Just a quick post, because Anna at FWD/Forward says it all better than I could. I’ve never actually watched the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon, closely tied to Jerry Lee Lewis, who hosted the event for many years. A number of people with disabilities have strongly criticized Lewis, the telethon, and the representations of people with disability that are included in the program. For instance, Laura Hershey describes her dissatisfaction with Lewis and the telethon in this clip from “It’s Our Story:”
Transcript, since the YouTube captions are wonky:
Laura: That’s actually a group that was started in Chicago by Mike Irvin, Chris Matthews, and several other people. And I worked with them a lot organziing these protests nationally. I think what the name says is that Jerry Lewis doesn’t have the right to claim us as his quote “kids”, especially as he’s not interested in our perspective. He completely trashes people who question or challenge the telethon approach. He’s attacked us in the press, calling us ungrateful, claiming that he bought us our wheelchairs which is, you know, completely untrue.
You know, whatever ego trip he gets thinking of himself as our saviour, or our daddy, or whatever it is he thinks, we reject that.
We’re not his kids, we’re adults, and we’re our own people. We don’t belong to him.
This activism around Lewis and the telethon resulted in protests at last year’s Oscars, as PWD objected to Lewis’ honorary Award. For an interesting summary and analysis of that event, I recommend Beth Haller’s new book, Representing Disability in an Ableist World.
I’ve been pretty swamped with work lately, followed by a rare vacation, and starting a running program, and now I’m sick, so blogging has not been a top priority. That said, there are several things I wanted to blog and didn’t get to:
“Disabled” – This episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (3/24/10) is a sort of updated Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, as a woman abuses her sister, who suffers from severe MS, and the detectives try to solve her recent rape. Obviously, it’s in the very special episode tradition, we learn some background about Ice-T’s character (his grandfather died in a nursing home), and there are a lot of poor language choices (“the handicapped”), but I did think it presented the prevalence of abuse and rape of women with disabilities as serious problems, and largely treated the victim respectfully in terms of her ability to communicate on her own. Interesting timing for me, too, as I just read this Feministe post about sexual assault and disability.
The National Broadband Plan came out a few weeks ago, and I intended to do a real read-through and summarize the ways in which disability protections are and are not included. Sadly, I haven’t even read the whole thing yet – for those of you in the US and interested in internet policy and/or disability, I’m sure it’s a worthwhile read!
Finally, I wanted to post about the accessibility options on Apple’s new iPad (I got to touch one over the weekend!), but I don’t know how much I can contribute without having given it a full test drive. Check out Assistive Technology for Mac- their site is down now, but I know they had a full review out the other day.
That’s it for now – in a month, my school work will be winding down and I can get back to blogging!
Today, I’m stepping outside my usual zone a little bit and ruminating on television and celebrity at Anne Helen Petersen’s fantastic blog, Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style.
I’ve been a fan of The Hills since the beginning – though my viewing has dropped off lately – and after rewatching some early seasons, I suggest that Heidi can be read as a tragic character. With the benefit of hindsight, and the inundation of media coverage of Heidi and Spencer, her transformations over the past few years (including her recent extensive plastic surgery) take on a more sinister cast. I’m not wedded to this idea – it’s still floating around while I make sense of it, and this blog post is a start.
Yesterday, Google announced that it would deploying several new options for increasing the number and quality of closed captioned videos on the site. The New York Timesreported on this as a first step to making videos available to deaf and hearing-impaired audiences, but it seems clear that there are a lot of potential beneficiaries – foreign language audiences (captions can be translated to 51 languages), those of us who can’t turn on the speakers at work, and anyone who wants to search the verbal content of a video.
So, how are they doing it? First, speech-to-text technology currently used by Google Voice is being applied to a small number of videos on the site (largely educational content) to produce captions automatically.
“Because the tools are not perfect, we want to make sure that we get feedback from the video owners and the viewers before we roll it out for the whole world,” Mr. Harrenstien said. “Sometimes the auto-captions are good. Sometimes they are not great, but they are better than nothing if you are hearing-impaired or don’t know the language.”
Presumably, if this works, speech-to-text will be rolled out more broadly. For now, you can take a look at how this works below. To see the captions, Google/YouTube explains – “Click on the menu button at the bottom right of the video player, then click CC and the arrow to its left, then click the new “Transcribe Audio” button.” I’ve picked a clip of PBS’s upcoming series This Emotional Life, focusing on Asperger’s.
Obviously, it’s not perfect – “Asperger’s syndrome” is transcribed as “Mister Gerson” – so I hope that speech-to-text improves before this initial stage is extended to other videos. This, however, leads to the second option that Google/YouTube have made available, which is to provide your own captions for videos you upload.
Now, after you upload a video, you can also upload a text file – YouTube will combine the video and the text to create captions. Through “auto-timing,” YouTube will match a transcript (a file with only verbal content) to the video using speech recognition, or will match a caption file (which includes time codes for the text to appear) to the video. The help file on this seems fairly clear, and also includes tips like including bracketed information about non-verbal sounds [whistling], or using >> to indicate changing speakers inthe captions.
I gave it a try – not the easiest experience. They weren’t kidding when they said that clear speech works best, as my transcript file (no time code) was not able to be matched and displayed as captions. People singing to cats didn’t translate well. Thus, to get a captioned video, I had to try the old fashioned way, creating a .sub file with time codes. This quickly got me in a bit over my head – while I could do it, given the time, there’s a reason most people don’t caption their YouTube videos. It’s time intensive, there’s a learning curve involved, and the results may not seem important enough to justify the work.
This, of course, is exactly why forays into speech-to-text and auto-timing are so exciting. If captions could be created automatically, or from a simple text file, captions on user-created video would certainly become more common and make the world more accessible. While the tools as they are today aren’t anywhere near perfect, it’s certainly a first step in creating automatic accessibility features for participatory media.
As someone who studies accessibility and internet media, I’m constantly torn between getting excited about social/participatory media and being disappointed in their access options. This WordPress blog I’m using is notoriously terrible in its implementation of image alt text, for instance. Blogging has given so many people an outlet to write and connect, but if they want to make a blog accessible, it takes additional research and effort. Attempts to build accessibility features in automatically are, in my opinion, game-changers when they’re done well. I’ll withhold judgment on this YouTube move for now – it has potential – but I’ll be watching to see whether it develops .
Today’s my birthday, and I’m taking a break from blogging (and reading, and writing, and teaching and most other parts of my usual routine!).
But, it happens that I share a birthday with Chally, a fantastic (and prolific) Australian blogger who writes about disability issues, feminism, sex ed, and more. In the spirit of the day, check out some of her work from all around the internet:
