Television's transition to the Internet: Disability accessibility and broadband-based TV in Australia

Whereas entertainment has featured negatively in the broader NBN debate currently occurring in Australia, within the disability sector it has been recognised as revolutionary. Government, industry and technical analysts describe digital television, particularly that delivered via broadband, as potentially enabling to people with vision and hearing impairments through the more widespread provision of accessibility features such as audio description and closed captions. This article interrogates the approach to accessibility taken by two case studies of broadband-based television: Netflix and catch-up TV. Netflix, which is not officially available in Australia, is often presented as the future of television, while catch-up services provide an example of the current broadband-based television paradigm in this country. Although accessibility features may be available on broadcast television or DVD release, each of these forms of broadband-based television has either previously (Netflix) or currently (catch-up) stripped accessible functions to stream online. The discussion reflects on both activist interventions of people with disability and the industry standards

Paraphrasing in respeaking – comparing linguistic competence of interpreters, translators and bilinguals

Respeaking is a method of producing subtitling for live events and TV programmes. Respeakers repeat speakers’ utterances so that they may be changed by speech recognition software into subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing. Respeakers need to paraphrase the text so that it conforms with temporal and spatial constraints of subtitling. Due to the similarities between respeaking, interpreting and translation, we tested interpreters, translators and bilingual controls on a paraphrasing task to see whether interpreters or translators would manifest any advantage thanks to experience. Following respeaking training, the participants were asked to paraphrase sentences with semantic redundancies, oral discourse markers and false starts in a simultaneous and delayed condition. Contrary to our predictions, we found that experience did not modulate paraphrasing quality or speed in general, but interpreters did outperform other groups when eliminating semantic redundancies, which were also the most difficult reformulations to tackle for all participants. The data suggest that while interpreters and translators are not better predisposed to become respeakers than regular bilinguals, at least as regards the paraphrasing performance, certain aspects of the interpreting experience (the need to express meaning concisely within time constraints) may offer a slight advantage in producing well-formed respoken subtitles

Testing the Causality between Electricity Consumption, Energy Use and Education in Africa

We investigate the existence of causal relationships between energy consumption and education (enrollment in primary secondary and higher education) for a sample of 16 African countries over the period 1971-2010 (according to availability of countries' data). We use the panel-data approach of Kónya (2006), which is based on SUR systems and Wald tests with country specific bootstrap critical values. Our results show that education and energy use are strongly linked in Africa. There is bidirectional causality between primary, secondary and higher education and energy use for several countries. Moreover, electricity consumption plays a crucial role in the energy-education links in Africa.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132984/1/wp1084.pd