Deaf and following the World Cup? We're streaming live captions | Hacker News Reader

Deaf and following the World Cup? We're streaming live captions

tveeder.tumblr.com

143 pointssunpazed38 comments

I wish I could upvote this a hundred times. This is exactly the kind of thing I like to see more of. Is this your project, sunpazed? Nicely done!

EDIT: Wait, what? Did that guy really say:

"Yes. It's edgy stuff, this. It will ruffle a few ferts. Will say something some people won't like. Hopefully they won't be watching the show. It wasn't very difficult to give Tony Abbott a dick and balls. He was holding this at the time."

I spotted some other weird bits, (I have nothing to compare it to) Is this is computer-based voice recognition? I have to admit it's a lot better than Youtube's terrible excuse for captioning - most of what I see on this page looks pretty coherent and on topic.

Yes, it is. Myself, and a small group of enthusiasts developed the service.

We launched in 2011, with the idea that the hearing impaired could use the service to access a great source of realtime information - television.

The hearing impaired could now objectively access and review online the quality of captions delivered by broadcasters.

Since then, it has grown into a useful resource for everyone.

One of the biggest benefits, we believe, is that our service raises the awareness of captioning to others who haven’t traditionally relied on it.

For those technically minded, it's a client-server model built with custom client hardware. Currently, we're only streaming Australian channels, however, there's scope to plug in any terrestrial broadcast, and feed it into TVeeder.

There's a REST API too.

That's pretty awesome. Thank you for stepping up to work on this.

Thanks for the clarification, that's more what Hacker News readers want to know :) .

I wish you best of luck and congratulations.

what about Streaming API?

Not yet. Websockets are utilised on the frontend, however the API is vanilla REST.

I second, great project. Is it just failing under load ATM (cause of MEX v. CMR)? It may not work from this network (worked earlier from another) which uses a transparent proxy. websockets tends to fall over with most proxies. I see you use ws:// maybe wss:// would get through more often but maybe that is too much. Again thanks, this is great what you all created.

yea I just see the event information, no captions

Is there any documentation for the API, or at least a link to it?

Sure. It's a simple REST API. Here's the link: http://tveeder.tumblr.com/post/60208341417/oh-theres-an-api-...

I'm not sure it's working, I just tried the SBS of the GER POR game and after some ads (which corresponded to the websocket data):

  ...
  "text": " Every second of every game ",
  "text": " live on the big screen at Crown. ",

All that ever came back was:

  {
    "range": []
  }

It's like there were no captions whatsoever. Failing under load?

Try this link: http://beta.tveeder.com/785/byrange?&from=1402972200&to=1402...

It worked from Safari but not FF on the proxies network. During the BELvALG game there are lots of trouble again, seems to only get a small portion of the captions and then stops updating. Here is the last of what I was able to get:

    {
      "id": 4399254,
      "channel": 785,
      "text": "But at BOQ you can talk to one person",
      "date": 1403023783.284,
      "cid": 7
    }

I don't understand the service. When watching tv with my hearing impaired father I push the CC button.

For the world cup specifically the espn announcers perform so terribly we likely won't even do that and have music playing instead.

I remember watching a match during a strike of announcers in Italy, where announcers are supposedly very knowledgeable about soccer.

It was one of my best experiences in soccer ever, beat only by when I started using my radio to listen to a group of comedians commentary.

Not all tv programmes are captioned. Sometimes pushing the CC button won't work :-)

Then something like this becomes incredibly useful.

EDIT: Also, (and I'm not sure if tveeder supports this) but making this a web service means that even hearing people can search for the resulting transcripts as easily as any other text.

I'm deaf and many many thanks for this. I will share with others.

Do you have a way for people around the world to provide additional content? For example if I have a tuner card, and want to run some service to extract screenshots and CC text to send to you via some sort of API

Yes. However, it does require custom hardware. We've prototyped a small hardware platform to allow others to contribute to the live feed. However, this remains at prototype stage - we've been running self funded since inception.

Very nice :) .

Are these captions taken from a live text commentary (like BBC's service), or from a radio commentary?

I think the second would be more useful, since they tend to mention players and plays more often.

A nice case of tech helping people with disabilities, great job and good luck !

The linked posting (now?) says the captions are coming from SBS Australia.

Yes, it did when I read the posting, but is that live audio commentary transcribed or live text commentary?

I think realtime-transcribed live audio commentary would be more timely and lively :) though also harder to do I guess. In either case it's a great service.

Edit: it apparently IS computer-generated live audio! Amazing :)

There are some syncing services between radio and streaming - for example here in Uruguay we like the local radio commentary, and so do the Brazilians and Argentineans, we might watch a match on tv with the sound turned off and radio turned on.

Probably too late now that the conversation has moved on, but if you happen to see this could you point me to one of these syncing services? A very quick google search didn't turn up anything. Thanks.

curious how you are handling the copyright issues?.,..... or just hoping they don't notice?

Very well done. I experimented once with Sports broadcast captioning (not real-time though; using YouTube videos) by using Amazon Mechanical Turk for crowdsourced closed-captioning.

An example is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCgc1jAXGSk

Isn't being deaf and watching soccer more like being there in person? Whenever I go see live matches there is no announcer. The ref has no mic and makes no hand gestures and there are no jumbo-tron close ups on anything important. Very difficult but apparently genuine. Part of the barrier to entry for football fans I suppose.

> The ref has no mic and makes no hand gestures

While, from the stands, they may be difficult to see, soccer referees definitely make standardized hand signals.

Is it only done the instant they make the call or is it repeated after the fat like in american football/hockey? I'll have to take your word for it because from where I've sat I could see nothing :)

Main ones off the top of my head:

Arm straight up: offside

Arm towards goal line: goal kick

Arm towards corner: corner kick

Arm in one direction or the other indicates throw in direction (if it was a close call -- often there isn't any chance for dispute and the team knows what's what and throws it in within a second or two if there is a hurry).

There is a "play on" type arm wave (usually accompanied by a verbal "play on" or something) to indicate "yes I saw him fall, no I don't think it's a foul, keep playing".

The line referees have flags and have similar signals. The only real difference is for a foul they hold the flag straight up and wave it a little. For offside they hold it straight up and stand still to mark where the offside occurred. The line referee should always be located at the exact line that marks offside. Of course pro players are faster than referees, but to get past level 7 refereeing (starts at level 9, kids games, level 7 is probably high school games, state level, etc) you must pass fitness exams as well as paper exams. Level 2 is FIFA assistant referee, so they must all be in quite good shape.

This is a very nice service - well done.

Tangentially, most soccer commentary (esp. in the US) is so horrible it's not a big loss not being able to hear. Just watch the game ;-)

Hmm, the stream doesnt load for me at the moment. Is it location restricted or are there too many users right now? The other streams work.

Yesterday when I brought up ESPN's streaming feed they had an option to stream a video with closed captioning. Is this your source?

Well done sir! There's so much talk about UX lately and still just few really think about real problems like Accessibility

Not a big fan of soccer, but this is really cool!

They have other TV programs being streamed as well. Looks like 6 channels. (Ex: http://beta.tveeder.com/560/live )

Yes - there's 6 streaming, see: http://tveeder.tumblr.com/post/60161190670/weve-just-graduat...

The architecture allows for additional channels as needed.

This could be the next big thing on the hipster world...

- What are you doing?

- Just here, reading TV

would be interested in the tech behind this... voice recognition?

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