Ferry system unveils captioning plans
At a recent Seattle meeting of interested organizations, Washington State Ferries explained how it intends to convert its public-address announcements made on its vessels and at its terminals into text form, then to display those announcements to make them accessible to patrons with hearing loss.
The basic system will be modeled after the system used at San Francisco Airport, where all gate information and passenger pages are displayed in text on some 80 screens visible throughout the airport. Here are the notes from that meeting, as compiled by WSF.
The San Francisco Airport has a central communications center, where all messages originate. That allows the messages to be dictated by a very few speakers, which enables the information to be transcribed into text using a software program, without any additional human input. Because the WSF messages will originate on the individual vessels, a centralized system may not work in this application. WSF is therefore thinking about how to standardize the messages in such a way that vessel crews only have to type in the specifics, like the license number of a car or the name of a person.
The feedback from representatives of organizations that serve people with hearing loss was overall quite favorable, although people with both hearing and vision impairments noted that the proposed system could still leave some access gaps.
After evaluating feeback from the user groups, WSF will formulate a Request For Proposals, and follow state purchasing requirements to obtain and install a captioning system on the Bainbridge vessels and at the Seattle and Bainbridge terminals for a six-month trial. If the system performs satisfactorily, it will then be installed system-wide.
There are too many unknowns to predict with any certainty when the systems will be installed. The target to install the test system is the latter half of 2010.
WSF is undertaking this effort to resolve a lawsuit brought against it by the Washington State Communication Access Project, which alleged that WSF was violating the Washington State Law Against Discrimination by failing to communicate effectively with hearing-impaired patrons. After the suit was filed, the Attorney General's office worked smoothly with Wash-CAP to come to an agreed order implementing the communications improvements.
Washington State Ferries is the nation's largest ferry system, carrying some 26 million passengers annually. Assuming the prevalence of hearing loss among WSF passengers is similar to that in the nation as a whole, as many as 4 million passengers will benefit from a system-wide implementation of the agreement.
