The visible subtitler: Blockchain technology towards right management and minting.

Background: Subtitles are produced through different workflows and technologies: from fully automatic to human in open source web editors or in-house platforms, and increasingly through hybrid human-machine interaction. There is little agreement regarding subtitle copyright beyond the understanding that it is a derivative work. While same language verbatim subtitles may have little room for creativity, interlingual subtitling is heavily dependent on the subtitler skills to translate, prioritise, and condense information. These days creative subtitles are increasingly being used as one more aesthetic element in audiovisual narrative. Though they may be in the same language, the visual attributes that contribute to the narrative development make creative subtitles one more element that should be acknowledged and copyright protected. Methods: The paper will present a short introduction to subtitling copyright. It will then describe centralised and decentralised copyright management - where blockchain technology can be applied to aid subtitler identification. A focus group with expert professional subtitlers was organised, and feedback is reported. Conclusions: Subtitle copyright is country dependent, still subtitling working practices and media asset distribution have no geographical borders. Blockchain technology -as a concept- could aid subtitle traceability. This can be useful beyond financial and moral right management and work towards media sustainability, allowing for reuse and repurpose of existing media assets.

Toward a Sign Language-Friendly Questionnaire Design.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities requests "Nothing about us without us." User-centered methodological research is the way to comply with this convention. Interaction with the deaf community must be in their language; hence sign language questionnaires are one of the tools to gather data. While in the past interacting with an online video questionnaire was out of the question, today it is a reality. This article focuses on the design of an interactive video questionnaire for sign language users. From a historical review of the existing literature on research methods and previous sign language questionnaire, the article examines the design features affected in the process of making accessible questionnaires with sign language videos: format and layout. The article finishes with the solution developed toward mainstreaming sign language questionnaires in order to contribute to a diverse and inclusive society for all citizens.

Subtitle synchronization across multiple screens and devices.

Ambient Intelligence is a new paradigm in which environments are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. This is having an increasing importance in multimedia applications, which frequently rely on sensors to provide useful information to the user. In this context, multimedia applications must adapt and personalize both content and interfaces in order to reach acceptable levels of context-specific quality of service for the user, and enable the content to be available anywhere and at any time. The next step is to make content available to everybody in order to overcome the existing access barriers to content for users with specific needs, or else to adapt to different platforms, hence making content fully usable and accessible. Appropriate access to video content, for instance, is not always possible due to the technical limitations of traditional video packaging, transmission and presentation. This restricts the flexibility of subtitles and audio-descriptions to be adapted to different devices, contexts and users. New Web standards built around HTML5 enable more featured applications with better adaptation and personalization facilities, and thus would seem more suitable for accessible AmI environments. This work presents a video subtitling system that enables the customization, adaptation and synchronization of subtitles across different devices and multiple screens. The benefits of HTML5 applications for building the solution are analyzed along with their current platform support. Moreover, examples of the use of the application in three different cases are presented. Finally, the user experience of the solution is evaluated.