Live Subtitling

Live subtitling of meetings and online courses

Phase 1

 

Type of project: Exploratory research

Disability concerned : Hearing disability

Thematic : Education

Status: Completed

 

The aims of the project were, firstly, to study the quality and usability/UX of current live subtitling systems for online meetings and, secondly, to develop concrete proposals for the day-to-day use of these systems and the improvement of their usability/UX.

In order to communicate with hearing people, people with a hearing disability need a sign language interpreter (SLI), who translates spoken language into sign language and vice versa. However, the use of a SGA is severely limited by several aspects: The use of a conference interpreter is costly, as it has to be ordered several days in advance. For this reason, the AI only allows a limited monthly time budget for interventions that cover the most vital needs of the persons concerned, and his or her intervention is not always guaranteed for capacity reasons. 

Thanks to the enormous progress in voice recognition technology, an alternative to sign language interpretation has recently become available for online events: automatic written interpretation. In this case, the spoken language is not translated into sign language, but into written language. This alternative is particularly suitable for online meetings and courses, where the hearing impaired person mainly listens and speaks little. The objectives of the project were, firstly, to study the quality and usability/UX of current live captioning systems for online meetings and, secondly, to develop concrete proposals for the daily use of these systems and the improvement of their usability/UX.

Tests with live subtitling of online meetings and courses have shown that the quality of live subtitling in English and German of the MS teams is so good that comprehension is generally assured. Usability/UX was assessed by means of a questionnaire that participants filled in after the meetings. The results led to various suggestions for improvement and best practice in the use of live subtitling.
The objectives of the project were thus largely achieved, although not all the planned activities could be carried out due to lack of time.

Overview of the user interface with live subtitling on the bottom side and live transcription on the right side

Contact info

Institut für angewandte Informations-technologie (InIT), School of Engineering, ZHAW

Andri Reichenbacher

andri.reichenbacher@zhaw.ch

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