Synote: Accessible and assistive technology enhancing learning for all students

Abstract

Although manual transcription and captioning can increase the accessibility of multimedia for deaf students it is rarely provided in educational contexts in the UK due to the cost and shortage of highly skilled and trained stenographers. Speech recognition has the potential to reduce the cost and increase the availability of captioning if it could satisfy accuracy and readability requirements. This paper discusses how Synote, a web application for annotating and captioning multimedia, can enhance learning for all students and how, finding ways to improve the accuracy and readability of automatic captioning, can encourage its widespread adoption and so greatly benefit disabled students. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.