OTTAWA — The Broadcasting Accessibility Fund (the Fund) announced last week it will award $398,016 to three new projects, approved by its board of directors, that will advance the accessibility of Canadian broadcasting content.
“These three innovative projects represent the completion of the Fund’s eighth round of grants, with a total commitment of approximately $4.4M to date, to address gaps in broadcasting accessibility,” a press release explains.
The CBC is receiving $107,467 for a project designed to optimize closed captioning for children with disabilities. “This project aims to advance the current state of accessibility to content for children with disabilities across three age groups: 2-6; 6-10; and 10-13,” the release says. “The results will inform the CBC’s accessibility strategy and help determine what solutions and opportunities are available and create a more inclusive audience experience.”
All results from the project “will be shared with the CRTC and other organizations that provide content for children with disabilities, via a report of the research findings, a policy brief, and a web project page of all materials to be shared with others,” the release adds.
The Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf (CCSD) will receive $120,000 for an initiative that “will research and deliver an animated sign language character prototype model and publicly available best practices Technical and Pedagogical Guide for Accessible Broadcast Sign Language Animation,” leading to first such best practice guide for accessible sign language animation for animation companies and broadcasters, according to the release.
“The technical focus is to apply motion capture technology in order to explore ways to animate ASL movements. Research findings will be shared with the animation industry and would be presented at key animation creator events (e.g., the Toronto Animation Arts Festival, Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Ottawa International Animation Festival, Youth Media Alliance/Alliance Médias Jeunesse, SIGGRAPH and Kidscreen). The best practice guide will be made available on the CCSD website.”
PAVO Digital Inc. will receive $123,251 for a project that aims to compare and integrate two previously funded captioning assessment tools: the NER Evaluator (Keeble Media, round 4) and the Caption Quality Assessment Intelligent System or CAIS (Ryerson University, round 6). Through PAVO Digital’s project, these tools “would be advanced to reflect quantitative errors in addition to subjective Deaf/Hard of Hearing viewer perspectives, particularly for auto-generated captions. This project would ensure that the Canadian NER, the CRTC-mandated method of live caption evaluation, presents accurate and fair results regardless of caption method.”
The fund’s next call for Letters of Intent, the first step in the application process, will be announced in 2023.
Created in 2011 as part of the tangible benefits package associated with Bell Canada’s acquisition of CTV, the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund is an independent and impartial funding body that supports innovative projects to increase the accessibility of broadcasting content in Canada.
For more information, please click here.