Tel Aviv, 19 February 2024 – OOONA, a global provider of professional management and production tools for the media localisation industry, today announced its collaboration with the British Sign Language Broadcasting Trust (BSLBT). This ground-breaking partnership marks the start of a unique training initiative on OOONA’s educational platform, EDU, tailored to BSLBT’s cohort of deaf subtitlers.
BSLBT is a charitable organisation that commissions British Sign Language (BSL) programmes in various genres, creating role models for deaf children and young adults. Its multi-award-winning programmes are all in BSL and feature English subtitles, ensuring they are accessible to a broad audience. With a new change of management, BSLBT plans to take its subtitling provision to the next level.
OOONA EDU is a versatile cloud-based educational platform specifically designed for training in any type of audiovisual localisation task. It offers a wide array of professional courses in a variety of delivery formats, such as self-paced courses, workshops, lectures and webinars. The platform comes integrated with the Moodle open-source learning management system used by educational institutions worldwide for the creation of online courses. It also features the complete suite of OOONA Tools so users can practice subtitling, captioning, scripting and audio description tasks in a realistic working environment.
“The goal is to train a cohort of deaf BSL/English translators in the art of subtitling so we can continue to make sure our programming reaches everyone,” says Stephanie Burke, Production Executive at BSLBT. “Previously subtitles were created by hearing people but we are now giving deaf people the opportunity to become trained subtitlers. By adding English subtitles to our shows, we aim to share the fascinating and colourful deaf community and their experiences with the wider world.”
“I am thrilled to launch our revamped EDU platform with BSLBT as a collaborator, offering a course specifically designed for deaf users,” adds Wayne Garb, OOONA co-founder and CEO. “This initiative not only aligns with OOONA’s commitment to accessibility but also provides for an excellent opportunity to learn and evolve our software to better serve the needs of deaf users.”
BSLBT (www.bslzone.co.uk) is a charitable organisation set up in the UK in 2008, with Ofcom’s approval, to offer an alternative way for commercial broadcasters to meet their regulatory requirements to provide sign language on qualifying channels. With an equal number of trustees in the broadcasting world and the deaf community, BSLBT commissions television programmes made in BSL to address the UK’s deaf BSL users, all available to watch at any time on the BSL Zone website and app, as well as on Film4 and Together TV every Monday. Many of the programmes are also available on Sky VoD / NOW TV, and are showcased at film festivals around the world.
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