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911 Texting Won’t Work – Yet
Filed under: Cell Phones, Emergency Preparedness, Mobile Pagers
By Bill Leukhardt, Hartford Courant, 11/19/09
NVRC Note: There is a non-captioned video of a broadcast on this at http://www.courant.com/news/politics/hc-911texting1119.artnov19,0,2356078.story
Text messaging is perfect for casual chatting, but right now it’s useless for contacting 911 and will remain so for years, state officials and telecommunication experts testified Wednesday.
“Currently, the ability to text 911 does not exist,” Marissa Mitrovich of Verizon Wireless told the state legislature’s public safety committee at an informational hearing on using text messages to get police, fire and other emergency assistance. “It will take many years.”
The millions of text messages sent daily by cellphone users are handled equally by carriers, so a 911 message could sit for hours before it is delivered. Even then, it’s worthless, as dispatch centers don’t have the technical capacity to receive it, lawmakers heard.
No one was willing to predict how long it may take state and federal agencies and the national telecommunication industry to resolve the equipment, security and technical roadblocks to 911 texting.
Until then, it’s still best to call and talk directly to a dispatcher, said John Danaher, the state’s public safety commissioner. A call gives the 911 center the location and callback number of the telephone used and allows the dispatcher to ask questions and get more information, he said.
The hearing was triggered, in part, by the violent death of Alice Morrin, the Vernon woman who was shot to death by her estranged husband, James Morrin, on June 28. Police said Alice Morrin spent the last moments of her life frantically sending text messages to a friend seeking help. James Morrin killed her as police showed up at their house, then committed suicide.
“When I saw the media reports on that incident in Vernon, it touched me,” said Rep. Stephen Dargan, D-West Haven, the committee co-chair, said after the meeting. “I’m not familiar with texting. So I thought we could have an informational meeting and learn more about it and 911.”
Peter White, director of public policy for AT&T, said 911 texting will be possible when the nation’s emergency dispatch system is upgraded from copper-based land lines to a fiber-optic-based system capable of receiving digital information, such as texting and videos.
“That’s what’s coming sometime in the future,” he said. “Until then, if you need help, don’t go to Facebook. Don’t Twitter. Don’t send a text message. Call and talk.”
Verizon has programmed its system to discourage customers from 911 texting. When its equipment detects a 911 message, it gives the sender an error message, saying that there is no text service to 911 and that the person should “please make a voice call to 911,” Mitrovich said.
At the hearing, Danaher discussed an ambitious state project started three years ago to create a fiber-optic system linking all 107 emergency call centers, hundreds of police, fire and other first-responder stations, the judicial system and medical facilities.
The project, which will cost $58 million over 10 years, is financed by the 47-cent monthly charge paid by land-line phone subscribers to support a new emergency call system.
The first few years of the project were spent planning, but now work has begun installing fiber-optic cable in some Hartford-area towns. All the cable should be installed by 2011 and the system ready to link all the facilities in a secure, digital network that will make sharing information much easier, Danaher said.
The new system also will be able to receive text messages, once national wireless networks and the federal government figure out how to quickly and securely deliver 911 texts to emergency centers. But for a while, the state will be ahead of the curve.
“All we can do is take care of our end of the system,” Danaher said. “We’ll be ready when 911 texting can be used.”
Copyright © 2009, The Hartford Courant
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Google and YouTube: Leading the Way for Internet Captioning, Part 2
By Cheryl Heppner, 11/20/09
Ken Harrenstien Introduces Captioning Features
Vint Cerf introduced Ken Harrenstein, and engineer who is deaf, who worked with him on DeafNet, an early attempt to bring the Internet to people who are deaf. He called Ken the strongest proponent and technical contributor to access initiatives who is passionate about this work.
Ken, who gave his presentation in sign language, talked of his frustration during the many years he has pursued the goal of access to the Internet. He reviewed what is already available, beginning with YouTube, where videos can display captions and subtitles. There are options to increase or decrease the size of the captions and also to add or remove the panel behind the captions.
Next Ken demonstrated the ability to change the captions to another of the 51 different languages that YouTube supports. This translation feature is still in beta testing but I enjoyed making use of my rusty French when he selected that. He demonstrated Japanese as well.
Hidden Treasure in Captioning
For a great incentive for anyone to use captioning, nothing beats the fact that they are text makes a video instantly searchable. To show the power this brings to the Internet, Ken did a search for “one small step for man” on You Tube, and from among the options he chose a captioned video of the famous walk on the moon.
Since their launch for the first time in 2008, the growth in captions on YouTube has surprised and pleased Ken. He said there are now hundreds of thousands of captioned videos. I did a lazy woman’s search to check this out, going to YouTube.com, entering the word “captions” in the search box and clicking to see the result. Holy cow! There were 20 pages of results with a total of about 32,300.
Challenges Remain
There are still some hurdles before captions can begin to be commonplace on the Internet. Ken did a nice job of sidestepping the geek talk to help us visualize the Internet as a bunch of pipes that water runs through with 20-23 hours’ worth of videos being uploaded each minute. Then he showed a photo of Niagara falls to demonstrate how only a small amount of those hours are captioned. “Who’s going to bottle that water?” he asked.
And then he answered. This Google/YouTube event celebrated the launch of speech recognition and YouTube to make captioning widespread. Thirteen educational partners have joined forces for for an early launch. Among the partners are University of California at Berkeley and at LA, Columbia University, Duke, MIT, Stanford, Yale, and University of New South Wales. Google will add more partners as quickly as they can.
You can see Ken in his black Google tee shirt at the beginning of a year-old video “YouTube Captions and Subtitles”: http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about.
Watch for Part 3 for more interesting details!
NVRC Note:
This morning we heard from several people who were listening to news on the radio. The Google/YouTube event was covered by WAMU and NPR, and it included mention of NVRC. You can click on the link below to hear the audio and read the transcript of some WAMU coverage.
| Despite New Technology, Internet Accessibility Lags for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Source: wamu.org November 20, 2009 – By Sabri Ben-Achour |
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Actress Marlee Matlin Advocates for Closed Captioning
Filed under: ADA Accessibility and Advocacy, Captioned Films on the Web, People
The FCC held a hearing at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. on November 6, 2009 as part of its effort to gather information from experts and consumers for the development of a National Broadband Plan. Among those on the first panel was Academy Award-winning actress Marlee Matlin, who is the spokesperson for the National Association of the Deaf for accessible broadband services and Internet media.
Here’s the link. Its captioned as well (of course)
http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=o-wHa0jZuiE& feature=player_ embedded
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