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‘Did You See That!?’ Enhancing the Experience of Sports Media Broadcast for Blind People

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Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021 (INTERACT 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12932))

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Abstract

Accessibility in sports media broadcast (SMB) remains a problem for blind spectators who wish to socialize and watch sports with friends and family. Although popular, radio’s reliance on low bandwidth speech results in an overwhelming experience for blind spectators. In this paper we focused on two core issues: (i) how SMB can be augmented to convey diegetic information more effectively, and (ii) the social context in which SMB are consumed. We chose tennis broadcasts for our investigations. Addressing issue (i), we developed a system design and prototype to enhance the experience of watching tennis matches, focusing on blind spectators using audio descriptions and 3D audio, and evaluated our system with (n = 12) in a controlled user evaluation. Our results indicate how audio descriptions gave clear information for the tennis ball placements, 3D audio provided subtle cues for the ball direction, and radio provided desired human commentary. For issue (ii), we conducted an online questionnaire (n = 15) investigating the social context in which blind spectators consume SMB. Participant feedback indicated there is a demand for more accessible SMB content such that people can consume SMB by themselves and with their friends. Participants were enthusiastic for a revised system design mixing elements from 3D audio and audio description. We discuss our results in the context of social SMB spectatorship, concluding with insights into accessible SMB technologies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An image of the football pitch showing the demarcation of zones can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/1760579.stm.

  2. 2.

    https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-1811,00.html.

  3. 3.

    https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applicationservices/speech_synthesis_manager.

  4. 4.

    P3 and P11 indicated that they passionately follow sports.

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Acknowledgments

Cagatay Goncu is supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) grant DE180100057, and thanks the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University for their support. Daniel J. Finnegan thanks the School of Computer Science & Informatics at Cardiff University for their continued support. We also thank Tennis Australia, particularly the Game Insight Group members Machar Reid, Touqeer Ahson and Stephanie Kovalchik for their support, and finally Kate Stephens for providing insightful feedback during development.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Cagatay Goncu

  2. Tennis Australia, Melbourne, Australia

    Cagatay Goncu

  3. Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Daniel J. Finnegan

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  1. Cagatay Goncu
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Correspondence to Cagatay Goncu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo Ardito

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Rosa Lanzilotti

  3. Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Alessio Malizia

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK

    Helen Petrie

  5. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Antonio Piccinno

  6. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Giuseppe Desolda

  7. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Kori Inkpen

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Goncu, C., Finnegan, D.J. (2021). ‘Did You See That!?’ Enhancing the Experience of Sports Media Broadcast for Blind People. In: Ardito, C., et al. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021. INTERACT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12932. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85623-6_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85623-6_24

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