As part of his push to help young Australians and their families living with a disability, Senator Mitch Fifield visited Red Bee Media Australia’s Sydney captioning facility on Wednesday the 20th July.

In March 2011, Senator Fifield co-sponsored a motion which called on the Government to provide funding for a pilot program of captioning services for Deaf and hearing impaired students in the classroom. This visit formed part of the Senator’s research into live captioning methods, applications and capabilities.

Red Bee Media’s Live Remote Captioning (LRC) service has been helping Deaf and hearing impaired students fully participate in university lectures for nearly 7 years.

LRC captures the lecturer’s words during a lecture, via a lapel or body-pack microphone, and transmits them ‘live’ to one of three captioning studios in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. This audio is converted to text by a specialist captioner.

The text is then streamed in real time via the Internet to a secure website, where the student can log on and access the text stream on their laptop computer, iPad or interactive whiteboard. As the lecturer speaks, the words appear on the laptop screen in real time.

The Senator took a tour of Red Bee Media’s live captioning department to gain insight into captioning methods such as respeaking and stenocaptioning, and also witnessed LRC live in action. A discussion with Red Bee Media staff and Senator Fifield was captioned live by a stenocaptioner, with a transcript of the meeting appearing on a web browser as it took place.

Chris Howe, Managing Director of Red Bee Media Australia comments, “It is great that Live Remote Captioning has been recognised as a viable option for classroom inclusion schemes. The Access Services industry has been providing the service for many years, continually investing in research and new technologies, and we are very excited at the prospect of it being implemented in classrooms across Australia.”

“Captioning technology is proven to deliver transformational results for students. This is the sort of support that could be purchased for students under the Coalition’s Education Card Policy which allows families to choose the services right for their child,” Senator Fifield said.

Red Bee Media’s Live Remote Captioning and On-Site captioning services are also used at conferences and events, and in corporate meetings.