captions to fit supported constructs for decoding and display.
According to Evertz Product Manager Tony Zare, his company’s HD9084 HD DTV closed caption encoder not only encodes new captions on productions, but can analyze captions on existing captioned material.
“You can run the master through one of these devices [and] the machine will analyze the closed captioning content and fill in the blanks, almost like an automatic scrubber of corrupt captions,” Zare said.
Evertz also builds its closed caption technology into other devices like video crossconverters and multiviewers.
A couple of other DTV caption products that could make life easier include a caption translator that’s soon to appear from Wohler. “We’ve got a world exclusive for you,” said Andrew Hutton, FPGA hardware designer at Wohler. “We’ll be launching a converter from 608/708 to [Europe and Australian standard] OP47 captions, and vice versa.”
And Softel-USA has its Swift TX, which allows the captioning text and instructions to exist as a file on a server until it’s time to play them back.
“The benefit is you’ve got the caption data available for transcode to specific targets, whether it’s SD or HD for broadcast, transport streams for VOD systems, or Web delivery, you can then use that caption data,” said Softel president Ed Humphrey.
“We knew from experience that every broadcaster has a different workflow, and therefore we need to be able to plug into those workflows where the customer wants.”
So there’s plenty of attention now focused on DTV captioning and its delivery to the viewer, and plenty of tools to solve technical problems and streamline the process.
But it seems that just as the captioning people are beginning to sort things out in the new digital world, there appears to be a new wrinkle looming ahead which is bound to cause some concern. Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA) has introduced the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009. It’s a good bet the industry would rather fix closed captioning by themselves.
NVRC NOTE: The final paragraph in this article is confusing. The 21st Centrury Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009 does not have anything to do with TV broadcast captioning over the air or by cable or satellite; it addresses captioning on the Internet.
- Thanks to NVRC, Fairfax
Action Alert: HLAA Urges Giving Input to AARP
August 25, 2009
Dear Friend,
AARP’s National Policy Council (NPC) wants input on public policy issues. At age 65, one out of three people has a hearing loss. Surprisingly, hearing loss is not a top priority for AARP. This is our chance to let them know how hearing loss affects older adults and encourage AARP to partner with HLAA to raise the nation’s awareness about hearing loss as a major public health issue.
If you are an AARP member, use this letter to guide you to send your comments to AARP.
Feel free to add your own comments, experiences, or just fill in your name, date, address, and AARP member number, and how long you have been an AARP member (if you know or can guess).
E-mail your letter to NCP@aarp.org or mail it to:
Office of Policy Integration
601 E Street, N.W., T3-313
Washington, DC 20049
Whatever you do, get your letter to AARP soon – the deadline is Tuesday, September 15, 2009!
Regards,
Brenda Battat
Executive Director
- Thanks to HLAA and NVRC, Fairfax
HLAA Employment Toolkit
From Hearing Loss Association of America 6/15/09
Looking for work, landing a job, and keeping your job can be difficult under the best of circumstances, but it can seem to be minefield if you have a hearing loss. There are ways to be successful at the workplace with a hearing loss. But you need the right tools, do your homework, find out what’s right for you and for your employer, and find ways to successfully advocate for yourself.
HLAA has developed an “Employment Toolkit” to provide information about the workplace for people with hearing loss. We intend to bring more resources, more information to this kit as time goes on. If you have a success story you’d like to send in, contact us. We want to share good experiences so that others can be encouraged that they too will be successful in the workplace.
The Hearing Loss Association of America Employment Toolkit would not have happened without the generous support of Hearing Loss Association of America-Manhattan Chapter. We thank them for bringing this to you.
NVRC Note: From the HLAA web page link http://www.hearingloss.org/advocacy/Employment.asp#jobtoolkit you can download the complete Employment Toolkit or select from these sections:
1. Cover Page
4. Introduction
6. Communication Tips : How to Communicate with a Person who has a Hearing Loss
9. On the Job
10. Hearing Aids, Health Benefits and Insurance
11. Coverage of Hearing Aids: Fact Sheet
12. Hearing Loss and the Law in the Workplace
13. For Employers: Information & Resources for HR Departments
- Thanks to NVRC, Fairfax
Coming Our Way: Mobile TV in the Washington, DC Area
By David Crocker, NVRC Member and former NVRC Board Chair, 8/09
On July 28, 2009 the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) held a special presentation at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC to tout a combination of high definition programming, free broadcasts, and mobile digital TV as a “Triple Play” boon for consumers. While the target audience of the forum were members of Congress and their staff, NVRC was invited to attend because of our advocacy efforts to ensure access for deaf and hard of hearing people in new emerging technologies and the Internet.
Mobile digital television is an emerging broadcast technology that enables specially manufactured receivers to show TV signals on the go. According to a manufacturer rep, one could be driving a hundred miles an hour for hundreds of miles while passengers watch live TV in high def.
Participating broadcasters included: WRC-4, WDCA-20, WPXW (ION), WUSA-9, and the Tornado Warning Network, all of whom displayed sample broadcasts. Devices on display included: regular size flat panel televisions, receivers the size of notebooks or portable DVD players, and cell phones that could display the broadcast video. The manufacturers represented included Kenwood, LG, Dell, Roundbox, DTV Interactive, and iSET Emergency Alert System.
One of the coolest features of the new digital mobile transmissions is the enhanced interactivity for viewers to participate in polls, such as for American Idol or game shows.
When we arrived at the forum, none of the dozen or so display devices displayed any captioning at all. All of the industry reps attending were quick to say that many of these devices were prototypes. They plan to have closed captioning tuners in their final products.
Before we had an opportunity to speak with him, John Taylor, Vice President of Government Relations and Communications for LG Electronics, ordered one of his staff to turn on closed captioning for all of the of the LG televisions in the room. This was a clear demonstration that at least one VP realized the importance of captioning. He stated that both the small LG handheld devices and phones will also be caption capable.
Michael Bergman, Vice President of New Digital Technologies for Kenwood Electronics said that closed caption decoding will be included in their receivers.
Mobile digital television looks to be part of the next wave of consumer technology, and one wonders how we will pry our kids away from the TV set now. On the serious side, the ability to watch a news broadcast or an emergency announcement may be a life saver in the future. And maybe even a Redskins football game while on the go….
For more information about the Open Mobile Video Coalition: http://www.openmobilevideo.com/about-omvc/
- Thanks to NVRC, Fairfax
DHHSC on Facebook
Translator
-
Our Sponsors
