Top Tech Tidbits for Thursday, February 27, 2025 - Volume 1004 ♿️
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The Week's News in Access Technology
A Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd. Publication
#news #technology #accessibility #a11y #disability #blind #deaf #deafblind #toptechtidbits

Top Tech Tidbits. The world's #1 online resource for current news and trends in access technology.

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The #BBC is looking for a Head of Digital #Accessibility, with the role only open to #deaf, #disabled, and/or #neurodivergent applicants. Hybrid working, based at any UK BBC hub. Salary up to £110,000.

careers.bbc.co.uk/job/Head-of-…

#jobs #a11y

Head of Digital Accessibility - Extend

^{careers.bbc.co.uk}

The enshittification of AI has lead to the choice of AI used by VLC to be groaned at. I even saw a post cross my feed of someone looking for a replacement for VLC.

VLC is working on on-device realtime captioning. This has nothing to do with generating images or video using AI. This has nothing to do with LLMs.

(edit: There's claims VLC is using a local LLM. It will use whisper.cpp, and not be using OpenAI's models. I don't know which models they will be using. I cannot find any reference to VLC using a LLM.)

While it would be preferred to use human generated captions for better accuracy, this is not always possible. This means a lot of video media is inaccessible to those with hearing impairment.

What VLC is doing is something that will contribute to accessibility in a big way.

AI transcription is still not perfect. It has its problems. But this is one of those things that we should be hoping to advance.

I'm not looking to replace humans in creating captions. I think we're very far from ever being able to do this correctly without humans. But as I said, there's a ton of video content that simply do not have captions available, human generated or not.

So long as they're not trying to manipulate the transcription using GenAI means, this is the wrong one to demonize.

#AI #Transcription #VLC #HearingImpaired #Deaf #Accessibility

Hi friends!

We're working with a large technology company looking to understand deaf individual's needs as we build assistive technology. Please forward to all of your #deaf or hard of hearing friends in the USA. We're paying referrals!
Tim
p3technology.questionpro.com/t…

12160 | MetaRL12160 - Hearing - Enterprise Survey Software

MetaRL12160 - Hearing - Enterprise Survey Software

^{QuestionPro Online Surveys Made Easy}

FINALLY! Open-source LIVE CAPTIONS for your Linux desktop that run locally! No internet connection, no spyware!

github.com/abb128/LiveCaptions

FUTO is a company that grants young developers means to build awesome tools like this one. Tools that help digital sovereignty.

futo.org/projects/

All I need now is a model that will translate all the Russians in #CounterStrike for me :D

#Accessibility #HearingAid #Deaf #FUTO #FreeSoftware #FairSoftware #MachineLearning

Top Tech Tidbits for Thursday, May 2, 2024 - Volume 961
toptechtidbits.com/tidbits2024…

The Week's News in Access Technology
A Mind Vault Solutions, Ltd. Publication
#news #technology #accessibility #a11y #disability #blind #deaf #deafblind #toptechtidbits

Top Tech Tidbits. The world's #1 online resource for current news and trends in access technology.

Subscribers: 17,060 Opt-In Subscribers were sent this issue via email. 170 Premium Subscribers were sent this issue via email.

I think it's really cool that Black American Sign Language is in some ways more conservative than the kind of #ASL you learn at Gallaudet University.

Other ASL varieties use a lot of handshapes influenced by English spelling. But black ASL has kept more of the original handshapes, because black #deaf schools didn't get hit so hard by the oralist reformers who made war on ASL.

You can see BASL in action at csdhh.org/black-asl

#BlackHistoryMonth

Black ASL — CSDHH

^CSDHH