With global attention on the COVID-19 outbreak, each day that brings more uncertainty for businesses and our communities, we are reminded that this too shall pass (Ecclesiastes 3). In the meantime, our team is closely monitoring developments on the outbreak and are taking the appropriate steps — consistent with CDC and WHO recommendations — to help support the ongoing health and safety of our employees and customers.
We know that first and foremost on your mind is making sure you are taking the appropriate precautions to care for yourself, your family, and others around you.
No doubt, you are also focused on taking care of your businesses, employees, and customers during this time. Here is what we are doing at Aberdeen:
We are fully operational with a good portion of our team already working remotely with the ability to move to 100% remote if mandated.
Our Live Captioning Team is responding and fulfilling emergency meetings and events. We will continue to do so as long as we have the capacity. Please call (949) 302-0004 if you have a new need for Live Captioning.
We have taken several steps to help ensure the reliability of our critical business processes and supporting infrastructures. This includes up-front prevention and mitigation efforts, as well as comprehensive emergency response and recovery plans.
We're asking all of our employees to take appropriate preventative measures. This includes regular and consistent use of hand sanitizer and disinfecting spray and wipes as well as increased cleaning and sanitizing.
We're also encouraging any employee who does not feel well to stay home, get well, and avoid interacting.
We understand and are committed to providing our media and captioning services that are a key link to ensuring necessary media is broadcast to help the overall public.
Some reassuring words…
Romans 15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Philippians 4:6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
We are constantly reminded of the difference that live captioning services can make for a ministry.
Take a quick listen (under a minute!) as our Matt Cook, Aberdeen President, talks about Woodland’s success with live captioning.
After working with Woodlands Church for many years on the post-produced closed captioning and AberFast Station Delivery of the Kerry Shook program, it was just a few years ago that they decided to give our live captioning services a try. Before long, they discovered all of the positive ways live captioning supports their events and services — and, most importantly, makes them more accessible to church embers.
“Woodlands Church has used Aberdeen live captioning services since 2018. The audience engagement and measurable growth have been so positive that we've added captioning to an additional service.”
Vince W. - Online Campus Pastor – Woodlands Church
Change is a beautiful thing! So we're pleased to announce the rebrand of our logo and launch of our new website. You may have noticed us testing out the new brand at the trade shows earlier this year. The response was so great, we've rolled it out and built a new site to complement it.
Why the .io domain? All of the "techie" advancements we're implementing behind the scenes that help ensure we're captioning and delivering your media in the most advanced and efficient way possible are connected by our own application programming interfaces ("APIs") built on this domain. Having our website on the same domain is a reminder of our continued dedication to our clients to improve. And the vintage photos on the site are our way of saying that even with the adoption of new technology, we're still old school in our customer service - always available and ready to come alongside your team!
Win a $100 Amazon Gift Card!
Find the hidden plane and you'll be entered into our sweepstakes to win!
While checking out our website, keep your eyes out for our old paper airplane logo - we've hidden it on one of the pages. It's a clickable image so when you find it, give it a click to submit your contact information to win a $100 Amazon gift card!
Be on the lookout for one of these…
(HINT: the color may help guide you to it)
The winner will be announced on December 18, 2019 on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. So be sure to follow us.
It is not every day you get to observe acts of pure kindness
and dedication of service in today’s world. Last week, myself and Becky Isaacs
founder of Aberdeen, had the privilege of observing the No Limits after-school
program for deaf children.
No Limits is an after-school program for deaf children that teaches underserved children and their families practical skills to help succeed in school and in life. Their ultimate vision is to build the child’s self-esteem and communication skills so they can reach their potential.
During our visit, we were given the grand tour and
introduced to sweet Jacob who explained to a very ignorant person (I’m speaking
about myself here) how cochlear implants work. We also met adorable Ian, who
just spoke his first word about two months ago and just turned 2 years old.
What was shocking was the staggering statistics we learned from their volunteers: Over 75% of deaf children in California graduate from High School - functionally illiterate - unable to read and write higher than the fourth-grade level; and, that over 90% of children with hearing loss are born to hearing parents. The program helps battle these statistics through advocacy, awareness, and education, while implementing the following core values listed on their mission statement:
All children should be given the tools to believe in themselves.
All children have the potential to realize their dreams.
All children with a hearing loss should have a variety of communication options.
All children with a hearing loss deserve to receive a quality education equivalent to their hearing peers.
All children with hearing loss have the ability to become literate and educated and contribute to the community.
An informed parent is a child's best educator.
Honestly, there aren’t enough words that give justice to this wonderful program. It was truly inspiring and touching to see. The educators, volunteers, and staff that work with the program truly have a servant’s heart. They help these children no matter their circumstances and situation, and students who have attended No Limits three years or more are now enrolled in college and graduated from college.
When our tour came to an end, we were in awe. And, I kept on
asking myself, what more can I do to help? I was even more moved when they
thanked Aberdeen for the closed captioning services our company provides for
deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. Seriously, what a great bunch of people!
To learn more about No Limits, or to see how you can volunteer or donate to this wonderful program, please visit their website at http://www.nolimitsfordeafchildren.org/.
There’s a growing trend on social media and sites like Reddit and Quora to showcase captioning errors from television and numerous online platforms. As accessibility laws tighten and the quality standards for captioning on broadcasts become more rigorous, how do these bloggers have so much fuel for their posts on captioning errors? It is a simple question with many complicated answers.
Live television programming is captioned in real-time either by machines or humans working with a stenotype machine (like those used in courtrooms) and thus tends to lag slightly behind and, inevitably, will include some paraphrasing and errors. While the Federal Communication Commission requires American television stations' post-production captions to meet certain standards, the Internet is still vastly unregulated. Video-sharing websites like YouTube have struggled to provide accessible captions. Despite YouTube's recent efforts to improve accessibility, their captions continue to disappoint viewers, especially those of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community.
In a 2014 The Atlantic article called "The Sorry State of Closed Captioning," Tammy H. Nam explains why machines cannot create the same experience humans can. She posits, "Machine translation is responsible for much of today’s closed-captioning and subtitling of broadcast and online streaming video. It can’t register sarcasm, context, or word emphasis." By using machines instead of human writers and editors, sites like YouTube are not providing the same viewing experience to the deaf and hard of hearing as they are to their other patrons. Humans can understand which homophone to use based on context. There is an enormous difference between the words soar and sore, air and heir, suite and sweet. Humans can also determine when noise is important to the plot of a story and thereby include it in the captions so that a non-hearing viewer won't miss critical details. In the same Atlantic article, deaf actress Marlee Matlin says, "I rely on closed captioning to tell me the entire story…I constantly spot mistakes in the closed captions. Words are missing or something just doesn’t make sense." Accessible closed captions should follow along exactly with the spoken dialogue and important sounds so that viewers are immersed in the story. Having to decipher poor captions takes the viewer out of the flow of the story and creates a frustrating experience.
YouTube created its own auto caption software for its creators to use in 2010. The software is known for its incomprehensible captions. Deaf YouTuber and activist Rikki Poynter made a video in 2015 highlighting the various ways in which YouTube's automatic captions are inaccessible. She wrote a 2018 blog post explaining her experience with the software, "Most of the words were incorrect. There was no grammar. (For the record, I’m no expert when it comes to grammar, but the lack of punctuation and capitalization sure was something.) Everything was essentially one long run-on sentence. Captions would stack up on each other and move at a slow pace." For years, Rikki and other deaf and hard-of-hearing YouTube users had to watch videos with barely any of the audio accurately conveyed. Although her blog post highlights the ways in which YouTube's automatic captions have improved since 2015, she writes, "With all of that said, do I think that we should choose to use only automatic captions? No, I don’t suggest that. I will always suggest manually written or edited captions because they will be the most accurate. Automatic captions are not 100% accessible and that is what captions should be." The keyword is accessible. When captions do not accurately reflect spoken words in videos, television shows, and movies, the stories and information are inaccessible to the deaf and hard of hearing. Missing words, incorrect words, poor timing, captions covering subtitles, or other important graphics all take the viewer out of the experience or leave out critical information to fully understand and engage with the content. Until web resources like YouTube take their deaf and hard-of-hearing viewer's complaints seriously, they will continue to alienate them.
So, what can we do about poor web-closed captioning? Fortunately, the Internet is also an amazing tool that allows consumers and users to have a voice in the way they experience web content. Deaf and hard-of-hearing activists like Marlee Matlin, Rikki Poynter, and Sam Wildman have been using their online platforms to improve web-closed captions. Follow in their footsteps and use the voice that the web gives you. Make a YouTube video like Rikki Poynter or write a blog post like Sam Wildman's post, "An Open Letter to Netflix Re: Subtitles."
The Internet is a powerful platform in which large companies like Google can hear directly from their consumers. If you would like to see the quality of closed captions on the web improve, use your voice. Otherwise, you'll continue to see memes like this one...
“The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.” - Qui-Gon Jinn
One could imagine the kinds of responses people might give when asked to list humanity's greatest achievements. A quick internet search reveals such monumental accomplishments as the building of the pyramids, the advent of flight, or the recording of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." Not surprisingly, few of these lists include the creation of language — more specifically grammar — as great accomplishments, but how many of humanity's greatest achievements would have been possible without the ability for human beings to communicate with one another in precise terms? The phrases failure to communicate or communication breakdown are commonly heard, and indeed, poor communication seems to be a handy scapegoat for a myriad of failures, including marriages, wars, and road construction projects. It seems natural for humans to go straight to the source and blame language when things go wrong, so what exactly is the point at which language loses all meaning?Read
Last month, the FCC amended a few sections of Title 47 CFR 79.1: the rule pertaining to closed captioning of televised video programming. The amendments, specifically to 79.1(g)(1) through (9) and (i)(1) through (2), along with the removal of (j)(4), are a follow-up to the proposed reallocation of responsibilities of the Video Programmers and Video Program Distributors first established back in early 2016. The updates to the rule reflect the final decisions on how a compliance ladder will operate when handling consumer complaints related to closed captioning quality concerns.
The ruling focuses on two different scenarios based on how the consumer may approach making a complaint. The FCC recommends filing all complaints within 60 days of the problem either directly with the FCC, or with the Video Program Distributor (VPD) responsible for delivering the program to the consumer. Depending on how the complaint is filed, the review and steps taken to correct the issue should follow the steps below.Read
At a meeting on September 19th, 2017, the Rochester City Council (New York) approved a new city ordinance that will now require its local businesses to enable the closed captioning feature on televisions displayed to the public. Rochester will join only a few other U.S. cities, such as Portland, Oregon, that require all city businesses to provide this service to their patrons.Read
Over the past couple of years – and after several lawsuits filed against a few Ivy League schools – a growing number of universities are working toward accessibility compliance with their online video courses. Initially, the process can be overwhelming and take up a lot of resources. One university even resorted to removing its public library of 20,000 free educational videos because of a complaint filed by the Department of Justice. Unfortunately, because accessibility requirements are often met by a big-bad lawsuit when standards are not met, the whole process gets a negative designation right from the get-go.
Where to Begin
It appears that the initial obstacle for universities is a lack of appropriate education on both the requirements and the benefits of closed captioning. Often, universities do not take the proper initiative in allocating suitable funding or appropriately equipping the classrooms until the school is approached by an organization advocating for accessibility rights – at which time the need to comply becomes a time-crunched burden with a possible lawsuit attached.
It’s important to know that public and private educational institutions must provide equal access for students with disabilities in agreement with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as detailed in Title II (publicly-funded universities & vocational schools) and Title III (privately funded). Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 also ensure equal accessibility in any system of higher education that receives federal funding.
Beyond ensuring equal accessibility to all students, closed captioning is used as an effective learning tool by a significant percentage of students who do not self-identify as having difficulty with hearing. The availability of lecture and video transcripts helps students review and retain information outside of the classroom. It also aids students with learning disabilities, as well as ESL students.
Breaking Down the Roadblocks
Universities should not be overwhelmed by the thought of having to equip classrooms with an array of expensive technologies. The closed captioning process is simple. As long as clear audio can be transferred via the internet or a phone line, real-time captioners can write remotely to a variety of web platforms across multiple devices already available to students – devices such as mobile phones or laptops.
Furthermore, the educational value and benefits of closed captioning are often overlooked when it’s perceived as economically burdensome. Captioning is not only for the deaf and hard of hearing. Recognizing the value of captioning as a successful tool for all students should motivate all administrators to provide captioning on all their online courses.
The instant popularity of live video streaming apps like Periscope, Snapchat, and Facebook Live proves that authentic, in-the-moment content effectively captures the attention of audiences worldwide. Today, one out of five videos on Facebook are broadcast live and are watched three times longer on average than non-live. Considering that more than 5% of the world’s population – about 360 million people – have some degree of disabling hearing loss, there’s a significant number of users that the social networking service cannot ignore when over 100 million hours of videos are watched a day.Read
