The Broadcasting Accessibility Fund Inc. (the Fund) is an independent and impartial funding body supporting innovative projects that provide solutions to promote the accessibility of all broadcasting content in Canada. The Fund will support projects that provide practical solutions to increase accessibility to broadcasting content and that, whenever possible, make use of inclusive design principles to promote accessibility at the earliest stages and in the most cost-effective manner for new technologies and applications in Canada.
Project Sponsor
Steering Committee
The Canadian Association of the Deaf-Association des Sourds du Canada (CAD-ASC) is the oldest national consumer organization of, by and for Deaf individuals in Canada for having its interests represented at national level.
James Roots, Executive Director of the Canadian Association of the Deaf, chairs the Project Steering Committee.
Founded in 1940, the Canadian Hearing Society (CHS) is a non-profit organization and the leading provider of services, products, and information that remove barriers to communication, advance hearing health, and promote equity for people who are culturally Deaf, oral deaf, deafened and hard of hearing.
The Canadian Hard of Hearing Association (CHHA) is a consumer-based organization formed by and for hard of hearing Canadians. CHHA works cooperatively with professionals, service providers and government bodies, and provides information about hard of hearing issues and solutions.
Bell Media owns 30 local television stations led by CTV, Canada’s #1 television network; 30 specialty channels, including TSN and RDS, Canada’s most-watched specialty channels in English and French; and four pay TV services, including The Movie Network and Super Écran.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, branded as CBC/Radio-Canada, is a Canadian public broadcaster for both radio and television. It is a federal Crown corporation funded by the government. The English- and French-language service units of the corporation are commonly known as CBC and Radio-Canada, respectively.
Rogers Sports & Media is a diverse sports and content company. Their multimedia offerings include 54 radio stations, 29 local TV stations, 23 conventional and specialty television stations, podcasts, digital and e-commerce websites, and sporting events. Their brands include: Citytv, TSC, CityNews, KiSS, Breakfast Television, Cityline, Sportsnet and the Blue Jays. Rogers Sports & Media is a subsidiary of Rogers Communications Inc.
National Captioning Canada provides real-time and off-line closed captioning and transcription services to broadcasters, webcasters, governmental bodies, productions houses and other organizations requiring real-time transcription services. National Captioning Canada boasts a large roster of professional closed captioners and captions hundreds of hours of sports, news, entertainment and political programming per week.
PAVO Digital is a Canadian software company developing state-of-the-art captioning software using AI and machine learning to support live captioners.
Project Team
Christie Christelis - Project Manager
Christie Christelis is President of Technology Strategies International, a technology market research, analysis and strategy firm focusing on information and communication technologies (ICTs). He is project manager for the live captioning research project.
Dr Deborah Fels - Expert Advisor
Dr. Fels has a Ph.D in Human Factors from Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. She is currently employed as a professor in the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management, and the Director of the Inclusive Media and Design Centre at Ryerson University. Her research interests involve inclusive design, access to media and technology for people with disabilities and older adults, inclusive video game design and inclusive business.
Pablo Romero Fresco - Expert Advisor
Pablo Romero Fresco is a Ramón y Cajal grantholder at Universidade de Vigo (Spain) and an Honorary Professor of Translation and Filmmaking at the University of Roehampton (London, UK). He is the author of the book Subtitling through Speech Recognition: Respeaking (Routledge) and the editor of The Reception of Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Europe (Peter Lang). He has collaborated with Ofcom in the UK, Ai-Media in Australia and CRTC/CAB in Canada, among other institutions, to introduce and improve access to live events and live television programming for people with hearing loss.
Dr Nazaret Fresno - Expert Advisor
Nazaret Fresno is Assistant Professor of Translation and Interpreting at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She holds a PhD in Translation and Cross-cultural Studies, an MA in Literary Translation and an MA in Audiovisual Translation. She has taught a variety of courses in Translation Technologies, Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility at several universities in Spain and the US, both at the undergraduate and at the graduate level. Her research, which has been published in a number of Translation scholarly journals, deals with Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility, mainly audio description for the blind and visually impaired, closed captioning and subtitling for deaf and hard of hearing.
Dr Maria Karam - Post Doctoral Fellow
Dr Karam received her PhD from the University of Southamption in human computer interactions, with a focus on sensory computing. Karam is also an entrepreneur, who has invented products for the accessibility market and owns an historic theatre in Toronto.