T-Trans Announcement

[Alex Colomb]

The Trace Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announces the
availability of the T-Trans service to the Access Grid community. T-Trans, a
speech to text modality translation service, is integrated into the
Grid-based collaborative visualization work space(s) to allow participation
of individuals with hearing impairments and deafness.  It will also help
participants who find themselves in noisy environments, with poor or lost
audio, distracted by side conversation, or who have difficulty in following
a presentation due to language differences.  Additional benefits are the
availability of a transcript for archiving, indexing, and searching the
audio portion of a presentation or interaction.

The T-Trans system currently relies on human captioners from Caption First,
a private captioning company. Every time a session is scheduled with the
system, a captioner is scheduled for it as well. Captioners are not
available on demand, therefore scheduling should be done two or more days in
advance. The captioner does not have access to an AG node and requires that
you have a phone bridge available for them to call into and receive the
audio. The captioning quality is dependant on the audio quality received by
the captioner. It is recommended that audio tests be conducted with the
captioner prior to any session, to adjust audio levels. During the beta test
period, all captioning fees will be covered by the Trace Center.

All Access Grid community users are encouraged to try out the T-Trans
service and provide comments/feedback/bug reporting. T-Trans is available
for any computer platform that runs a Web browser and supports the Sun Java
1.4.1 plugin.

Go to http://t-trans.trace.wisc.edu/T-Trans for additional scheduling
information and installation instructions. 

Please report all bugs and problems to T-Trans Support
(t-trans at trace.wisc.edu).

Please send any feedback or questions to Thomas Yen (yen at trace.wisc.edu).