Design and the Digital Divide. Alan F. Newell
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were fully documented by Osmond’s [1972] report of the Lord Chancellor’s working party. POSSUM also found it difficult to persuade the Lord Chancellor’s Office that a simultaneous transcript would be valuable (e.g., so that court officials could read it overnight). This was solved after a demonstration of the system to judges, who immediately saw the benefits. In later years speech recognition has been used in the U.S., but requires a trained speaker to re-speak the words uttered in Court.
Following fashion—even in research—may produce incremental advances. Swimming against the tide can lead to major advances.
With funding from the National Research and Development Corporation (which became the British Technology Group), Palantype transcription systems were licensed to, and made commercially available by, POSSUM Controls Ltd. They also organized operator training. They offered transcription as a service to deaf people in a range of situations, including meetings, conferences, in a pilot telephone translation service and by a deaf business man [Hayward, G., 1979]. As technology improved, these systems incorporated very large dictionaries, and similar portable systems were developed in the U.S. for Stenograph machines.
Rapid reading of orthographic text requires good literacy, and thus can be difficult for pre-lingually profoundly deaf people, for whom a sign language translator is more effective, but both require a trained operator. The advantages of an orthographic output are:
• the words remain on the screen for a short time after they have been spoken, and thus the reader can briefly look away from the screen without missing words;
• orthographic output can be used for other purposes (e.g., retaining a record of the speech);
• a stenographer requires fewer and shorter breaks than a shorthand translator; and
• orthography can be used for “closed captioning” of television, whereas technology does not (yet) exist for transmitting sign language other than in the picture.
A French student at Southampton University showed that a Grandjean transcription system for the deaf was feasible [Sayi et al., 1981]. This was not taken forward, but CAT software (IBM-TASF) is now available which is compatible with the Grandjean shorthand machine. For his Ph.D. Colin Brooks [Brooks and Newell, 1985] investigated the potential of handwritten shorthand, but concluded that it was unlikely to be a viable alternative to machine shorthand.
In the U.S., Computer Aided Transcription (CAT) systems were developed for commercial applications, such as the law courts, and were not used for supporting deaf people until the technology could be made portable. In the UK the first commercially available CAT systems were small dictionary systems designed to support deaf people, and these became useful in traditional court reporting situations when large dictionaries could be included in such systems.
The major disadvantage with this research and development in the UK was that hand-written shorthand was much more popular than machine shorthand, and there was a shortage of operators: until POSSUM re-introduced it, there had been no training available for many years. In contrast Stenography is very popular in the U.S.—there are a number of companies producing training courses, machines, and CAT systems. Thus, as the availability of cheap portable computers which could host a full dictionary based CAT system became available, POSSUM’s marketing edge in the field of supporting deaf people was removed and stenographic transcription, supported by a large technical base in the U.S., began to become available in the UK.
Support from potential customers is not a pre-requisite for successful research.
At the time of applying for the grant, we did not have support from potential users (other than Jack Ashley), but the Research Councils at that time did not demand proof of commercial viability, and we were awarded a Science Research Council Grant “Simultaneous translation of machine shorthand for the deaf” (1977/79). With this funding we produced a prototype which worked in realistic environments, and also spent much time and effort in selling the idea to potential user groups, neither of which activities are “academic”, and which tend to be squeezed out when University funding is reduced.
2.7 THE NEED FOR LUCK, FAITH, TIME, AND EFFORT
The Palantype Transcription story is the story of success being based on the results of what could be considered to be failures [Newell, A., 1988a], and had the following challenges:
• Although originally a great success and a very well designed system, Palantype Machine Shorthand never became very popular in the UK, and from the 1960’s had begun to decline.
• The NPL work on CAT for Palantype had not led to a commercial product.
However, although automatic speech recognition systems only became commercially viable some 30 years after the research reported above, my knowledge of this area prompted me to investigate machine shorthand.
Success can be produced from commercial failures.
The project required:
• a great deal of luck. A chance meeting with an MP and an excellent undergraduate student who produced the first prototype;
• a great deal of faith;
• financial support for untried ideas which had little support from potential users;
• time available for “academically” non-productive work including: marketing the idea, liaising with potential users, investigating companies and negotiating licenses;
• technical developments to produce a “pre-production” system that worked in real environments, rather than research leading to a proof of concept laboratory prototype; and
• acceptance of restrictions on publication due to commercial confidentiality.
It is interesting to speculate how difficult it would be to achieve this within the context of Universities in the 21st Century. Would there be time in an academics diary to do these essential, but academically un-productive aspects of a project of this nature? Would it be possible to obtain funding for an idea which had such a narrow focus, and no support (from the Lord Chancellor’s Office) for the wider ramifications of the idea? An “Impact Statement” (as is now required by UK research councils) which reflected this reality would likely be seen as rather weak.
Another unanticipated spin-off from this research was a project supported by an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council into Automatic Speech Recognition. We used Palantype Machine Shorthand Transcription in a “wizard of oz” simulation of a “listening typewrite” to examine human factors aspects of a “listening typewriter” [Newell et al., 1991b].
2.8 COMMERCIAL AVAILABILITY
A range of portable communication aids for speech-impaired people are now available, including the Lightwriter, and are best seen at the commercial exhibitions associated with the biennial Conferences of the International Society of Augmentative and Alternative Communication. Machine shorthand transcription for hearing-impaired people is now routinely available in the UK using both Palantype and Stenograph systems.
CHAPTER 3
TV Subtitling for Hearing-Impaired People
A chance request led to an investigation on how to subtitle television for hearing-impaired people. This covered both the style of captioning that was most appropriate, and the development of efficient systems producing captions both for live and recorded programmes.
3.1 MOVING INTO THE FIELD
In the early 1970s, a lecturer in television engineering from a further education college approached me to ask if he could do an external Ph.D. Display technology had reached the state where it would be possible to create alphanumeric characters from ASKII code reasonably cheaply, so I suggested that he investigate the possibilities of “closed captions”—that is, subtitles which only appear on a set especially adapted/adjusted to display them. He rejected my suggestion of