Television, film and digital media are important cultural experiences that help shape and define society. Exclusion from these experiences may present a barrier to wider participation in society. While video description of pre-recorded content (e.g., movies, many TV programs, etc.) is becoming more common, video description of live programming (e.g., news, improvisational theatre, etc.) has received little attention and very few examples are available to illustrate its feasibility. We present a tool, LiveDescribe, which enables the production of real-time video description for on-line broadcasts. LiveDescribe includes features such as two-button operation, and automatic detection of silent periods that enable it to be used by a single operator. Initial feedback from describers about the usability of LiveDescribe is relatively positive but they found the task of live description difficult. The cognitive load imposed by the real-time aspect of describing tasks is high and may lead to high error rates.
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