WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

CAPTIONED ELECTION NIGHT COVERAGE ON NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

for

From: John Middleton
Date: Nov 3, 2008 8:30AM


FYI,

CAPTIONED ELECTION NIGHT COVERAGE ON NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO (YES, RADIO!)

On election night, WGBH's Media Access Group will not only be captioning
live television coverage on CBS, PBS and Comedy Central (a combined
Daily Show and Cobert Report special), we'll be captioning National
Public Radio's (NPR's) coverage as well. Captioned radio is made
possible via a live scrolling transcript of a radio broadcast that can
be displayed on a webpage (in this case, at npr.org) or on screens in
specially equipped HD (high definition) Radio receivers. It's a concept
that was hatched between NPR and WGBH's Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family
National Center for Accessible Media and that has been developed for
this historic test through a joint effort between NPR, Harris
Corporation, Towson University, and WGBH, with funding provided
through a grant from NIDRR (H133G060187).

On election night, November 4, between 7-11 p.m. ET, WGBH's
stenocaptioners will be monitoring NPR's live coverage and creating
instantaneous speech-to-text transcriptions. These transcriptions will
then be routed to NPR in Washington, DC which will transmit the feed via
the Public Radio Satellite System to Colorado Public Radio in Denver,
WAMU DC, WGBH Boston, KJZZ Phoenix, and WTMD Baltimore as well as on a
captioning demonstration page on NPR.org. There will be events in those
five cities, during which members of the local deaf and hard-of-hearing
communities will see the radio coverage.
Another milestone...
2008: Captioned Radio. Watch along on npr.org to see history made.

*Full story:*
http://www.npr.org/about/press/2008/102118.CaptionedRadio.html