We are a still quite young team (first occurence at 30C3), with roots in the Selfnet e.V. from Stuttgart, and we try to do live subtitleing of the congress talks, as well as provide (more accurate) subtitles to the conference talks recordings afterwards.

For us, inclusion is an important goal and value of a civilized society and hacker culture. We want to improve accessibility for people by providing a written form of the content parallel to the talks.

This might not only help people with hearing impairments, but also those, that are non-natives of the language used in the talk and can also be the starting point for translated subtitles into other languages.

Last but not least is a transcription in the end a more than nice thing to have for future research, as we can provide machine-readability to the spoken content of the talks.

As we learned in the past, that live subtitles and the creation of subtitles for the recordings later have a completly different set of requirements, we distinguish clearly between those two steps and only try to reuse live subtitles for the recordings in individual cases.

During the talks we try to catch as much as possible of the spoken words (and sometimes actions) using live transcription in teams or using voice recognicition.

The output is available to everybody in real-time using the web interface (no more etherpads!) and on screens. For 32C3 we decided, to concentrate our efforts and limit live subtitles to rooms 1 and 2, but that enables us hopefully to provide better quality and more coverage there.

For more on this part of the project see use live subtitles.

If you want to support us at this quite exhausting and excessive amount of work, please join us as a subtitles angel. Especially native English speakers are very welcome!

If you are a speaker and want to make our work easier, have a look on the checklist for speakers.

The second part of the work is, to create edited subtitles for the recordings of the talks – and maybe even translate them to other languages.

In some cases we will use the raw material gathered in the first stage of the process, but usually we will transcribe the audio more precisely and synchronize the timing to the final version of the recording. In the end we will provide srt files to the video recordings.

For more information on this part of the project see recording subtitles.

If you want to support us at this even more excessive amount of work, please contact us so we can get you into the coordination of this process.

For deeper infos check the FAQ or contact us for more!