Captioning

Live Captions of Your Phone Conversations Are Now Available On Your iPhone From Hamilton Web CapTel

Hamilton Web CapTel has introduced Mobile CapTel, an iPhone app enabling you to get live, real-time captions of telephone conversations you are having on your iPhone. Web CapTel is an amazing, free service available to anyone in the U.S.  It lets you get real-time captions over the web for any phone conversation you may have. You sign up for a free Web Captel account and, when you make a phone call, let the Hamilton relay service know you want a captioned call. Their captioning expert, aided by voice-recognition software, listens in and supplies the live captions of your conversation on your computer screen.

The new Hamilton Mobile Captel service, currently available on any 3G/3GS iPhone, shows the captions on the iPhone screen. Users download the Mobile Captel iPhone application from Apple’s iPhone App Store and use it to log onto their Web Captel accounts. Because the service works with iPhone-compatible headsets (either wired or Bluetooth), you can speak and hear while looking at the screen in your hand. Read more

Looking For A Movie And A Theater With Closed Captions? Captionfish Will Find It For You

Finally someone has done something very obvious and necessary, but also very difficult, that hard-of-hearing consumers have been awaiting for years. Captionfish is a website providing comprehensive listings of closed-captioned movies at theaters all over the United States. It is a sophisticated search engine that finds open captioned, “rear-window” captioned, subtitled, and descriptively narrated movies along with zip-code locating of theaters closest to your home.

This is no easy feat and it took a team of developers with some pretty impressive credentials to make it work so well. DeafCode LLC was founded by Brendan Gramer, Chris Sano and Greg Millam, who all have three things in common: each of them is deaf, each of them is an experienced programmer, and they all have a sense of humor (from their web site: “We’re a bunch of deaf geeks. Seriously. Geeky.”) Brendan works at Amazon, Chris works at Microsoft, and Greg works at Google. Talk about having the bases covered!

I’ve used the service and it works well, alleviating my frustration at the listings in the newspapers and online which usually, at best, only identify which theaters offer captions without saying which specific movies offer the captioning or what kind of captioning they provide. Captionfish shows you which movies are playing in theaters near you and exactly what kinds of captioning they have. Read more

How Google, Congress and Marlee Matlin Will Make Universal Video Captioning Inevitable For The Web, Television And Movies

Universal captioning of videos on the web, television, in the movies and everywhere else video can be shown may still be a long time coming, but it is definitely on its way. Propelled by a combination of new technology developments, political advocacy, legislative action, court rulings, and the marketplace laws of supply and demand, universal captioning of videos is inevitable. The movement, which got its first big push in the 1990s when the Federal Communications Commission required television broadcasters to provide closed captioning, has recently gotten a burst of new energy. When the government was slow to regulate the explosion of digital video on the web, the momentum for captioning stalled for a while. But now a new wave of advocacy, aided by Google’s desire to extend its web search technology to every nook and cranny of the globe, is making the dream of universal captioning come true. Read more

More Courts Should Provide ‘CART’ Real-Time Video Transcription Services

I was excused from jury duty today after I told the officer at the reception desk that none of their amplification schemes, even the portable listening devices they provide as an accommodation for people with hearing loss, would work for me. I told him I’d be happy to serve if they could provide CART service–communications access real-time transcription–where they wheel a TV monitor into court and provide real-time video captioning of the proceedings. But they still don’t provide that service in the Massachusetts Superior Court House where I was called to serve.

CART systems have been around for many years and have long been recognized by the federal government as a “reasonable accommodation” under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). So it’s disappointing and a little surprising that CART service isn’t yet a standard accommodation for hard-of-hearing people called to jury duty. Read more

Congressman Markey Demands Internet-Video Captions For Hard-Of-Hearing Web Surfers

Democratic US Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts is backing a bill that would require major producers of web videos to provide captioning, a piece of legislation that provides many other benefits for people with hearing, vision and other disabilities. Read more

More Good News From WGBH NCAM: Easy Captions For Adobe Flash Videos

While I’m going on about WGBH NCAM’s web video captioning success with its industry-wide coalition, I should also mention their recent introduction of a software utility that makes it easy to create captioned Adobe Flash videos. Read more

AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! Collaborate On Web Video Captioning

There’s some GREAT news in the captioning world this week from the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at WGBH, the public broadcasting station in Boston. AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to collaborate with NCAM to establish and manage a new International Captioning Forum to set standards for captioning on any kind of video presented on the Web. Read more

CapTel Captioned Telephone Service Finally Gets A Hearing In Massachusetts

Since I last wrote about CapTel captioned telephone service, a dozen additional states have started offering this vital lifeline for hard-of-hearing consumers. To my chagrin, my home state of Massachusetts now is one of only six states in the union that have not approved it. Read more

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