Category: Hearing

This category contains information for hearing accessibility. Topics include prelingual and postlingual deafness for profound deafness and hard-of-hearing. Information is also provided for presbyacousis (old-age hearing loss).

What is Unclear About Captioning?

Karen Mardahl on

Does your business know about the need for captioning? This recent article might be a wake-up call for people in the United States: "Who is Required to Close-Caption?"

With only a few exceptions, all programming for broadcast in the United States must be closed captioned.

Fortunately, the article includes the "FCC Guide Closed Captioning on Television". This is also available as a Closed Captioning Guide (pdf).

If you make instructional videos, do you want to leave out the potential audience segment that is deaf or hard-of-hearing? No captions means you lose a visitor or client. You can add captions to your videos using the steps in this video:  Updated
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWbNrm7Jo5c

For one source of information about captioning, we suggest you turn to Twitter and follow the stream of tweets from the people on our Twitter list for topics about deafness, hearing impairments, and captioning. They are the source for much of the information in this article.

There is so much catching up to do with captioning, so once again, we point you to these other great resources for captioning:

I am not deaf and I am not hard-of-hearing. So why do I write this article?

  • Because I believe technical communicators are perfectly positioned to introduce and include concepts like captioning into businesses
  • Because it is a part of any decent, sensible content strategy
  • Because I find subtitles and captions on television quite handy when I want to catch a phrase that was garbled by the actor's poor articulation
  • Because I believe it is a natural service to offer for any business
  • Because I got my socks knocked off when I read Oliver Sacks' Seeing Voices and began to view deafness as a culture, not a disability
  • Because it is a matter of human decency

Learning from AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech Demo

Karen Mardahl on

I'm trying out the AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech demo that came to my attention on Twitter. I encourage you to do the same!

It answered a question that had bothered me for some time. How do text-to-speech tools handle spelling errors and emoticons? Well, a lot depends on context, but I still think people should stop being sloppy with their spelling. (Grrr!)

  • A typical typo for the word "the" is "teh". The misspelled version was a garbled sound. I fed the TTS demo this sentence: "This is a longer sentence and I want to see if I can hear teh difference when I misspell the word "the"." I barely caught the "teh", and the word in quotes at the end was very abrupt – I would have drawn out the word in quotes, but "Crystal" (the voice I chose) spat it out in a nanosecond!
  • The abuse of "your" versus "you're" drives me batty. It looks like people who use TTS are spared too much anguish. I tried "you're welcome to your opinion" and "your welcome to your opinion". There was no difference in pronunciation. I also tried "Is this you're book?", but heard no difference.
  • I ventured into "lolspeak" with cheezburger vs cheeseburger. In the lolspeak version, the "g" was pronounced like the "g" in the word "German". I assume the system defaulted to some basics when it encountered unfamiliar words.
  • Emoticons were familiar. For the smiley, both the two-character version and the three-character version were recognized. Colon plus close parentheses and colon, hyphen, plus close parentheses give you "smile". The emoticon colon plus open parentheses gives you "frowning". That is anatomically correct, so to speak, but I always read that as sad. That was a surprise. Maybe I am just not that fluent in emoticons! (By the way, I spelled out the emoticons because no matter which html tags I used, WordPress insisted on converting my characters to visual emoticons!)

All in all, this is a learning experience. I know there are many, many people out there who are completely unfamiliar with any type of assistive technology (AT). I suggest that those people learn to play with any AT tools like this to gain insight into a different angle on the world! I think you can become a technical communicator from such experimentation. There is an FAQ on this site where you can learn much more.

Maybe your next step is trying out tools such as Fire Vox for your Firefox browser or the Opera browser voice options. (For Opera Voice on the Windows platform, read the instructions on the Opera site; for the Mac platform, use the built-in VoiceOver (find it through the Opera browser or Mac online help.))

Have fun!