Posts Tagged ‘BSL’

Captioning BSL videos

Friday, November 6th, 2009
Video of a woman signing

Screenshot of a BSL video

Some of you will know about my project to get British Sign Language content on our corporate website. For the background to this, see the original business case and my experiences in the studio filming the videos.

Last week I got the BSL videos from our audio/visual unit, with all the audio editing complete, bringing us a step closer to getting them online. All I needed to do was add the captions and run them past our BSL expert one more time, to make sure nothing had been lost in translation.

With impeccable timing, Henny Swan blogged about captioning earlier today so I’d encourage people to read her post too as I’ll be referring to her findings here as well.

More about captioning videos

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Filming web content in BSL

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
Camera and bluescreen set-up

Camera and bluescreen set-up

I’ve just got back from a busy day filming BSL videos – simple, short clips of a person signing key content taken from the website. For the whys and wherefores, see my previous post on Deaf Awareness Week and BSL videos online. In a nutshell, many users have BSL as their first language, with written English being their second language. Offering content in the form of a BSL video takes this into consideration, showing that we are aware of the needs of these users and ensuring they have optimised access to information offered online.

Preparations and requirements

Before the day I prepared five scripts, taken from key pages on our website. It was my estimation that each video would last between 90 and 180 seconds. The idea was to identify content that was high-level enough not to need regular updating – i.e. an overview of a particular service with contact information and maybe a weblink to further info. These were then passed to our signer to read through and prepare the BSL.

read more about filming the BSL videos

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Deaf Awareness Week and BSL video online

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

This week (4th – 10th May 2009) is Deaf Awareness Week. This year’s theme, “Look At Me”, aims to:

improve understanding of the different types of deafness by highlighting the many different methods of communication used by deaf, deafened, deafblind and hard of hearing people, such as sign language and lipreading.

Deaf Awareness Week website – www.look-at-me.org.uk

For a while now I’ve been working on a business case to pilot a project, offering key content from our website in the form of video of a British Sign Language interpreter. The following is an extract from that business case, explaining why such content could be valuable:
(more…)

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