The user group meeting was held in the afternoon of the 3rd
of September.
Some 25 participants took part in this discussion of experts.
The meeting starts with the demonstration of two videos by Giuliano Pirelli, demonstrating the use of voice recognition at school and for TV subtitling.
Gerold Wagner introduces the goals of this user group meeting:
Peter Tobisch (ORF; Austrian broadcasting corporation) points out that a distinction between heard of hearing and deaf persons is not common practice at broadcasting companies. One has to mention that only a restricted budget is available for television subtitling. With the current funds it is simply not possible to offer more subtitling than today.
Gernot Kerschbaumer (student) expresses his wishes for a precise and not simplified subtitling. For him it would be important to display the original text, not simplified or shortened versions.
The ongoing discussion shows that different kinds of hearing impairments require different services. The discussion about the necessary quality of subtitling varies widely. On the one hand precise subtitling is demanded, on the other hand people state that precise subtitling is too complex. Also the question whether it would be useful to produce subtitles automatically (which of course contain some errors) in the case that no budget for manual subtitling is available, cannot be clarified. Some people say it is better to provide subtitles with errors than providing no subtitles at all, others state that non-perfect subtitles are useless.
Peter Tobisch, ORF makes the suggestion that organisations for the deaf should put some pressure on the authorities for a legal liability for broadcasting companies which forces them to provide a certain percentage of subtitled broadcasts. This would lead to the situation that also the private broadcasters would be forced to offer such services and also that enough funds would be available for subtitling.
Another result of the discussion is that the providers of voice recognition software should be motivated to increase the usability of voice recognition software in combination with telephones.