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App turns a smartphone into a speech translator for the deaf
Even deaf people who excel at lip reading need a bit of help when it comes to meetings or group conversations. The developers of a new app called Transcense claim it's the hearing impaired's answer to understanding hard-to-follow chit-chats where everybody's talking almost all at once. How? Well, Transcense can translate speech into written words and transcribe it on screen in near real time. To make that possible, the app connects to several phones and activates their mics to capture what everyone's saying, then it uses voice recognition to assign each person in the group a color for their speech bubbles. Also, the user can ask the program to speak for him using a digital voice or get everyone's attention through the app when he wants to say something.
Toshiba's new android 'employee' uses sign language, speaks Japanese
Toshiba's newest hire (of sorts) is called Aiko Chihara -- and she's manning a reception desk at the company's booth at CEATEC 2014 in Japan. Oh, and she's silcone-coated robot. Interaction isn't in her repertoire just yet -- a Toshiba spokesman said that it was certainly a possibility in the future -- as Aiko only came into being last month. There's 15 actuators inside the head for expression, while yet more are paired with air compressor to give (unerringly) smooth motion to the arms and hands. Toshiba collaborated with several universities, including Osaka University, to develop the robot and its sign language skills are geared for Japanese (with voice commands narrating along with it). While the bot is lifelike and fluid, there's no intelligence to speak of: actions are all preprogrammed. The company says that there are also plans to teach Aiko American Sign Language in the future, as well as hoping to install the android and its (sign) language skills at other exhibitions and shows in the near future -- something that a handful of other robots are already being tasked with. We've got video-based glimpse of the uncanny valley right after the break.
Government will require closed captions on video clips lifted from TV broadcasts
Over the last few years closed captions have become increasingly prevalent in online video, but now the FCC is pushing for providers to go even further. It's already a requirement for full-length video that originally aired on TV to come with captions when it's streamed online, but new rules approved today will extend that to clips from the videos as well. In a unanimous vote, commissioners put deadlines for compliance that vary on the type of clip being used. By January 1, 2016, "straight lift" clips that just pull one segment of a show will need captions, then in 2017 montages of compiled clips will need them and finally, by July 2017, clips of live and near-live programming will need captions (with a short grace period.) This won't apply to your garden variety YouTube channel however, these rules are for online streams from the broadcasters and cable/satellite providers that originally aired the video. [Image credit: Washington Post/Getty Images]
​MotionSavvy uses gesture recognition to give sign language a voice
If you're fluent in American Sign Language, congratulations: you know one more language than most of the people reading this post. The rest of us? A solution to our communicative failures is on the way. A company called MotionSavvy is building a Leap Motion-equipped tablet case that can actively interpret ASL and 'speak' the translation out loud. It's an ambitious project, but it works: at a recent Leap AXLR8R event we saw company founder Ryan Hait-Campbell sign over a MotionSavvy equipped slate. "Hello, my name is Ryan," he said. "What's your name?" It was an impressive demo, but Hait-Campbell admitted it was limited -- the setup can only recognize about 100 words at present, and since signs can vary slightly from person to person, those words don't consistently register for every user. Still, the company's prototype shows enormous potential. If the firm can outfit it with a larger word database and the ability to decipher personalized signing, MotionSavvy could become an incredible communication tool for the hearing-impaired.
Deaf gamer connects, educates through Wizard101
Even though she can't hear any of the music or sound effects in the game, Kelsey Fireheart professes a strong love for Wizard101. In a guest post on the KingsIsle blog, Kelsey shares a little of what it's like to be a deaf gamer and why this MMO means so much to her. Shortly after starting her adventures in the game, Kelsey had a profound encounter: "I remember questing in the Pyramid of the Sun of Krokotopia and I bumped into a fellow wizard named Diana Wildheart. She mentioned that she was deaf, and I gasped in astonishment. I replied, I am deaf too! That's when I realized that I could meet fellow deaf gamers through games like Wizard101." Kelsey said that this friendship made her realize that MMOs could be used for more than just fun and to educate others about what it's like to be deaf. "This game is a wonderful educational tool that I can use to teach countless others and it gave me a way of communicating with no barriers. In fact, it gave me a greater purpose within the game," she wrote. Kelsey said that the visuals of the game are quite important to her and that she wished sign language would be available as in-game emotes.
Deaf/Ventless raiding guild slices silently through heroic ToT
How smoothly do you think your raid would run without Vent? The instant connection of voice communications makes short work of strategizing before an encounter. It allows raid leaders to direct the flow during battle, issuing new orders, calling out phases, and reminding players when to move. It allows for a certain amount of friendly banter during lighter moments, and it unites the entire team in whoops and cheers when the boss finally goes down. The players of Durus Veritas make their way through the heroic raids of Mists without any of that. In fact, most members are partially or completely deaf and can't hear anything in the game at all. Even its hearing members hear nothing, because the guild eschews voice communications. Despite that, the guild is now 8/13 in heroic Throne of Thunder, chewing steadily through every barrier and demonstrating that fellowship, like raid progression, depends on clear communication -- no matter what form.
Apple Store employee describes great experience with students
Floating around this week was a wonderful story from former Apple Store employee Chris Gonzales. He tells the tale of a group of deaf students who visited his Apple Store to purchase new Macs. After struggling for a few minutes because he couldn't communicate with them, he came up with the idea of using an iMac to type things out. The story ends with a big surprise that you will have to read for yourself. Take a few minutes of your time and hop over to Gonzales' site. You won't be disappointed.
Netflix Watch Instantly's life after Starz includes Academy Award winners, more captions
In a change of conversation that would make Don Draper proud, Netflix has picked up its blogging pen and accentuated the positive, even as hundreds of titles provided by Starz Play blinked away this week. The first bit of good news? Content that's coming instead of going includes several movies that scored trophies at last weekend's Academy Awards,including Best Picture winner The Artist, and Best Documentary winner Undefeated that will arrive "later this year, plus Best Animated Feature Rango that goes live on the service March 31st. That extends to movies in theaters too, as last weekend's top two, Act of Valor and Good Deeds, are pay-TV window exclusives for Netflix. The other positive note is that it achieved a goal of offering closed captioning on 80 percent of the hours streamed by the end of last year, and notes 90 percent of streaming is now done on devices that have been updated to support optional captions. The bad news there is that some embedded TV and Blu-ray player software might not be able to be updated for captions, and progress on adding captions for that last twenty percent of content may be slower since it's content that isn't viewed as often. So, is the red envelope company doing enough to keep you hanging around, or are you going to blow through the last few eps of Lillyhammer and pull the eject button?
Nintendo, NTT DoCoMo testing DS-powered speech translator
Nintendo and NTT DoCoMo are reportedly teaming up in order to create a voice-to-text system that'll help hearing-impaired children study. Using a modified DSi, speech is converted into text which is then archived in the cloud -- accessible afterward as a learning aid. That way, a teacher can have their words instantly typed up for reading by the students, who can also play interactive games to help them get along. Trials of the system are being held in Tottori and Okinawa Prefectures, with the overall aim of letting them use it as a universal translator outside the classroom. We're worried we'd be too tempted to swap out Tactical Assault during maths class.
Democratic Republic of Congo bans text messaging
After a controversial presidential election that saw Joseph Kabila retain the office amid fierce protests, the Democratic Republic of Congo has shut down the nation's text messaging services in order to restore public order. Civil liberties concerns aside, it's proving to be highly dangerous for the one point four million deaf residents who rely on text messaging. Normally they would receive safety signals when conflict broke out in their vicinity -- leading to people being caught unawares in crossfires who would otherwise have remained indoors. Human Rights organization ASADHO has said the crackdown could lead to further deaths, especially for people in remote areas and has joined numerous others in requesting the repeal of the ban.
Trouble hearing? Advanced Bionics' waterproof implant is paddling your way
If you're one of the 200,000 deaf people who've received cochlear implants, then here's an upgrade worth considering: the Neptune from Advanced Bionics claims to be "the world's first and only swimmable, waterproof sound processor," and it's just received certification for the US and Canada. Read on for more details in the full press release and soon you could be bantering while you bathe.
15 Minutes of Fame: Legally blind player with hearing loss conquers raid healing
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. Talk about working around healer's tunnel vision: Rainbo, a 25-man discipline/holy priest on Cenarion Circle (US-H), stays out of the fire working with a mere 10-degree field of vision. Rainbo suffers from Usher Syndrome, an incurable condition that causes deafness and progressive vision loss. Despite those challenges, the 29-year-old gamer has played WoW off and on since it first came out. "Basically, I only have a small field of central vision that is obscured with floaters and flashers, but I creatively use addons and techniques to successfully raid -- even on heroic," Rainbo says. "We're currently 4/7 heroic Firelands, which puts us as the #8 guild on the server in terms of progression." Pretty hot for a guy who can't even see the fires he's moving out of.
Netflix's day: Sony movies pulled, new bandwidth options, no more DVD API access and a lawsuit
In an apparent ode to Rebecca Black, Ice Cube and any number of body switch movies, Netflix has had an incredibly active Friday, so sit back while we get you up to speed. Sony Pictures movies from Starz Play are no longer available (on any device, not just the Xbox 360 this time) due to a "temporary contract issue" according to the official blog. According to NewTeeVee, the problem is an "IP distribution cap" that was reached due to Netflix's explosive growth, but with no word on when the movies will be back, you'll be missing The Other Guys. Up next was the National Association of the Deaf, which has filed a lawsuit in Springfield, MA against Netflix, claiming that its failure to provide closed captions on all streaming content puts it in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Netflix last claimed 30 percent of titles were subbed with plans to reach 80 percent by the end of the year, but the press release (and captioned YouTube video) make the case that as a leader in streaming video, it should do better. Netflix also quietly gave US subscribers access to the same bandwidth management options provided to Canadians a few months ago. The new Manage Video Quality settings (shown above) can be found in the Your Account section, and if you're trying to stay under bandwidth caps or just keep seeing buffering, they should help you out at the cost of a few pixels. As if that wasn't enough, the Netflix Tech Blog squeezed in news that it was ending access to "DVD-related features" for apps using its Open API later this year. The move is apparently preparation for expanded international streaming, so if you're trying to manage discs through a third party things may change soon.
Telecommunications device for the deaf gets hitched to a rotary phone, hacked to run Zork
In today's episode of "But will it run Zork?" a chap named Ulysses got the vintage game to run on a TDD (telecommunications device for the deaf) -- a project he built to show off at the Bay Area Maker Faire last weekend. In a move we truly respect, he hunted down a rotary phone lifted straight out of the era when Zork was conceived (that would be the late '70s / early '80s). Then, he modified a modem so that the acoustically coupled TDD could be interfaced -- transmitting at a slow 45.5 baud to make it easy for even ponderous readers to keep up, one line at a time on the TDD's narrow display. Once this was sorted, things weren't exactly smooth sailing when Ulysses started fitting the compressed Zork story file into the system. At first, he tried using an Arduino Pro and an Arduino Mega, but found that neither had enough memory to accommodate the compressed Zork story file. Ultimately, he took a different tack and settled on an embeddable FitPC. We'd love nothing more than to see this thing in action, but in lieu of a video we highly suggest carving out a few minutes and perusing Ulysses' photo blog at the source link.
YouTube brings human-enabled closed captioning to live video for Google I/O
If you were glued to your computer during the live broadcast of the Google I/O keynote yesterday morning, you might have noticed a new feature accompanying an otherwise recognizable YouTube video. The online video provider used this morning's conference kickoff as the springboard for its live captioning feature, which brings human input to the transcription process. According to Google's Naomi Black, a team of stenographers banged out translations during this morning's keynote. The resulting captions were then displayed on the conference floor and delivered by an "open source gadget" to the I/O YouTube channel. This new feature apparently prevents the inaccuracies experienced using Google's automatic captioning function, which, if you'll recall, provided us with at least a couple hearty chuckles when we took it for a spin. The code behind the new live captions will be available to YouTube's partners and competitors on Google Code. You can check out tomorrow's keynote to see how the humans fare.
President Obama signs bill to give disabled better access to technology
Now this is something we can all get behind. Today, President Obama signed a bill pledging to see that the blind and deaf get better access to cellphones, the internet, and other technologies which are a necessity of life in the modern era. Joined by a group of lawmakers and Stevie Wonder, the president signed into law the bill which promises guaranteed access for 25 million blind or visually impaired and 38 million deaf or hearing impaired people living in the United States. New federal guidelines resulting from the bill include requiring improved user interfaces on smartphones, providing audible descriptions of television programming, captioning online programming, making telephone equipment compatible with hearing aids, and adding buttons to remote controls to provide quick access to closed captioning. The bill, S. 3304, should bring down the cost of these technologies for people who need them significantly.
Officers' Quarters: Pitchforks and torches
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available from No Starch Press. Wipes are a fact of life. Everyone wipes. How you deal with these situations can be crucial to your guild's success. Some guilds cultivate an environment based on blame, where everyone's first thought after a wipe is, "Who messed up?" Sometimes, it's easy to figure out who is at fault: Someone with a spore goes the wrong way, or someone gets mind-controlled by the Blood Queen after failing to bite his assignment. When it's not easy to figure out, some guilds use a different strategy for assigning blame. Here is one such case: I have a real dilemma. I'm an officer, one of six, in a semi-serious raiding guild. We have 30 core raiders who raid with us, and one of them until recently was one of our druid healers, and the issue surrounding him is my dilemma. A little background information on the guild, since it is relevant, is that we have a strict rule involving loot due to some people in the past who have abused our requirement for Vent in that they wouldn't use it, or they'd log in but leave their headsets off. This caused a lot of problems with wipes and caused the officers, GM and co-GM to agree that a rule would be made that was you must be in Vent and actively listening at all times during a raid in order to be eligible for loot. This is what caused the initial problem. The player of this druid healer I mentioned before applied to our guild and told us on the application that he is deaf.
Digit-Eyes identfies everything for the blind without breaking the bank
The Digit-Eyes Audio Scanner and Labeler (US$29.95) from Digital Miracles is a remarkable Assistive Technology (AT) app for the iPhone and iPod touch geared to the blind and visually impaired community. What it does is fairly straightforward once you get the big idea, but the implications of its uses are fairly mind-boggling. The app does three things. The first and simplest is, using the built in camera, scanning UPC and EAN codes found on most everything. Taking advantage of the VoiceOver accessibility capability built into the iPhone/IPod touch, it searches a database, brings back the results and reads it to you. There is also a button to search Google for more information. That's really no big deal since a variety of barcode scanning apps such as Red Laser can do roughly the same thing. You need an Internet connection for this since you are referencing the Digit-Eyes database. The second thing it does, is more compelling. Once you register for a free account on their site, you can create text labels for printing on over 50 sizes of standard Avery labels. Select a type of label and a template page is displayed full of empty boxes representing labels. In each box, type in up to 100 characters of anything you want the label to say. Once done, all your text is transformed into a .pdf page of QR (quick recognition) codes like the one shown in the upper right corner of this post. Print the page on the Avery label stock, and stick each on whatever you wanted the label to say. For example, if you typed in "Blueberries bought on July 31st", you would stick that corresponding label on a container of blueberries. Then using the Digit-Eyes app, scan the label on the container and the screen will display and a voice will read back "Digit-Eyes label read: Blueberries bought on July 31st". The database of what's behind each label is stored on your iPhone so you won't need an Internet connection to access the information. %Gallery-98575%
ZVRS to support live sign language translation via iPhone 4's FaceTime for calls between deaf and hearing users
While SMS and mobile email are great, they still can't match the emotion, interaction, and intonation of a live conversation with someone -- that's why our phones still ship with microphones and speakers, apparently. Of course, this is much more difficult when one of the parties is deaf or hard of hearing, which is where video relay services come in. With the help of a videophone or your computer's webcam, you can make a call with a live translator, who speaks your signed ramblings out loud to the hearing person on the other end. Of course you're usually stuck at a desk when doing this, but now ZVRS is going to be supporting calls made from the iPhone 4 over FaceTime. It might not be quite as sexy as Apple's goosebump-raising iPhone 4 commercial, since the phone obviously makes two-way sign language calls possible, but if the person on the other end doesn't have an iPhone 4 or doesn't know sign language, ZVRS seems like the next best thing. The new service will launch on July 26th. Check out a video of it in action after the break, the actual call starts at 2:25.
Video relay calling breakthrough uses FaceTime to help the deaf
In the past, the only way for the hearing impaired to communicate was either in person or by way of the TTY (teletypewriter); the TTY is a device that's about as large as a laptop computer, and it allows the hard of hearing to type on a QWERTY keyboard and have the communication transferred. However, iZ breaks that barrier; it will allow the deaf to pull an iPhone 4 out of their pocket and effectively communicate. Now, another technical impediment will be on its way out. This is wonderful news. At first, the technology will only be available through Wi-Fi and the iPhone 4, but it's a safe bet to say that it will eventually filter down to other devices and be able to use cellular service. For now, though, it's quite a start. [via AppleInsider]