Augmenting Social Media Accessibility

Roberto Borrino, Marco Furini, Marco Roccetti

matrixbob@tin.it Department of Computer Science, University of Piemonte Orientale, Italymarco.furini@unimore.itDepartment of Social Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italyroccetti@cs.unibo.itDepartment of Computer Science, University of Bologna, Italy

Hello everybody!

Why Social Media?Communication Media

Built on the set of Internet technologies grouped under the label Web 2.0

Provide new opportunities for sharing and discussing information among human beings

Change the way communication, collaboration, interaction, and information are consumed and produced

Social Media

Social Media Landscape

Decentralized, user friendly, and easily sharable for the average citizen. Mainly based on Web 2.0 technologies and include blogs, vblogs, podcast, SMS, video communication, social networks, wikies, …

Social Media

Social Media Popularity

Top Sites

Alexa source (April 17, 2009)

1. Google2. Yahoo!3. YouTube4. Facebook5. Windows Live6. MSN7. Wikipedia8. Blogger.com9. Myspace

10. Baidu Social Media will overtake traditional media

Social Media Accessibility

There is a widening generation gap between adolescents growing up with social technology and adults who find it foreign and unsettling

Amanda GefterLiving online: This is your space New Scientist, September 2006

Most social media are mainly designed for people without any limitation either geographical, physical, economical or technological

it is necessary to augment social media accessibility. Social media should be available to the largest possible audience

SOMFA: Social Media For All

SOMFA focuses on: making social media available through

mass-media TV (and not only through the Web, as the Web can be a burden for a part of the society)

adapting social media contents so as to offer a multi-modal (i.e., aural and visual) content presentation

SOMFA provides a multi-modal presentation of social media contents (aural and visual) and organizes such contents in order to be

displayed on TV sets

SOMFA: Portability

SOMFA can be used to augment the accessibility of any social media, provided that social media contents are available in

Web syndication formats

Instead of focusing on specific social media, SOMFA relies on standards used to keep people

update, i.e. the Web syndication formats (RSS and ATOM)

Designed to be as portable as possible

SOMFA Architecture

Crawlerfind and download

Minerextract and filter

Codertext2speech, resize, resampling

Web Syndacation Feeds

Atom #1 Atom #N RSS #1 RSS #M

Media File linked in Feeds

Feeds

List

Producerlayout AVS script

Media filesMedia files

MPEG a/vRSS 2.0

ATOM 1.0

Media urls

SOMFA: the Crawler

Crawler task Find and download Web contents specified

in the feed list The list of feeds represents the interests of

the user Download possible multimedia contents that

are linked in the downloaded feeds

SOMFA: the Miner Miner task:

Parse all the feeds downloaded by the crawler Extract information contained in the feeds Extract information of where to locate

multimedia contents (e.g., pictures, audio, or video) and pass them to the crawler module for actual downloading

SOMFA: the Miner

Feed

Entry

Author

Category

Icon

Title

Summary

Published

Author

SourceLogo

Rigths

Title

Link

Category

Channel

Title

Description

Link

Item

Title

Description

PubDate

Enclosure

AuthorLanguage

Copyrigth

Image

Link

Source

SOMFA: the Coder

Coder task: avoid the creation of new ostracism forms

with regards to users with physical disabilities, who are unable to (fully) enjoy social media

transcode text-based information (title and description) of any news into vocal form

use an external text-to-speech software module to produce the vocal form

resize the downloaded pictures if the resolution goes beyond 384x288 (i.e., the portion of the TV screen that will be used to display images)

SOMFA: the Coder

Why an external module to do text-to-speech? To enhance portability and customization It is possible to use opensource software

(e.g., text2speech, Festival Speech Synthesis System), or commercial products (e.g., Loquendo tts)

Currently, the DSpeech freeware software is used

SOMFA: the Producer

Producer task: Organization of downloaded and transcoded

contents so as to watch them on TV Production of an audio/video MPEG stream Production of an AVS script

SOMFA: the Producerto p = ImageReader(file="top_parser.png", start=0, end=985, fps=25).ConvertToYV12()bo ttom = Ima geReader(file="bottom_parser.png", start=0, end=985, fps=25).ConvertToYV12()

########## Multimed ia ma terial associated with the news ##########e0 = ImageReader(file=".\data\canale1\stor_12416348_55180.jpg",\\ start=0, end=985, fps=25).LanczosResize (384, 288).C onvertToYV12()

########## News Title ##########V = Subtitle(top, """Blog di Beppe Grillo\nLa guerra a i delfini di Capoverde""", \\ x=5, y=5, first_frame=0, last_frame=985, font="Arial", size= 30, text_color=$ff9854, lsp=10)A = WavSourc e(".\data\tts\tts0.wav")to p_subs0 = AudioDub(V, A).ConvertToMono().SSRC(16000)

########## News text ##########side = ImageReader(file="side_parser.png", start=0, end=656, fps=25).Co nvertToYV12()side_subs0 = Subtitle(side, """Delfini sulla spiaggia a\nCapoverde. Oggi vi racconto\nattraverso le \\ parole di\n una ragazza di Capoverder una fa vola moderna. Il lupo\nnon c’è più,\\ al suo po sto\nci sono le basi nava li americane\ncon sotto marini nucle ari.\nE cappuccetto\\ Rosso no n è\nPutin, m a in questo caso,\n""", x=5, y=5, first_frame=0, la st_frame=656,\\ font="Arial", size=25, text_color=$e0e0e0, lsp=10)

FrameserverProducerlayout

AVS script

Audio/video file

SOMFA: the Producer

Feed and News Title

Image(up to 384x288)

Additionalinformation

News text(up to 10 rows)

768 pixel

576

pixel

SOMA: an example

SOMA: an example

SOMFA: Fields of Application

Richiesta

Audio/Video stream

SOMFA client DVB-T SOMFA client DVB-H

Request

SOMFA

SOMFA server

Audio/Video script

Conclusions

Augment social media accessibility

Transcode informationBring social media contents outside the Web

Contact Information

For any information, question or just for a comment, please, email me at:

marco.furini@unimore.it