Automated Live Captioning with Higher Ed in Mind

Handouts Media

Presented at 9:15am in Lakehouse on Thursday, November 15, 2018.

Speaker(s)

• Will Lewis, Microsoft
• Brian Trager, Associate Director, NTID

Session Details

• Length of Session: 1-hr
• Format: Lecture
• Expertise Level: Beginner
• Type of session: General Conference

Summary

Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has the largest access services in the world, providing interpretive and captioning services to the 8% of their student population who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH). Microsoft technologies in PowerPoint and Microsoft Translator have provided additional communication tools to fill the gap.

Abstract

Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has the largest access services in the world, providing interpretive and captioning services to the 8% of their student population who are deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH). Despite having large access services, they cannot keep up with the demand. Microsoft technologies in PowerPoint and Microsoft Translator have provided them additional communication goals to fill the gap. Since Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, we see the automated captioning technologies provided in these tools to be empowering tools, in particular since they can be turned on and used at a moment’s notice, in the classroom, at extracurricular events, in student study groups, at teacher office hours, in ad hoc meetings, etc. Because the technology can adapt on-the-fly to the vocabulary used in technical university classes and meetings, teachers and students can benefit from the dramatically improved quality an

Keypoints

1. How Presentation Translator, a PPT add-in, can be used for live captioning in class, as an additional tool
2. How Presentation Translator can adapt automatically to technical and domain-specific vocabulary used in class
3. How students can receive captions to their own devices, and use elsewhere in campus life.

Disability Areas

Cognitive/Learning, Deaf/Hard of Hearing

Topic Areas

Accessible Course Design, Assistive Technology, Uncategorized

Speaker Bio(s)

Will Lewis

Will has worked in MSR Machine Translation (MT) incubation team since July 2007. He has been involved in Microsoft’s Machine Translation development, specifically Microsoft Translator, but more recently, Skype Translator. Prior to joining the MT team, he worked as an Assistant Professor in the Computational Linguistics Master’s Program at the University of Washington, where he was founding faculty in the program and continues to hold an Affiliate Position. He received his PhD from the University of Arizona in 2002, and graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of California at Davis in 1996.

Brian Trager

Brian is the Associate Director for the Center on Access Technology at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), where he is often involved in various projects related to accessibility such as MUSEAI, VisualSync and bilingual storybook apps to name a few. He is also an Associate Professor as the lead faculty in the Mobile Application Development program, and the Principle Investigator (PI) for the NSF ATE RoadMAPPS to Careers grant.

Handout(s)

• AHG_Automated Live Captioning with Higher Ed in Mind (Lewis-Trager)