NCSA NEWS

Trace Center Demonstrates Live Captioning for Hearing Impaired at SC99

released November 16, 1999

Researchers from the Trace Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison are demonstrating the feasibility of providing realtime captioning for the deaf and hearing impaired during Webcasts of portions of SC99, the annual high-performance networking and computing conference that runs Nov. 13-19 at the Oregon Convention Center.

The captioning demonstration by Trace, a member institution of the Education, Outreach and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (EOT-PACI), complements the efforts of other PACI partners and SC99 to provide live audio/video Webcasts of selected presentations. The Webcasts are broadcast through SCinet99, an integrated network environment constructed specifically for the conference.

The long-term goal of the Trace Center project is to make using a Grid (an array of services and resources linked by high-speed networks) more user-friendly to the deaf and hearing impaired. Eventually users will be able to launch an application and have windows appear on their screens, showing either sign language interpretation or closed-caption text of any conversation taking place within the application.

A schedule and instructions for accessing the SC99 Webcasts are available at http://www.sc99.org/webcasts/. More on the Trace Center captioning project is available at http://www.eot.org/.

 

More News Briefs