Adaptive technologies for the deaf and people with hearing impairment

Visual sounds in software applications
Captions

Visual sounds in software applications

Microsoft Windows 98 and later versions include features that can be accessed from the Accessibility Menu to help deaf and hearing impaired users. When the system or an application generates a sound, it can be represented visually on the screen. Note that these features only represent system sounds and will not be helpful to these users when information presentation includes speech, music or other sounds in sound files.

The Apple Macintosh offers similar facilities. In Mac OS X, select System Preferences from the Apple Menu. Then click on Universal Access to activate visual representation of system sounds.

Captions

Captions are text-based information which replicates what is spoken. There are two types of captions, ‘open’ and ‘closed’. ‘Open’ captions are permanently on the screen and cannot be removed. ‘Closed’ captions can be turned on and off. Closed captions are used on television programs, videos and digital video disks (DVDs).

EXAMPLES

Australian Caption Centre: http://www.auscap.com.au.
MAGpie (Media Access Generator) is produced by NCAM (National Center for Accessible Media). It allows creation of text and/or auditory captions for videos in several multimedia formats. This free software and useful information is available from http://ncam.wgbh.org/richmedia/ .
Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange (SAMI) this Microsoft product simplifies provision of captions when developing web pages or multimedia presentations. The file format is an open standard and is freely available. It is based on HTML structure. More information is available at http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp? url=/library/en-us/dnacc/html/atg_samiarticle.asp (search for sami).