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Cowling, Mark wrote: > I would like to introduce an extra question: because my wife is deaf > we watch live events on the television with subtitles. [snip] I would > be interested to know how this is done? If the solution is a purely > technological one, is it one that we could imitate in some way? As I understand it, there are two main ways that live subtitling is done these days. 1) Palantypy - where an individual using a chorded keyboard with phonetic system of some kind types what is said by speakers at a very high speed. I know the ones for deaf people's speech to text transliteration are expected to do 180 wpm at 90% accuracy (Signature/CACDP course spec). 2) Speech recognition, where an individual who is watching the live broadcast repeats what the speakers are saying into a speech recognition programme such as Dragon. I assume these are professionally trained individuals who happen to have good speech pickup from Dragon et al. I think there may be phonelines involved somewhere so the text is uploaded straight into the subtitle stream. I'm partially deaf myself - I almost never watch live subtitled content as the lag between the sound, lip-patterns and the subtitles gives me a headache. I have similar difficulties with text to speech transliteration systems, I'd much prefer BSL/SSE to supplement my residual hearing for live speakers despite my sign not being that good. Interestingly I think my deafness and my resultant mild (most people don't notice) speech and language impairment is what has made pre v10 Dragon unusable for me. Mark, can your wife use Dragon? Has she ever tried? I need to play with my copy of v10 when it's not nearly end of term and see if I can arrange training from someone experienced with working with deaf users (if such an obscure thing exists). In fact if any of you lot know of a suitable Dragon trainer who has worked with deaf or speech impaired individuals I'd be very interested to hear about them! I lend copies of dragon to disabled students via our loan pool and I find their success and happiness with it varies, some get on well with it, others really don't. I always advise them to put the learning time in, but recognise that it may not be a solution which works for them or that they may need proper training which I can't provide. I wonder if there's a correlation between 'verbal fluency' and success with speech to text system.... Natalya