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The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language
- bombcar 6y agoMicrosoft Teams supports live subtitles - I've not tried it but it looks like it could be interesting. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions-in-a-teams-meeting-4be2d304-f675-4b57-8347-cbd000a21260 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions...
- jimktrains2 6y agoThe autogenerated ones in Google Meet can be quite amusing at times.
- simion314 6y agoI dread the day when Google/Youtube will start blocking accounts based on what their Speech to Text thinks someone is speaking.
- erk__ 6y agoWell they already use it to decide if a video can be monetized so it is already happening in some sense. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?visit_id=637499425470515881-2173076687&rd=1&hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?visit_id=6...
- gambiting 6y agoThey already do. There was the case just the other day where someone explaining chess strategy had their video removed for "racial violence" when talking about.....white and black sides of the chess board. Obviously google knows what was said thanks to the speech to text translation.
- shawnz 6y agoIt's not confirmed that's actually why agadmator's channel was removed. That was just a theory
- TeMPOraL 6y agoStill, whatever in that video triggered the detector, that such ban happens at all is worrying. This, plus Google's penchant to ban you across the board for a perceived violation in one service[0], means you absolutely cannot trust Google with your speech. -- [0] - Examples abound; my favourite was the great many people who got banned after a YouTube livestreamer asked them to vote by typing in color emojis in the chat, and as they did so, YouTube spam detector banned their Google accounts.
- simion314 6y agoYeah, but I was thinking at people with non standard accents, there a large number of people outside US that make Youtube videos and their accent is tricking the AI and the automatic subs will contain random words. The AI will have a big bias against non US creators or even US people with an accent that is not popular in the Google training data.
- timvdalen 6y agoRelevant discussion from earlier in the week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218476
- mercurywells 6y agoEnglish is not always the preferred language. An user of ASL may not necessarily be as proficent in English. The government version of Teams still does not have live subtitles last I checked.
- whoomp12342 6y agoI am suprised that Teams does not support multiple langauges
- bombcar 6y agoCaptions itself is very new, I assume more languages are coming (as an aside Zoom's machine transcribing works surprisingly well).
- chaorace 6y agoThat's a terrifying sentence: "the government version of Teams". Out of curiosity, what makes it different?
- bluGill 6y agoI would guess that the government doesn't take the latest updates vs having a different program called teams. The government may also refuse to install some plugins.
- Jtsummers 6y agoMore importantly, the "government version of <x>" is often hosted on something separate from the commercial version. That is, 20 companies all using MS Teams may all be actually communicating with a common (or barely segregated) backend. The government version is often running on a distinct suite of servers that only the government version touches.
- jhbadger 6y agoYeah. There is also a government version of Zoom for similar reasons.
- mabbo 6y agoTwo quick misconceptions to call out for those less familiar with signed languages: 1. ASL is not just English with each word replaced with a sign. It's an incredibly complex language with different grammatical rules, some of which don't have English equivalents. 2. It's incredibly flexible. Many core grammar components will remain consistent, but often if you drive to another city, many words/signs will be different. But signers adapt to these changes quickly. Those two things make this article all the more interesting, because it's a great example of how the flexibility and unique properties of ASL allows for adaptation in circumstances like these strange times. Source: three years, almost a minor, in ASL in University. I'm no expert, but I truly enjoy the language.
- thepete2 6y agoThis is kind of unrelated, but I wonder if a small amount (say 100 signs or so) of sign language (ASL or local equivalent) wouldn't be useful for hearing people in their day-to-day lives. I'm very interested in sign-language, but language being what it is you can't do it alone ...
- mabbo 6y agoThey are handy! Especially if one person is on a call and can't talk, or you're trying to be quiet. "I love you", "Food?", "Tea?" (we're tea drinkers) are commonly used in my home.
- thepete2 6y agoThat's exactly what I mean. Great use haha
- wittjeff 6y agoCheck out Cued Speech (one-handed phonetic signing). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn4e9V3oigs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn4e9V3oigs It's a different modality of the local spoken language, not a separate language like ASL. You can learn it in a weekend. IMO it should be taught to everyone in the 2nd grade to help with phonological awareness, which is helpful for visual literacy. But it'd also be useful in a lot of noisy situations throughout life.
- jamesdwilson 6y agoCurious about statistics, what percent of people speak sign language?
- bluGill 6y agoWhat do you consider speak? I know one phase in each of French and Russian - though I'm sure my accent is so bad natives would have trouble understanding me. I can read Spanish, and produce simple sentences that are not memorized, but I'm not on the level of a conversation. So how many languages do you want to say I speak? You can creditably argue 1,2, or 4 from the above.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 082349872349872 6y agoAny signed language? Or a particular one?
- flerchin 6y agoRoughly 10% of Americans are hard of hearing. Unfortunately far fewer have learned sign language.
- Wohlf 6y agoI assume that's because the majority of them are elderly, and have no desire to learn it.
- _nalply 6y agoIn Switzerland about one per mille or even less.
- sneak 6y agoDoes anyone know of a good web based videoconferencing system that does 1080p or 4K, at close to 30fps? Ideally it wouldn't require some big subscription plan, either. Meet maxes out at 720p (it's that or 320p) and what seems like a single-digit frame rate. Zoom doesn't seem much better. I don't know sign language but I have a lot of bandwidth (and am wired) and I'm tired of calls optimized for 1-5mbps wifi. Even calls that are primarily for audio could benefit from higher resolution/framerate video, I feel.
- leesalminen 6y agoWe bought the Logitech gear for a Zoom Room years ago for our office. It was a 4K camera and participants in meetings would frequently remark on the high quality video stream. Of course, we also had a symmetric gigabit fiber connection so that probably helped.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ihuman 6y agoDiscord supports 1080p@30fps screen sharing in DMs if you have Nitro classic (and 60fps in servers), but I can't tell if that also applies to your camera.
- rasz 6y agohttps://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-studio-send-an-udp-stream-to-a-second-pc-using-obs.455/ https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-studio-send-an-ud...
- kevincox 6y agoJitsi can support 1080p at 30fps, I'm not sure if it goes higher. However you may need to host your own as meet.jit.si has some quality restrictions (although it is pretty good looking for general use). Also note that most laptops only come with a shitty 720p webcam so unless you have a nice camera you won't see much improvement.
- cblconfederate 6y agoThose seem like reasonable adaptations, but i think Zoom has missed an opportunity here, we all need some kind of sign language with video calls. Where is my "Yes", "No" button, or other instant ways to communicate common things without having to turn on the mic or type in chat ?
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoThere's "hand up" in most video chat apps; I saw that in Jitsi first. Perhaps changing it to allow other emoticons ... ?
- yreg 6y agoI know what you mean and you are right, but in our team we signal trivial stuff like yes/no with gestures, without turning on mics/interrupting speakers.
- cblconfederate 6y ago- a lot of people do full-screen presentations (where they can't see others) - a lot of trivial interuptions are "can you see this?" , "can you hear me" etc
- krallja 6y agoPersistent Non-verbal Feedback (“Yes”, “No”, “Slower”, “Faster”) was added to the Zoom client on February 1.
- CivBase 6y agoPerhaps someone on HN knows the answer to a question I've had for years now. Why use sign language on platforms where text is accessible? I've wondered this since I first saw a TV broadcast with a signer off to the side. Isn't that what closed captions are for? Surely it's faster to read text captions than the gestures of some low-res recording of a human stuck in a tiny box in the corner of the screen. Video chat platforms like Zoom almost always have a text chat feature. Although at least for those I can see how it might be faster and more personable for many to sign than type.
- dnndev 6y agoA few reasons: 1) You loose facial expression communication 2) Its slower to digest (small/slow text scrolling across bottom of screen) 3) Its harder to learn to read as the process is aided by phonetics
- bskrobisz 6y agoIt's faster to read text than to listen to someone speak, yet speech remains popular. There are aspects of communication which are not easily replicated in text -- sign languages do not lack the semantic information that is provided in speech by the tone, pitch, and rhythm of voice which is not, for the most part, reflected directly in grammar (in English, anyways). These components take other forms (expression and aspect, primarily) in ASL.
- CivBase 6y ago> It's faster to read text than to listen to someone speak, yet speech remains popular. I suspect there are a few reason for that beyond the explanations you gave. 1) Speech is faster to produce than text. Professional captioners are among the few who can challenge that. For everyone else, it's usually faster to give a speech or say what's on your mind than to type it all out. 2) Speech frees up the eyes. My vision is usually in greater demand than my hearing, so I prefer to avoid committing it to a single activity for a long time if possible. Unfortunately, that's not an option for those without hearing. 3) Speech is easier to attribute to individuals. I can determine who said something with minimal effort just by listening to the sound of their voice. 4) Speech is more immersive for narrative content. Movies and TV shows feel more believable when characters are talking with each other face-to-face like they would in real life. Unfortunately, a signer in the corner can't make up for any of those factors.
- iav 6y agoThe best part of Zoom for deaf people is the automatic captioning. There is one big downside of using generic video chat for signing - it’s usually optimized for clear audio, not clear video. When the connection gets weak, Zoom will drop frames but try to preserve audio. For the deaf, dropping audio is of course not a problem but dropping frames means they miss a key word in the sentence.
- medstrom 6y agoThis could be fixed if pinning the interpreter's video feed on your screen gave it priority.
- _nalply 6y agoThere are other problems with video for hearing people. One example is WhatsApp providing an audio record button in the lower right corner of the screen. I always keep hitting the button by mistake. If I had a user script I would remove that button. Another one is recording videos. If there were an embarrasing noise like a fart I would be obliviously send the video to someone hearing.
- christkv 6y agoHave anyone done life transcription of sign language ?
- _nalply 6y agoIn the last ten years there was an endless stream of hopeful projects that failed silently. It's a very difficult problem.
- gugagore 6y agoI think the most interesting part of this is the lack of shared space in video conferencing, and how it gets in the way of ASL's use of space. As the article mentions, many verbs in ASL are inflected ("conjugated") according to semantic roles (roughly "subject" / "object" (not exactly, because passive voice)). "I ask you" and "I help you" can each be signed as a single entity, where the motion (starting at me, and moving in your direction) carries the information about the pronouns. At the very least, the layout on each person's screen could be consistent so that person A is always at location 1, and so on. That might restore some sense of shared space. This shows up as a pain-point even in a spoken-language setting. If everyone is introducing themselves, what order do they go in?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> This shows up as a pain-point even in a spoken-language setting. If everyone is introducing themselves, what order do they go in? On team meetings, we usually go clockwise by the order of pictures on the screen of the PM. That order is both seemingly non-deterministic and persistent over weeks - we have a little in-joke where we try to game the sequence by joining early or late, aiming to be sorted last. We haven't been able to figure out a pattern for it, though; it seems MS Teams sorts pictures in whatever way it feels this month. So for instance, whether I join before or after our PM, this month, I'm the first in the standup queue. Last month, I was the but-last. Personally, I'd love if there was a shared ordering assigned and windows were simply numbered, and the numbers were displayed on screen. Would help both sign and voice users.
- TheFullstackGuy 6y agoI went to RIT where the deaf community is huge, and I immediately read this article looking for a mention of it. I am not shocked I was right!