Mimolive Accessibility Features

We have a client who is concerned about accessibility features or techniques for people with disabilities in Mimolive. I looked through documentation and did an Internet search of “accessibility Mimolive” and didn’t come up with anything. Have you looked at how people with various disabilities can best interact with Mimolive, and whether any features can help them? I am wondering (as with Zoom) if a person who is deaf can see a sign language interpreter on their screen, even if not broadcast to the larger group (similarly for Spanish, French, etc. language interpretation), or what the status is on the integration of closed captioning, especially that done by a contracted professional rather than autocaptioning-- as was brought up in a prior thread. Thanks if you could let us know what Mimolive has in the way of accessibility features right now–as an important issue. Thank you!

Hi @MiniMattersEL Thanks for raising that important issue.

To be honest, accessibility features haven’t been at the top of our priority list so far.

Unfortunately, it isn’t very easy to add “accessibilty” to an app as the requirements are quite divers and depend on the user role. There is basic “accessibility” as provided by MacOS in the app itself. How usable it is, I don’t have any experience with.

So what can be done is:

  • You can add a sign language interpreter to the mimoCall return feed, but they will also be visible in what’s broadcast as you can not have a separate video feed for mimoCall yet.
  • You can have multiple language versions by creating separate audio mixes and creating multiple output destinations. In theory, you should also be able to create audio mixes for mimoCall callers with language translations, but I haven’t tried that yet.
  • Close captioning can be done “on screen”, meaning it will be rendered into the video. If you can find documentation on how to add close captioning to an h.264 stream, we will be very happy to implement it. I’ve been looking for a long time now.

Other than that, we will be happy to look at specific requirements.

@Oliver_Boinx you said “YET”… That sparked some hope in my heart. :grin: :+1:

It’s pretty high up on the wish list for mimoCall along with talkback.

@Oliver_Boinx Thanks for responding. Yeah, it did seem like this is not “right out of the box” easy with Mimolive, but it’s great to get clarity on where things stand. We’re not super technical, so we’re needing a little more ease of being able to do things. You did mention that closed captioning can be done “on screen” - what is the best way to go about this if a participant needed this? In Zoom, there are settings for captioning and one can use auto-captioning or assign a professional captioner that one hires.

Some Ideas:

  • On scripted shows, I’d suggest a prepared subtitle layer.

  • On not scripted or scripted shows without scripted text, I’d suggest a capturing of Google Transcripts App which is listening and transcripting all spoken live content, independently from the source (mimo Audio Out). The screen of the Smartphone could be captured with NDI or HDMI (also then cropped, maybe also with filtered out background) to overlay the live transcription. With a particular audio mix, you can make sure that the app listens only to live spoken content.

  • On not scripted shows—With a human live transcription—I’d suggest something like the spreadsheet data method, where spoken words can be written into a cell of a spreadsheet and pushed on screen by the use of some under the hood API commands: Spreadsheet Data

Notice:
If you use mimo to have something for post production, the transcription App can at least write everything down for you, which you afterwards can read in correctness to add it manually. Depending on the cut software you use, this is more or less convenient.

Sorry not to respond earlier to this - had not seen a ping. In this case, the client was looking for live captions in a livestream (which is not our main thing) and really to get at whether this platform had this built in and ready to go. Answer had to be no. I really appreciate how you laid out the different scenarios, including for a live captioner, which we sometimes have on our Zooms, as we work with deaf and hard of hearing people frequently–but use Zoom for that. Your analysis is so helpful always! (even if we can’t execute all that you can–it gives us a sense of what we’d need to do and we can then decide).

You’re welcome. Thank you very much for your feedback. :raised_hands:

Finally there is a more and more better working option:
Youtube and Facebook are offering live transcripts. This feature can be turned on at the settings for the video.

For German this does not work very well, but for English it’s good enough. :hugs:

Thank you again! For the YouTube live transcript, can that be done in Mimo? I think it may not be adequate to one of our key clients, who is hard of hearing and hires a captioner, as Zoom auto-generated captions are not good enough. BUT anyway, on a more positive topic, I’ve got MimoLive 6.0 working so nicely on Monterey and very happy about that. Really like the background removal and blur. And looking forward to using the stingers and more lower thirds options.

Live transcript by YT or facebook can be setup at youtube or facebook.

I would love for mimoLive to be fully accessible with VoiceOver for blind and low vision users.
Every element, button, dial, text box, etc. to be identified and read by Apple’s screen reader VoiceOver.
I will admit most elements are already in fact compatible. But there remains a few that do not.
@MiniMattersEL: Thank you for opening this thread and highlighting these needs.