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

expectancy increases and the elderly account for an increasing share of the totalpopulation. Other groups include immigrants, and work done in Catalonia suggests thatsubtitles can help promote social integration.Broadcasters in “subtitling” countries are having to put in place live subtitlingprovisions and need to ascertain the effectiveness and efficiency of SDH subtitling.DR is currently reviewing three years’ experience with a ”re-speaking” systemoriginally developed by a Philips subsidiary. In order to meet the requirementsof its public service contract, it may be necessary to opt for a new solution.Work has started in the second quarter of 2009.In a Swedish government white paper published in 2008, a recommendation wasmade to earmark funding for the development of a new SVT live subtitlingsystem.Given the lack of research on existing live subtitling provisions, DTV4All will beconducting an exploratory study involving a minimum of 30 Danish adults with a rangeof hearing impairments. Similar user studies on access services are being done inGermany, Catalonia, and Italy.In the Danish study, each viewer will be invited to watch DR1 TV Avisen [the maintelevision news] on an individual basis from 6:30 to 6:55 pm. She/he will be asked topress a buzzer every time there is a difficulty following the programme, regardless ofthe reason.At the end of the news, the observer goes through a recording of the programme withthe viewer and discusses each point at which the viewer pressed the buzzer and togetherthey note the cause of the problem. These annotations are stored with the recording forlater analysis.The study is primarily concerned with establishing the frequency and perceivedimportance of the three main types of problem: semantic errors, problems caused bypresentation differences between live and pre-recorded subtitles and the problemscaused by delay between the programming and SDH subtitles.Detailed linguistic analysis to produce a typology of user problems is out of scope, butthe research material can be analysed by academic researchers working withinDTV4All. If the study shows that presentation and/or delays have the biggest negativeimpact on following SDH subtitles, a follow-up study will be planned and implementedin which different treatments of the same programme will be compared.DTV4All will be doing a separate proof-of-concept test on buffering the video andaudio of programmes with live subtitling as a possible feature of Personal VideoRecorders. This approach is also being considered in NORDIG.Page 35