Re: Using HTML5 and Javascript to Deliver Text-Based Audio Descriptions

Hi Geoff,

That is indeed very interesting. I'd be curious how you're going with
the pre-recorded pieces and the download speed - is it fast enough? My
suspicion is that doing the synthesis on the client will lead to a
much more responsive system, but it'd be good to get that confirmed
with actual experiments.

Regards,
Silvia.

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:46 PM, Geoff Freed <geoff_freed@wgbh.org> wrote:
>
> Hello, everybody:
>
> IBM-Research Tokyo recently partnered with the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family
> National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) at WGBH to research ways to
> deliver online audio descriptions using  text-to-speech (TTS) methods. IBM
> and NCAM explored two approaches which exploit new HTML5 media elements,
> Javascript and TTML:
>
> -- Writing and time-stamping a description script, then delivering the
> descriptions as hidden text in real time in such a way that a user's screen
> reader will read them aloud. The descriptions remain otherwise invisible and
> inaudible to non-screen-reader users.
> -- Writing and time-stamping descriptions, then recording them using TTS
> technology. At the time of playback, each description is individually
> retrieved and played aloud at intervals corresponding to the time-stamped
> script.
>
> Visit http://ncamftp.wgbh.org/ibm/dvs/ to learn more about the project, view
> the demonstration models and download the code to see how it works.
>
> Thanks.
> Geoff Freed
> WGBH/NCAM
> (with apologies for cross-posts)
>

Received on Thursday, 9 February 2012 21:36:01 UTC