Equivalent Entertainment Access

The Inclusive Media Real-Time Closed Captioning (CC) and Described Video/Audio Description (DV/AD) Course Series provides advanced education opportunities for students to learn about inclusive media, and how to produce audio description and real-time captioning for deaf, hard of hearing, blind and low vision television audiences.

PAVO Digital Inc. is an agile Software as a Service (SaaS) company that, with Ryerson, has produced captioning software called PAVOCAT. PAVOCAT supports live captioning for broadcasters and is designed to make full use of features in the CEA-708 digital standard. It includes an intelligent linguistic analyzing AI engine for automated speech to text processing supporting “captioner as editor.” 

We are looking at ways to mitigate the speed/accuracy tradeoff live captioners face between whether to capture every word that is said on screen, which may be too fast for most people to read, or people watching the program may need to spend most of their time reading captions rather than looking at what is happening on the screen, or to paraphrase what is said.

Integrated Audio Description (IAD) is verbal descriptions of visual stimuli for B/LV entertainment access. Inspired by Inclusive Design, IAD is integrated into the pre-production, production and post-production phases of the video creation, whereas, traditional audio description (AD)  is added only in the post production or distribution phases of pre-recorded video creation. For live IAD, decisions are made in collaboration with Directors and actors while it is being created.

Caption-quality Assessment Intelligence System, CAIS,provides a set of predicted ratings on four selected quality factors: synchronization delay, presentation speed, number of missing words, and caption paraphrasing. It does so using an automated process of caption quality assessment, while reflecting human subjectivity by allowing humans to teach the artificial neural networks behind CAIS.