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Awesome! I love hearing about places making the effort to be inclusive. As someone who’s profoundly deaf myself, another less technical approach is to install

by qkeast 3y ago

Awesome! I love hearing about places making the effort to be inclusive. As someone who’s profoundly deaf myself, another less technical approach is to install Rogue Amoeba’s Loopback, and use it to pipe audio from a given app into a tool like Google Meet or Otter.ai using the Loopback device as the audio source. This effectively provides real time captions for anything running on your existing machine.

tuukkah 3y ago
Clever use of Google Meet as a tool! Also, Google Pixel phones now provide realtime captions to any speech playing on the phone (Accessibility > Live Caption). You can also choose a "preferred language" and the captions will be automatically translated to that language from other languages.
jallmann 3y ago
Google Chrome [1] also has captioning built-in [2], so this could also work from a plain page that hooks into the loopback device. Pretty sure it's using the same TTS backend that Google Meet uses. The nice thing about Chrome feature is you can move the caption box around and keep it in the foreground while doing other things, although styling options seem limited (the text might be a little small for some). [1] on desktop, not sure about mobile [2] via chrome://settings/accessibility -> Live Caption
romwell 3y ago
>Awesome! I love hearing about places making the effort to be inclusive. The extent of the effort being getting their employee a slightly-more-expensive-than-average tool that would enable them to do their job better regardless of the disability? Such inclusive, much pat-yourself-on-the-back, wow. "We gave our woodworking shop employee a quality saw so that they'd make their own accessibility ramps!"
- callalex 3y ago
  What would you have them do instead?
  - romwell 3y ago
    >What would you have them do instead? Why instead? They didn't a bad thing, just nothing beyond what the law requires.
  - romwell 3y ago
    >What would you have them do instead? A simple answer for you, BTW: Pay a student $15/hr to transcribe all meetings in real time for the employee. Or pay money to professionals in the field to set up a solution. You know, people who get paid to do just that. Jesus.
- qkeast 3y ago
  I have literally been told in job interviews that the company would not be “allowed” to hire me because I’m hearing impaired, so yes, making an effort to support an employee’s disability and their needs is worth recognizing.
  - romwell 3y ago
    >I have literally been told in job interviews that the company would not be “allowed” to hire me because I’m hearing impaired, That is literally grounds for a lawsuit. >so yes, making an effort to support an employee’s disability and their needs is worth recognizing. ...if the effort were actually made. Which is not the case. Merely being compliant with the law is a very low bar, and we should recognize that they did not do anything beyond what the ADA requires them to.
- RogerL 3y ago
  So what? Okay, in the case of a ramp, if you need one you probably are going to have difficulty building one. So pay employee Sally to build it instead, absolutely. But hearing loss does not impair standing up servers and software. They can pay the employee who probably is the expert at this, the guy with the hearing loss, or go task Emil to go do it to ... avoid 'appearances'?
  - romwell 3y ago
    > They can pay the employee who probably is the expert at this, the guy with the hearing loss, Aaaaaaaaand who said they paid him? Not the OP, for sure. It seems like the disabled person set the system up in their own time to help the company communicate with him in meetings. >or go task Emil to go do it to ... avoid 'appearances'? They could hire Emil to live-transcribe the speech into text. They could hire the services of a professional company that would set up speech recognition for their meetings. They could have done a lot of things. What they did is nothing. Gee, a software company gave their employee a laptop, how totally unheard of! Why are people here so willing to pass this off as some act of charity?
navbaker 3y ago
We definitely explored using these tools, but we’re constrained by government sponsor rules regarding data protection in our day to day work. We can use ZoomGov captions, but most of the other tools weren’t approved. It looks like Windows 11 has a real time solution of some kind, but we’re still stuck on 10.
- sdrothrock 3y ago
  I have profound hearing loss and rely on the Windows 11 captions. They are absolutely best in class and head/shoulders above any other automatic captioning I've used. My coworkers have a variety of accents (Hispanic, Eastern European, South African) and it does a great job with all of them. Additionally, it supports multiple languages (only one at a time sadly), so I also use it for Japanese captions and it's equally great there.
fy20 3y ago
Whisper is pretty good for speech to text, and can be done with in a resource constrained environment. I tried a demo running in a browser using WASM on my phone and even the tiny model is not bad.

by qkeast 3y ago

tuukkah 3y ago

Clever use of Google Meet as a tool! Also, Google Pixel phones now provide realtime captions to any speech playing on the phone (Accessibility > Live Caption). You can also choose a "preferred language" and the captions will be automatically translated to that language from other languages.

jallmann 3y ago

Google Chrome [1] also has captioning built-in [2], so this could also work from a plain page that hooks into the loopback device. Pretty sure it's using the same TTS backend that Google Meet uses. The nice thing about Chrome feature is you can move the caption box around and keep it in the foreground while doing other things, although styling options seem limited (the text might be a little small for some). [1] on desktop, not sure about mobile [2] via chrome://settings/accessibility -> Live Caption

romwell 3y ago

>Awesome! I love hearing about places making the effort to be inclusive. The extent of the effort being getting their employee a slightly-more-expensive-than-average tool that would enable them to do their job better regardless of the disability? Such inclusive, much pat-yourself-on-the-back, wow. "We gave our woodworking shop employee a quality saw so that they'd make their own accessibility ramps!"

callalex 3y ago
What would you have them do instead?
- romwell 3y ago
  >What would you have them do instead? Why instead? They didn't a bad thing, just nothing beyond what the law requires.
- romwell 3y ago
  >What would you have them do instead? A simple answer for you, BTW: Pay a student $15/hr to transcribe all meetings in real time for the employee. Or pay money to professionals in the field to set up a solution. You know, people who get paid to do just that. Jesus.
qkeast 3y ago
I have literally been told in job interviews that the company would not be “allowed” to hire me because I’m hearing impaired, so yes, making an effort to support an employee’s disability and their needs is worth recognizing.
- romwell 3y ago
  >I have literally been told in job interviews that the company would not be “allowed” to hire me because I’m hearing impaired, That is literally grounds for a lawsuit. >so yes, making an effort to support an employee’s disability and their needs is worth recognizing. ...if the effort were actually made. Which is not the case. Merely being compliant with the law is a very low bar, and we should recognize that they did not do anything beyond what the ADA requires them to.
RogerL 3y ago
So what? Okay, in the case of a ramp, if you need one you probably are going to have difficulty building one. So pay employee Sally to build it instead, absolutely. But hearing loss does not impair standing up servers and software. They can pay the employee who probably is the expert at this, the guy with the hearing loss, or go task Emil to go do it to ... avoid 'appearances'?
- romwell 3y ago
  > They can pay the employee who probably is the expert at this, the guy with the hearing loss, Aaaaaaaaand who said they paid him? Not the OP, for sure. It seems like the disabled person set the system up in their own time to help the company communicate with him in meetings. >or go task Emil to go do it to ... avoid 'appearances'? They could hire Emil to live-transcribe the speech into text. They could hire the services of a professional company that would set up speech recognition for their meetings. They could have done a lot of things. What they did is nothing. Gee, a software company gave their employee a laptop, how totally unheard of! Why are people here so willing to pass this off as some act of charity?

navbaker 3y ago

We definitely explored using these tools, but we’re constrained by government sponsor rules regarding data protection in our day to day work. We can use ZoomGov captions, but most of the other tools weren’t approved. It looks like Windows 11 has a real time solution of some kind, but we’re still stuck on 10.

sdrothrock 3y ago
I have profound hearing loss and rely on the Windows 11 captions. They are absolutely best in class and head/shoulders above any other automatic captioning I've used. My coworkers have a variety of accents (Hispanic, Eastern European, South African) and it does a great job with all of them. Additionally, it supports multiple languages (only one at a time sadly), so I also use it for Japanese captions and it's equally great there.

fy20 3y ago

Whisper is pretty good for speech to text, and can be done with in a resource constrained environment. I tried a demo running in a browser using WASM on my phone and even the tiny model is not bad.