Tens of Millions Worldwide to Benefit from Highly-Accurate, Low-Cost, Captioning Services

HILLIARD, Ohio - April 12, 2016 - PRLog -- IDEAL Group, Inc. today announced that it was selected to develop the world's first commercial multi-lingual/dialect, speech-driven, real-time captioning service. This unique cloud-based service will offer tens of millions of consumers and organizations worldwide, low-cost captioning services that are impressively accurate.

Contributing to the accuracy of the captions is a "crowd-based" caption-correction feature. This feature enables any preapproved participant viewing the captions to correct captioning errors in real-time. According to Steve Jacobs, President of IDEAL Group, "All corrections are immediately integrated into the live caption feed for all to see. In addition, this feature drives the creation of highly accurate transcripts. These transcripts can be used to inexpensively close caption recorded events. This is a win-win for all stakeholders!"

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide who are deaf, hard-of-hearing, or deaf-blind are being disenfranchised because events they wish to participate in are not live captioned. A recent Johns Hopkins study (2012) cites 48 million people living with hearing loss in the USA alone. Worldwide this number skyrockets to more than 360 million consumers.

While American Sign Language (ASL) is a good option for some individuals, many people are unable to benefit from ASL. These individuals include late-deafened adults, individuals who lost their hearing early in life after acquiring speech, individuals who are deaf-blind, and individuals who are hard-of-hearing who never learned ASL.

Many small organizations who host webinars, online courses, and other types of events and meetings cannot afford to offer live captioning (CART) services. The reason is that CART services can be very costly, sometimes exceeding $125/hr. This new service is being designed to "fill this gap" by providing high-quality, low-cost, captioning services in instances where the use of professional CART services is not logistically, technically, or financially possible.

This new service will be exclusively managed and controlled by TDI (formerly Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Inc.) with the support of a $500,000 Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities grant.

Jacobs went on to say, "We are thrilled our company was selected to develop this unique, highly-advanced system and look forward to using our many years of development experience to the benefit of tens of millions of consumers in every corner of the world."

About IDEAL Group, Inc.
IDEAL Group, Inc. is a 2002 spin-off from IDEAL at NCR Corporation. IDEAL Group's mission is to "enhance the independence and quality of life of individuals with disabilities through the development of low/no-cost technology-based products and services." For a detailed history of IDEAL Group, Inc., please see http://ideal-group.org/history.