The Disability Information and Resource Centre

Non-profit disability employment agency Nova Employment is holding a short film competition. Entries will focus on the ability of people with a disability.

There are three categories:

• Open entrant (open to anybody, of any age, anywhere in the world) – winner receives $5000 in prize money, runner-up receives $1500.
• Australian Schools – winning school receives $5000, runner-up receives $1500.
• Individual (for Australian school students) – winner receives $1500, runner-up receives $500.

Videos will be uploaded to the website on July 12 and viewers can vote online for their favourite video. Ten voters chosen at random will win an Apple iPod.

The video with the most online votes in each category will be declared the winner. Entries close June 30 2010.

Focus on Ability website: www.focusonability.com.au/default.asp

The Specials is an internet broadcast ‘docusoap’ about five friends with learning difficulties who share a house together. All the currently released episodes are viewable on their website.

The Specials were recent winners at the 14th annual Webby Awards.

YouTube’s parent company Google has announced on its blog that automatic captions are
to begin to roll out across the site.

The machine-generated captions will initially be generated in English. At first they will only be found
on 13 channels including National Geographic, Columbia, as well as most Google and YouTube channels.

The software engineer behind the technology, Ken Harrenstien, is deaf.

Currently YouTube offers a manual captioning service but video makers tend not to use it.

“The majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me,” Mr
Harrenstien wrote in the Google blog. His solution combines automatic speech recognition with the current caption system.

The translation is not always perfect (in a demonstration the phrase “sim card” becomes “salmon” in
text), but Mr Harrenstien says that the technology “will continue to improve with time”.

Alternatively users can upload a transcript of their video and auto-timing algorithms will match the
text to the words as they are spoken.

Vint Cerf, vice president at Google, is widely recognised as a founding father of the internet. He is
also hard of hearing and has worn a hearing aid since the age of 13.