Tackling live subtitles for the deaf

chris

Providing subtitles for deaf and hearing-impaired viewers is now a high – and frequently obligatory - priority for broadcasters.

Netherlands-based TV station RTV Gelderland has installed a new system that allows its live evening news and current affairs programmes to prepare visual text both closer to transmission time and live during its bulletins.

Gelderland is the central eastern province of the Netherlands, which has Arnhem as its capital and Nijmegen among its major towns. RTV Gelderland provides public service broadcasting for the region on cable, satellite and DTT, including a 20-minute news bulletin followed by a 40-minute current affairs programme. Both of these are repeated an hour after the original broadcast until closedown, and again the following morning.

As most of its output is live, RTV Gelderland needed a subtitling system that could generate on-screen text at very short notice. The broadcaster has installed SysMedia WinCAPS Live subtitles preparation software, supported by the manufacturer's SpeakTITLE speech recognition add-on module, a TDG-7 teletext inserter and a Teletext Re-Broadcast Decoder, and is now able to subtitle material at least two hours earlier than was possible before.

The live re-speaking application in the system allows the first news programme of the evening, at 18.00, to be subtitled live. The output is saved and then edited and revised to clear up errors and then automatically transmitted for the 19.00 bulletin. "With this technology we will be able to subtitle more content than previously," explained Martin Ouburg, technical manager for RTV Gelderland. "This is important to us because most of our content is live or available only close to broadcast time. We have also been able to improve efficiency and keep costs within the funds provided by the regional government for this purpose."