D2.3 Interim Report on Pilot Services - the School of Engineering ...

Three international service providers that use dictation solutions, namely, IMS, ITFC,and Red Bee, claim up to 96-97% content accuracy for widely spoken languages such asEnglish. There are alternative solutions available for widely spoken languages such asEnglish, but options for many less-widely-spoken European languages are either limitedor non-existent.Broadcasters offering live subtitles and using respeaking systems report that there hasbeen criticism of the quality of live subtitles, primarily semantic errors (misspellings,incongruous and omitted words).Live subtitles also differ from their pre-produced counterparts in that text is presented assoon as it is available and the presentation conventions are different. The delivery ratemay vary making demands on the viewer’s reading speed.The focus of the quality debate has been on semantic errors. Less emphasis has beengiven to presentation and the significance of the delay. There seem to be no knownformal evaluations of live subtitling in the research literature, only informal feedbackfrom call centres and broadcasters.News has been chosen for the study. The reasons for this are that: The main news at 18:30 already offers live subtitles News is one of the critical genres in terms of its complexity (involving a mix of preproducedand live subtitles)Other live genre (sport, factual, general election coverage, events) may well representslightly different challenges for live subtitling, as they contain a higher proportion ofspontaneous speech at a higher delivery rate. Even so, results for a news programmewill be indicative of how users perceive live subtitles, and there is always the option ofconducting additional studies on other genre if this is deemed necessary.This is the rationale for suggesting an exploratory study with Danish viewers with arange of hearing impairments to assess the relative importance of three issues: Semantic errors Presentation differences between live and pre-recorded subtitles and The delay between the programming and SDH subtitles.Scoping the subtitling studyThe case for the provision of access services is discussed in depth in an article from theforthcoming HCII 2009 conference in San Diego.In countries such as the UK, the Benelux and the Nordic countries where inter-lingualsubtitling and SDH are widespread, there is broad political and popular support for thiskind of access service.The take-up for SDH can be as high as 12-15% of the adult population. The elderly arethe main target group, and their numbers are forecast to increase as mean lifePage 34