The Broadcasting Accessibility Fund has tapped three new, innovative projects to receive a total of $350,718 in an effort to increase the accessibility of broadcasting content in Canada.

This is the eighth round of project grants from the independent and impartial funding body, which was created as part of the tangible benefits package associated with Bell Canada Enterprise’s acquisition of CTV.

Among the latest projects approved by the board of directors is CBC’s Optimization of Closed Captioning for Children with Disabilities, which will receive $107,467. The initiative aims to advance accessibility to content for children with disabilities across the age groups of two to six, six to 10, and 10 and 13.

The results will inform CBC’s accessibility strategy and be shared with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and other organizations that provide content for children with disabilities.

Getting $120,000 is the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf’s Accessible Sign Language Animation Prototype with Technical and Pedagogical Guidelines designed to Benefit Animation Companies and Broadcasters. The project aims to research and deliver an animated sign language character prototype model, applying motion capture technology, in order to explore ways to animate ASL movements.

The animation prototype project will also also deliver a publicly available best practices guide for accessible sign language animation for animation companies and broadcasters. Research findings will be shared with the animation industry and presented at key animation creator events.

The third project getting a grant of $123,251 is PAVO Digital’s Measuring Caption Quality for Automatically Generated Captions: NER and CAIS Comparative Evaluation, Enhancement and Integration. The initiative is intended to ensure that the CRTC-mandated method of live caption evaluation, known as the Canadian NER, presents accurate and fair results regardless of caption method.

The PAVO Digital project builds upon the previously funded NER Evaluator Project from Keeble Media and the Caption Quality Assessment Intelligent System or CAIS from Ryerson University by comparing and integrating those two captioning assessment tools.

In a statement, board of directors chair Marcia Yale said the latest projects are all “characterized by partnerships, transparency and broad dissemination of results, which are key elements of the fund’s grant program.”

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