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Posts Tagged ‘accessibility research’

How many TV commercials are closed captioned?

Monday, January 24th, 2011

FCC Closed Captioning Rules

In the U.S., the FCC doesn’t require TV advertisers to caption commercials, because the average commercial isn’t defined as “video programming” by the FCC. According to the FCC’s Closed Captioning Rules, “Video programming includes advertisements of more than five minutes in duration but does not include advertisements of five minutes’ duration or less.” So while video programming distributors are required to provide closed captions on 100% of their “new” (i.e. post-1998) nonexempt content, they are not required to ensure that the typical 30-second TV ad is captioned.

As a result, the closed captioning landscape for TV ads is uneven, to say the least. Exact numbers are hard to come by and most likely vary by market. It’s probably safe to say that national ads are more likely to be captioned than local, small market ads.

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The Future of Braille in Developing Countries

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

Braille

Approximately 87% of the 314 million people with vision impairments worldwide live in developing countries, making this the most prevalent impairment worldwide. Less than 10% of those with visual impairments have access to formal education, and only 3% are literate (WHO). The provision of information in alternative formats (i.e. audio, Braille) is essential to accessing education, employment and all forms of social participation, and the lack of this provision is a violation of international human rights (Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – CRPD).

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Disability in the Media: Issues for an Equitable Workplace

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

movie theater

As a number of nations prepare for legislation and public action on disability rights in the wake of the UN Convention, a range of issues that impact popular perceptions of disability in the workplace need examination. The discussion of disability on film is not new. There are several books written on various aspects of the subject, and disability studies programs offer classes that run entire semesters on media issues. Though much progress has been made on subjects such as the relationship of screen depictions with the dominant models of thinking about disability in the western world, comparatively less has been written about the portrayal of disability in cinema in the rest of the world.

The canonical western cinema has followed a few dominant patterns regarding the portrayal of people with disabilities. Characters could typically be pitiable (Coming Home), burdensome (Whose life is it anyway?), sinister (Dr. Strangelove), or unable to live a successful integrated life (Gattaca). The fundamental underlying theme has been the disabled character’s maladjustment or incompatibility in the public sphere, effectively highlighting what we can be referred to as an “otherness” from the non-disabled population.

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UIST 2010 Conference Report

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) was held this past week in New York City. UIST is one of the premier conferences for human-computer interaction (HCI), especially for those of us who approach HCI from a perspective of building new systems that address unmet user needs.

Three papers were presented that explicitly dealt with accessibility, and I thought I’d give a quick summary of each and provide a link so you could check them out for yourselves.

VizWiz: Nearly Real-Time Answers to Visual Questions

University of Rochester, MIT CSAIL, University of Washington, University of Maryland, and University of Central Florida

VizWiz is an accessible iPhone application that lets blind people take a picture, speak a question, and get answers from the crowd in nearly real-time. VizWiz was deployed to a number of existing blind iPhone users, and used to get a sense of the visual questions that blind people might want answered regardless of what current automatic technology can do. The paper describes strategies for getting answers back from Mechanical Turk quickly and cheaply (less than 30 seconds, and for a few cents), and an extension of VizWiz called LocateIt that helps users locate a specific object among many that might be tactually indistinguishable. (full disclosure: I was the first author of this paper!)

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