An innovative system can let deaf-blind people “watch” television in real time without needing someone right there to interpret for them.
This is one in a series presenting news on technology and innovation, made possible with generous support from the Lemelson Foundation.
You may enjoy TV — as do many people with hearing or visual disabilities. But those who are both deaf and blind need special help to follow along. Now an innovative technology is turning television signals into a form that deaf-blind people can understand.
Deaf people can’t hear. But they can use closed captioning to read subtitles of the words spoken on TV. Blind people can’t see. But they can make use of visual description in voice-over comments that describe what’s happening on the TV screen. Neither method, however, works for people who are both deaf and blind. That makes it harder for them to “watch” television shows or programs.
Roughly 45,000 to 50,000 deaf-blind people live in the United States, according to the National Center on Deaf-Blindness in Monmouth, Ore. By that center’s count, almost 10,000 of them are under age 22. Thousands more deaf-blind people live elsewhere around the world.
Ángel García Crespo is a computer engineer at Carlos III University of Madrid in Spain. His group has invented a new way for deaf-blind people to “watch” TV. He unveiled the technology at a conference, last year, in Aveiro, Portugal. The team went on to describe what they'd done in a paper, earlier this year.
The idea for the system grew out of previous work by García Crespo's group. The team had already worked on making audiovisual materials accessible to people with either vision or hearing disabilities. But the group wanted to help people with both challenges. So they asked some deaf-blind people what would help.
“We heard from them that they would like to know, without intermediaries, what is said in the TV newscasts,” García Crespo says. In other words, the deaf-blind people didn’t want to always need someone else to tell them what was going on. That sent the team brainstorming.
