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Hearing Dogs

Hearing Dog Graduating

Have you ever noticed a dog wearing a vest, with a deaf person? Chances are it is a hearing dog.

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Deafness Blog with Jamie Berke

Hulu Has a Captioning Question

Tuesday December 22, 2009

I just received this question from Hulu, which I am reprinting in its entirety. Feedback is needed - how Hulu captions will depend on your answers. Here is the question from Hulu:

We recently added a new feature to the site where we automatically title-case captions that were originally all in CAPS. The goal of the project was to increase the readability of the captions (we have some data to suggest that it's easier to read lower case text faster than they can read CAP text) So the following would be translated as such:

THE QUICK RED FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY BROWN DOG
The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog

The results are good, however, there are issues with proper nouns. For instance, the name Mark and the verb mark. It's very difficult for a computer to know if that word should be capitalized or not. In these cases, we are choosing to keep the word lower cased, even if we know there is a character named Mark in the show. This problem is largely localized to people's names as opposed to place names, or whatnot.

My question is, do you think the caption using community would prefer captions in ALL CAPS or would the community prefer lower case captions knowing that there will be errors with many proper nouns?

Please post your replies here. I will be giving the URL of this blog post to Hulu so they can follow your responses.

Guide's note:
Some people may not understand what a title case is.
Title case - http://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/capital_letters_title_case.htm
Don't confuse it with proper nouns;
http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/propernoun.htm

Majority of British Soldiers Deafened

Monday December 21, 2009

Most British soldiers who go to fight in Afghanistan, are returning with hearing losses. The news source reports that almost 70 percent of more than 1,200 soldiers returned with severe hearing loss. If that's what's happening with British soldiers, I wonder how many American soldiers are returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with hearing loss?

You Better Watch Out if You're Arrested...

Sunday December 20, 2009

Like what happened to Sober1205 on the forum. He was arrested at home and brought to the police station on an outstanding warrant. At the station, he requested an interpreter and a TTY. Both the interpreter and the TTY were denied! As a result, Sober1205 was stuck in jail for three days with no way to make a call, and no interpreter either. What could or should he have done in that situation? The only "advice" I was able to give was to file a complaint.

Blog post title is a play on "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."

Deaf Fox Cub Understands Sign Language

Saturday December 19, 2009

Just read this short article about a deaf fox cub in Thailand that had learned to understand sign language. Dogs, cats, gorillas/chimpanzees; now we can add foxes to the list of animals that can be trained to understand sign language.

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