BBC RADIO 4 IN TOUCH 04.06.13 2040-2100 PRESENTER: PETER WHITE Feature on accessibility of radio to deafblind people Peter White Now one group of our potential listeners who can’t access In Touch when it goes out are those thousands who are both blind and deaf. But there could be good news for them in the future because of work currently taking place in the United States to convert radio speech into Braille. We’ll hear more precisely what’s being planned in a moment but first we can illustrate the problem all too clearly. Liz Ball is herself both deaf and blind, she’s campaigns officer for the organisation SENSE. Ideally we’d have loved a straight discussion about Liz’s problems between her and the researcher but within the timescale we had no interpreter was available to translate speech so that Liz could follow the argument. So we switched to Plan B – questions e-mailed in advance to Liz, then retyped to her on Skype chat so she could read them on a Braille display as I spoke them in the studio and then answer them from her office. Complicated ha? And despite all of that Liz will still not be able to access this programme when it goes out, which begged an obvious question. Liz, first of all, how will you access this edition of In Touch? Liz Ball In Touch is one of a very small number of programmes that provides a text transcript, which is then e-mailed to people after the programme which means that I get a Word document that I can read in my own time and know what’s being said. The only problem with that is that it arrives a few days after the programme, which means that sometimes people try to talk to me about what was said in the programme before I’ve had the opportunity to read the transcript. White So more generally what is a deafblind person’s experience of “listening” – in quotes – to the radio? Ball Deafblindness is a combination of both visual and hearing impairment and the experience of deafblind people listening to radio depends upon how much hearing they have. For some people radio is completely inaccessible, they can’t hear it at all but for others it’s a useful source of news, information and entertainment but factors such as background music or people with strong accents or people who speak very quickly make it difficult for deafblind people to hear and that can make it a very frustrating experience. White So would you and other deafblind people, do you think they would use this service that’s being suggested? Ball Yes I would, I would love to use this service, although there are a number of questions that I would want answers to before actually committing to using it. So first question is whether it’s possible for the user to control the speed of the captions, if the text was scrolling too quickly on a Braille display it would make it impossible to read and that would make it very frustrating. Second, their claims about accuracy are very encouraging but live television subtitles are notoriously inaccurate and this is an issue that Ofcom is looking into at the moment – how to improve the quality of live television subtitles. And finally, using people to produce the captions introduces a substantial cost to the service, who would bear the cost of providing captions? White Well listening to Liz Ball is Mike Starling, who’s technical director of research for National Public Radio, he’s in Washington DC. We’ll come to some of Liz’s questions in a minute, Mike, but can you first explain the kind of experiments you’re conducting now in the States? Starling Yes, what we’re doing is to create the captions themselves for radio because we have such enormous volume we had to find a very efficient process. If we had to do it through the traditional means of using live stenographers it probably would never have gotten off the ground, simply because there’s 13,000 radio stations, virtually all of them have their own local news and information programmes, so that volume of information has never been conducive to being converted into text. So we picked up on a system that actually we heard about – learned about – from the BBC itself, called Voice Writing, where the individuals that are creating the text are re-speaking everything that they hear in their headphones. And then we have a customised version of Dragon Naturally Speaking – a commercial version with the software development built around it – to take that and convert it into text. You can understand, as Liz was indicating, that it’s got to be highly accurate, we don’t have any of the visual cues that you would have that can make some errors in television subtitling a little more forgivable, so our process had to work extremely well. White So how accurate is it? Starling Well we think we’re now up at 95%, coming out of the captioning process itself. So we have a two stage process, there’s a trained voice writer, there is a trained computer program, and then there is a trained live editor that follows behind them about 10 seconds later. So for the first step it takes about 10 seconds to get the text back out of the re-speakers, the voice writers’ computer, and then another 10 seconds behind that to clean it up with a live editor. So we call that virtual real time but it’s about 20 seconds behind real time but so much better than the several days that would typically occur waiting on a transcript. White And what about that other important point that Liz made – can the user control the speed? Starling Oh absolutely. In the interface to the refreshable Braille displays we have a little three step menu and in the menu of course you can set the speed and move it faster or slower as you see fit or put it in manual mode where you simply hit return basically at the end of the line. White In Britain on a network like Radio 4 you have a great deal of speech output, rather more than there is in quite a lot of other parts of the world, is it practical to think in terms of a system like this being able to turn into Braille maybe 18 hours of material a day? Starling Certainly if you were talking about a single studio with two voice writing booths that would be impossible but we’ve already got three programmes that we’re doing transcripts for – one of which has already been passed along as captioning – and we’re adding a second one this summer but of course the end goal is exactly as you describe, is to create regional centres like this all around America. White So can I just very quickly ask you the question that scientists hate to be asked – when would this be a system that most deaf/blind people who wanted it be able to access in the States? Starling I would say in the next year we will have the applications running that will take the captioning that we’re now doing and transmit it to them through an interface on any Apple connected, any IOS device as well as any Android device, we’re working on building those Apps right now. White Mike Starling, thank you very much indeed. Now clearly deafblind people in Britain, when they finally get to access this edition of In Touch, will want to know what the BBC is doing about this. Well we understand that some work is indeed going on here but rather than re-speaking programme content their concentration is more on a digital solution using speech recognition. We had hoped to talk to them about this work, disappointingly we were told that it was felt such an interview would be premature, we’ve had to content ourselves with this statement: BBC Statement Accessibility is important to the BBC and we’re exploring ways of improving how audiences with disabilities can access the BBC’s radio content. However, it’s too early to confirm any plans at this stage. Last word though I think should definitely go to Liz Ball. Ball I think this is a very interesting and exciting project that does have potential to help a lot of deafblind people both those who can’t hear the radio at all but also those who can hear the radio but would find text helpful to support what they hear. There is a lot of information and news available to deafblind people on the internet but there are things that are only available through radio broadcasts which could include things like interviews, documentaries, dramas. So it does open up a lot more information to deafblind people which has to be a good thing. And it also opens up options around being able to talk to people about what’s been on the radio which again is a good thing to increase not only the information but also the opportunities for social interaction. White Liz, we hope when you finally get to read the transcript we’ve represented you fairly. Thank you very much. Ball Thank you. White We’ll certainly be keeping tabs on that story.