[AG-TECH] Idea For Closed Captioning for the Hearing-Impaired on the AG

[Allan Spale]

Hello,

EVL has been using its digital video mixer to do many things.  EVL has
used the video mixer's chroma key function and video output from the
control machine to do a message crawl (the type of thing you would see at
the bottom of the screen when severe weather occurs).  EVL has also been
using a compose function of the video mixer to put various items on a
video window like someone's name, where they are from, and maybe a "logo" 
of the university.  To do this, Microsoft PowerPoint and a ticker program
called Cool Tick have been used.

I have a new idea for improving on the usefulness of a video mixer and
video output from a computer: real-time closed-captioning for people with
hearing impairments.  All that you need is a split screen in Microsoft
Word, a colored background (like blue), and the video mixer.  Someone can
just type what they hear, and it will appear in the bottom portion of the
video window. 

This could even be expanded to do real-time language translation.

Of course, having the proper tools is half the battle, so a person with
some sort of stenographer's machine would be better suited to do this work
than someone typing on a keyboard.  Another step would be to have some
sort of voice recognition software that would "type" the words for the
speaker (assuming the regular restrictions of voice recognition software
to-date). 

The video containing this idea will remain in the lobby for as long as
possible so that people can view how this is being done. 


Allan
evl at uic
node-op