The Research Centre for Ambient Intelligence and Accessibility CAIAC at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona is pleased to announce the 4th International Symposium on Live Subtitling: Live subtitling with respeaking and other respeaking applications, to be held on March 12th 2013. This symposium will be the fourth in a series of symposiums on live subtitling and respeaking technology. Its predecessors were held at Forli, Barcelona and Antwerp respectively (see: www.respeaking.net). The symposium will bring together specialists from academia, software development, broadcasting and the service industry as well as consumers and others interested in cutting-edge developments in media accessibility.

Now consolidated as the preferred means of providing live subtitles on TV, respeaking is currently facing a number of challenges as European broadcasters struggle with new legislation and subtitling quotas as well as critical cuts in their budgets.  These challenges will shape the future of this relatively young translation mode and test its aim to make audiovisual media accessible for viewers with hearing loss. In countries where respeaking has been used for over a decade and where the quantity of live subtitling is no longer a problem, the issue of quality has become increasingly important, as has the application of respeaking to other contexts such as public events and classrooms. In those countries where respeaking is not yet being used or not used consistently, the further development of speech recognition technology plays a fundamental role.  Generally speaking, technological progress is bound to have a significant impact on the nature of respeaking in all contexts, not least with the potential introduction of speaker-independent speech recognition and automatic subtitling. Research in this area is more pertinent than ever. We therefore welcome contributions on the following topics as well as related issues:

-        Accuracy and delay in respeaking
-        Respeaking in contexts outside TV broadcasting
-        Respeaker training
-        Software development and training
-        Speaker-independent speech recognition and automatic subtitling
-        Reception research
-        Other areas related to respeaking