REPORT ON CAPTIONING POTLUCK

Ryerson Polytechnic University, March 5, 2004

Theme: “Captioning”

A “virtual” community kitchen event took place on March 5, 2004 as Ryerson Polytechnic University hosted an online conference to discuss current issues in captioning. The “Captioning Potluck” offered the caption providers, broadcasters, experts and consumers a place to share ideas. The conference was held online, in the form of a chat, to facilitate schedules of the participants, allowing everyone to join the discussions in accordance with their interests and convenience.

The potluck commenced with a speech by Gary Malkowski, the Vice-President, Consumer, , Government and Corporate Relations at The Canadian Hearing Society. Gary’s speech was broadcasted live through the web. The rest of the conference consisted of four main sessions:

Approximately twenty people participated in the four main sessions, including representatives from WGBH/NCAM, Canadian Hearing Society, University of Toronto, Ryerson University, Canadian Learning Television (CHUM City), Automatic Sync Technologies and others from the Captioning industry.

The Sharing session was used as a warm-up and introduction to the conference. Since the chat was not centered on one specific area, various issues were discussed. One of the key topics of discussion was the user study conducted by National Captioning Institute Foundation in December, 2003 about the current quality of captioning (http://ncicap.org/AnnenbergStudy.asp).

Another topic of discussion was the emergence of Digital Television and its affect captioning. Other areas of interest were WGBH Enhanced Arthur project, literacy level of caption users and how accessibility requirements in North America compare to the U.K.
The second session on the agenda was Online Captioning. This session benefited greatly from having Larry Goldberg of WGBH/NCAM as a participant, since a lot of the chat was around WGBH involvement in online captioning of streamed video content. Other topics of discussion were broadcasters’ unwillingness to provide online captioning, available captioning software, and post-production versus during production captioning.

The New Technologies portion of the conference was dominated by possibilities presented by Digital Television in regards to captioning. There was a short dialogue about the possibility that DTV’s picture-in-picture capabilities could allow for ASL translations of programming, although it was rendered unlikely. This session also allowed for an in-depth chat about some captioning software available in the market.

The last main session of the conference was Advocacy, or a mechanism for consumer complaints and issues to be addressed without something as drastic as a lawsuit every time. The majority of this chat session concerned the FCC and the CRTC and how consumers should be encouraged to voice themselves.

Transcripts of the event are available online at:http://141.117.2.232/~t2lam/captionpotluck/additionalmaterial.php