DEAF CON [ Copy of t=13487 ]

[Knollgrass]

Re: DEAF CON

Sounds amazing to be honest!

Ok that gives me some good perspective. The priorities of the interpreters (at least certified ones) would be lecture sessions. All of the village and events where the interpreting is not continuous could be served by 'floating' interpreters who are called upon when needed. You could augment those interpreters with signing volunteers or interpreting students (they love opportunities to volunteer) that are under the supervision of the lead interpreters. This kind of setup would be really scaleable depending on how many people come.

Do we have any way of knowing what sessions or things people go to? Or is it a 'go where ever you want' kind of thing?

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: DEAF CON

So I've got to ask. Are there more small sessions and roving around talking to people or main big sessions that lots of people sit in on? I know about capture the flag, are there other games/hackathons events that go on and what are those like? Please forgive me for not knowing more.

some of the best hands-on learning happens in smaller sessions, specifically the teaching Villages.

there are small rooms (well, smaller than the talk tracks... they hold about 200 people) that are topic-specific. Lockpicking, Hardware Hacking (soldering and circuits), Wireless (WiFi, radio, mobile phones), and most likely this year there will also be Tamper Technologies (security seals and tamper-evident bypassing).

All of these "Villages" operate on basically the same model, which was inspired by the original Lockpick Village back in Europe at the hacker summer camps. the motto of these rooms is "Learn, Touch, Do!"

Mini-lessons and specific lectures are given routinely throughout the day. Often "intro" style talks are frequently repeated and specialized topic areas get focus in-between these sessions. But more than direct instruction is the hands-on experimenting. Lots of example hardware, mini projects, and workshop tools are littered around tables. People can go from learning about something to trying it themselves often in under an hour.

I anticipate that this environment will surely benefit from interpreter help, but here is where even casual ASL signers could make a real impact. The slower pace and learn-as-you-go atmosphere has historically allowed lots of people with different language backgrounds to sit in, if they are accompanied by a friend or relative who can help with interpretation.

I haven't put anything formal together yet, but i predict that we will use Lady Merlin and other people who sign fluently but not always at a technical interpreter level for the Lockpick Village mini-lessons. Something straightforward, with plenty of pauses for quick questions, repeated often... that's likely to be a cool interpreting task. And we'll almost certainly post on the schedule which sessions will have an ASL signer present. I predict two or three per day, most likely.


So, yeah... that's an example of a non-talk-track where ASL would come in handy. The CTF is really not likely going to need interpreting help, except if someone asks "why is there a person going crazy in this huge video showing on the wall? is he wearing a huge condom?!" (to which the response would be, "Yeah, but it's ok. He's German.")


Contests and casual fun around the con will be awesome for people either with or without ASL interpreting, because so many happenings are massively visual. (I.E. - beer cooling contraption contest, scavenger hunt antics, etc)

And don't forget the DEFCON Shoot... heh, aside from the intro safety briefing (where i'll have Lady Merlin interpret) the rest of that whole affair is easier on people with no hearing! *


* i had to make that joke because it was too easy... but did you know that many Deaf people are just as sensitive to loud sounds as the hearing community? it's true. just because they do not have the faculty of functional language-capable hearing, it does not mean they are able to waltz through loud areas without discomfort. #TheMoreYouKnow

[Knollgrass]

Re: DEAF CON

So let us assume that we get everyone onboard and we have the initial interpreter volunteers. The next logical step is to think about how to spread the the word to Deaf software engineers and such. There are several options depending on where Defcon's leaders want go with this. So I'll outline a couple of ways I think it could be done.

Start Small: Beta test the first year
Shoot for minimal interpreter coverage to get the main session available to Deaf people. Would take 2 interpreters. NO major marketing push or branding such as DEFCON + DEAF-CON. Just word of mouth to known (partially famous) Deaf engineers from Google to the Gov. Get 2-5 Deaf people to come. Use the first year as a test of interest and what it's like having interpreters in the mix. Conservative and wouldn't require as much commitment. Lays the foundation for the next year.

Modest attempt
Plan from the beginning to moderately advertise and expect a higher turnout by contacting the major hubs of Deaf engineering talent and universities like Rochester Institute of Technology (lots of Deaf people go there for tech degrees). Depending on the turnout, more interpreters would be needed for relief between sessions as well as being on the floor for breakout sessions or booths (someone will have to fill me in on some of the finer details about how the days go at the conference). Could cost a little more money but also opens up the opportunity for organizations like the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) or NTID-National Technical Institute for the Deaf (part of Rochester) to sponsor an interpreter. Unless DEFCON doesn't take sponsors which in that case, not a good suggestion and I apologize for uttering blasphemous things.

Balls to the wall
Lastly, DEFCON could take this up as a branded part of DEFCON with the plan to do it every year and go all out in trying to get people to come. This would bring a lot of cool attention to the conference but is higher risk if it doesn't work out as expected. But it has the potential of becoming the springboard for making the conference multi-lingual in the future and not being just for ASL/Deaf people.

So I've got to ask. Are there more small sessions and roving around talking to people or main big sessions that lots of people sit in on? I know about capture the flag, are there other games/hackathons events that go on and what are those like? Please forgive me for not knowing more.

[Knollgrass]

Re: DEAF CON

Deviant is absolutely right on both accounts.

Regardless of whether we pull Deaf Con off this year, there will always be the potential for a Deaf person to register out of nowhere and put the staff/goons in a bind. And regardless of my personal beliefs about the ADA (not a big fan of forcing people to pay me) it's still the law and nobody wants trouble. Plus anytime something is done 'reactionary' to a problem it always costs more and brings resentment for the people who caused the problem.

That's why I consult all of the Businesses whom I work with to have a strategy and a small budget for interpreting services. The strategy can be stupid simple and the budget $100/yr small but the fact that you have a strategy turns a potentially chaotic things into something routine. Plus you save a lot of money in the long run. With volunteers you can save even more. Just from talking to a few of my friends shows me how much people like the idea.

And besides... it's just way cooler if you refer to someone with the word 'terp. It sounds like you are about to help them hop into an armor-plated HMMWV and go speak to some local people in a farming village somewhere in rural Tajikistan.

We'll make sure to bring battle armour! Yeah it's a peeve of interpreters to be called translators. We like to think what we do is harder. If you did some of the mental health interpreting I do you would agree =).

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: DEAF CON

i feel that i should make two key points very clear at this time in the thread...


1. Legal matters

The ADA laws concerning accessibility and assistive technologies or services is pretty concrete on matters like this. If a person or persons who are, for example, deaf or hard of hearing make an official request to an entity, the ADA kicks in and there are very specific provisions that go along with all of that.

Right now we are all just folk talking on a message board. Among friends, this is a casual "what if" conversation. If someone reaches out to DEFCON proper, however... and if they say "i am deaf and i need an interpreter" then things get a lot stickier. There are rules. There are union matters. There are money matters.

The ADA and public funding can cover minor things and smaller affairs, but for an institution who is financially able to pay for interpretive services themselves (and i am not DEFCON staff, so i don't know the books, but we can all assume that DEFCON would have that budget) then they are legally obligated to do all that.

So, please bear that in mind when we have this discussion. I am not a lawyer, but i'm fairly confident that as long as we are all just talking among friends and speaking in hypotheticals here on the forums, The Man isn't going to come down on Jeff's offices with a list of demands.

But those who know better are likely to look into that so that we all stay on ok ground, legally.

That said, there is utterly no law which states that a person is not allowed to interpret for a friend or group of friends at a public gathering. As long as you're not disruptive to the people around you, private citizens can speak among each other (and in this case, friends or family could interpret for whomever is nearby) and that's legally fine. No ADA provisions, no legal obligations or standards or unions


2. Terminology

in a nutshell... Interpreter != Translator ...they are two different services and "interpreting" is not the same thing as "translating" so I hope that we can all keep the definitions straight.

An interpreter does their job in the here and now. Whether they are doing Simultaneous Interpretation or Consecutive Interpretation, they are in the presence of both parties who are communicating: both speaker and audience. Many times, interpreters have to think on their feet and "play" with the statements being uttered in order to help each party properly get certain jokes or cultural references.

A translator (usually) does their job away from the action. Often, statements and language are already written out and then this person's job is to transcribe them into another language, paying particular attention to exacting detail. In these cases, cultural context and idioms and such are often lost.

The most popular way of summarizing this: an interpreter "listens" and "speaks" while a translator reads and writes. (And i realize that this is an imperfect turn of phrase, given that interpreters for the deaf who work in ASL aren't "speaking" per se, but the Deaf and HoH community isn't generally put out by such generalizations.)

So, eventhough often people mix up these two terms (indeed, if you look at some of my initial posts in this thread, you'll see that even i was careless with the titles a couple of times) what we are talking about for DEFCON is interpreting.

And besides... it's just way cooler if you refer to someone with the word 'terp. It sounds like you are about to help them hop into an armor-plated HMMWV and go speak to some local people in a farming village somewhere in rural Tajikistan.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: DEAF CON

I think this is really great, man... and having you offer to volunteer is really wonderful. It's what the spirit of the hacker community and DEFCON in general is all about.

We would still likely crowd-source some funds in order to cover your travel out to DEFCON. You said you're in D.C. so plane flights would be happening. Hell, maybe even someone would pay for this in miles if they can donate some? (Unless you were really hoping to earn miles yourself for the trip... i'm like that, i know, so i couldn't begrudge you!)

We'll stay in touch about all this and we're really thankful for the offer.

[Knollgrass]

Re: DEAF CON

Hey everyone.

My friend, who's an avid Defcon goer, told me about this thread and I thought I would weigh in.

I happen to be a Nationally Certified ASL/English interpreter with a bit a tech background. I've got several years of interpreting for Electrical and Computer engineering under my belt. So this is my kind of thing to jump in on.

I told Deviant over an email that for starters you'll need at least two interpreters to cover the main sessions and depending on the number of Deaf people who are interested, scale up if needed. One of the previous posters noted the cost of getting interpreters. Yes, we are expensive so you're best bet is rallying interpreters who are dedicated to getting talented Deaf coders involved with some of these great conferences.

I would be stoked to volunteer and my best friend from college (also a tech interpreter) could be roped into volunteering.

The next question would be, outreach?

Thanks for letting me post guys.

[g3k_]

Re: DEAF CON

hah. my g/f's brother went there. just graduated this past term. he's the one who's been on facebook and other communication circles with all his friends working on the questions of how our community's terminology translates to ASL. ;-)

Yeah, she hit me up last night after I posted lol.

My GF isn't comfortable with technology, but she also has a network of interpreters she can communicate with if there are any questions and get back to me. Even if we start this year with 1 deaf person in attendance, we can raise awareness for the next year and engage the interpreter community some more. I'm gonna check on Reddit to see if there is a subreddit (probably is, there is one for everything) dedicated to interpreters and direct them here for input.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: DEAF CON

school in Rochester called the RTID (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationa...e_for_the_Deaf), a part of RIT, perhaps this would be a really good resource to reach out to.

hah. my g/f's brother went there. just graduated this past term. he's the one who's been on facebook and other communication circles with all his friends working on the questions of how our community's terminology translates to ASL. ;-)

[TheCotMan]

Re: DEAF CON

I have a somewhat related problem. I'm a college professor and use many, many DEFCON videos in my Computer Security class. I'm in Ontario, Canada. Starting next year, any videos that I use must have closed-captioning or I can't use it (regardless of whether anyone in my class actually needs it or not). I've been agonizing over how I'll accomplish this. The solution just suggested (captioning on the fly for hearing-impaired attendees) would also solve my problem and make the videos much more accessible.

Anyone that wants to can make their own CC or "subtitles" for AVI videos and then play them with many modern video players. This is often done with a frame count as an index, though some subtitles can be done with a time index. For these modern video players, just having the name of the subtitle file match the name of the video file but instead of ending with "avi" end with ".sub" is enough for the video player to make subtitles available.

There is a newer video container that ends with ".mkv" (Matroska) which allows you to include in one file:
* A Video
* Multiple Audio tracks for multiple languages and/or directors commentary
* Multiple subtitles for many languages

The effort needed with ".mkv" is greater, and it is not as compatible as an AVI with common codecs.

There are also tool for desktop machines that make adding subtitles like this in .sub files easier.

However, if you are a *nix person, and don't like paying anyone for anything, it is possible to use mplayer and mencoder with the codec libs and some programming:
* Use mplayer to find the total number of frames in the .avi file
* Use your coding "fu" to generate a bunch of indexed values, one per line at about 90 frames apart with a 10 frame gap between indexed values, and the only text for each as the indexed value for the frame being used to trigger subtitle display. (An example of a one-liner in bash/sh is at the bottom of this post.)
* Save this file, and then play the movie with those subtitles
* As people say things, pause the video and type what they say along with the frame index about where it happened.
* resume play and continue to mark this information
* Now back-fill all of the words you found into the right index times based on when the words came up and you saw the indexed value.
* Now, replay the video, and use an editor to adjust the timing of your frames, and save.
* Repeat the last step as many times as you want to approach perfection.

Today, with the quality of voice recognition from google, it is probably possible to get a relatively good spech-to-text from most films by using google's services. Heck, it may even be possible to have a display that captures speakers at defcon live, and prints their text on screen by using an internet-based service like that from google... this would require reliable internet access, and though our network volunteers are good at keeping the network up, there is always some jerk that thinks DoS is "leet" (elite.)

Once you have a subtitle file, if you want it to be even more portable, you can use many features in "mencoder" to have it "play" the video with the subtitles as part of the video and save the resulting video+subtitles into a new avi, which can then be played anywhere that you can play AVI with the codecs used to make it. (Obviously, this means the subtitles are burned into the video and you can't turn them off, and trying to play other subtitles on top of subtitles burned into video will suck.)

Example code written for bash:

for i in `seq 0 1800` ; do j=$((100*i)) ; k=$((j+90)) ; echo -e "{$j}\t{$k}\t Frame: $j" ; done > /tmp/my-filename.sub 2> /dev/null

That would create a subtitle file with indexes that start every 100 frames, play for 90 frames, have a 10 frame wait before playing the next frame for a file with 180000 frames.

Again, there is likely software "out there" that you can buy to help you with this, and if there is a tool that can hook into google's voice recognition online, you could have it make a rough pass for you at transcribing it, so you can edit it after you have it in text format.

(If you want to talk about subtitles, feel free to start another thread in /dev/random. I do not want to highjack this thread. If you reply to this one, and only comment about subtitles and not the topic, I'll fork off a copy of this post, and move your reply with this to /dev/random for you.)

[OM5]

Re: DEAF CON

I have a somewhat related problem. I'm a college professor and use many, many DEFCON videos in my Computer Security class. I'm in Ontario, Canada. Starting next year, any videos that I use must have closed-captioning or I can't use it (regardless of whether anyone in my class actually needs it or not). I've been agonizing over how I'll accomplish this. The solution just suggested (captioning on the fly for hearing-impaired attendees) would also solve my problem and make the videos much more accessible.

[ButterSnatcher]

Re: DEAF CON

Just an idea, what about just having someone from community volunteer to caption out the video feed ? There are some pretty quick typer's out there and im sure it would be a lot easier then trying to sign language out everything. I work at a community college teaching technology and with a deaf student, and i noticed during even fairly basic tech talk there was a lag mainly because some of the words im guessing don't have a sign for them. Because of that for our lessons they need them in advance so they can than figure out what to use. This would add risk to the talks that are more sensitive in nature and don't want them being exposed early.

[g3k_]

Re: DEAF CON

Deviant, we spoke briefly on this on Twitter, but it looks like most of my GF's feedback has been covered here anyway. She also recommends finding someone who is a nationally certified.

After discussing it with her, she told me an example from why signing technical terms is somewhat of an issue. She interprets for HS and is mostly trained in ASL, though she knows SEE. There was a boy trying to sign "flash drive" in SEE, by spelling flash and then signing the literal "drive", as in driving a car. A lot of signs, as you know, include a lot of intentions and context in a conversation. Using the "drive" sign (it's literally holding your hands up as if you were mock driving) in describing a flash drive, it was not understood right away.

Volunteers would be the best way to accomplish this, but there is a challenge there. Even if we have SOs/friends/family that knows ASL, they could be not familiar with technical terms and the culture in general. If this is the route that's ultimately decided, some primer document would probably be a good idea, with resources that cover signs relating to the industry.

I also just remembered something, but I'm too lazy to fit it neatly into the post. She also mentioned that there is a technical school in Rochester called the RTID (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationa...e_for_the_Deaf), a part of RIT, perhaps this would be a really good resource to reach out to. They don't appear to have a Infosec program directly at the school, but they could have electives (I didn't dig too much) http://www.ist.rit.edu/

[arose4beni]

Re: DEAF CON

This is a great idea. I would gladly donate to have interpreters or close captioning for talks. I'd also be interested in learning ASL myself. It is something I have always wanted to learn and can be useful in my field.

[TheCotMan]

Re: DEAF CON

wow. do you recall how long ago that might have been? what hotel was DEFCON at during that time?

It was not Defcon 5. The first I saw people providing sign language on stage with a speaker was probably around Defcon 6 or 7. Whichever year I saw it for the first time, I saw it in more than one presentation, but not all presentations. After that year, I only saw it in one presentation, and that presentation was delayed because they were trying to find someone to sign for it.

If it also helps, and my memory is fuzzy on this part, I seem to recall them standing on the far left of the stage in the room I was in. I do not remember anyone signing during Hacker jeopardy, or other late-night events.

Again, I don't know the story for why it happened, or why is stopped. Best guess is someone had the skill and offered to provide services for certain presentations, and then was no longer available, or was occupied in future years.