W3C received a 2016 Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for its work on the Timed Text Mark-up Language standard that makes video content more accessible with text captioning and subtitles. Representatives from W3C staff and the Timed Text Working Group attended the Emmy awards ceremony on 8 January 2016 at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). In the past, two CWI researchers contributed to the W3C Timed Text Working Group and CWI is still very active in W3C standardization.
According to the W3C website, W3C CEO Dr. Jeff Jaffe said: “W3C is thrilled to receive a 2016 Emmy ® Award in recognition of technologies that support an important part of our mission to bring the full potential of the World Wide Web to everyone, whatever their disability, culture, language, device or network infrastructure. I would like to thank the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for their recognition of W3C, and I congratulate the members of the W3C Timed Text Working Group and the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative on this outstanding achievement.”
CWI researchers Dick Bulterman and Kees Blom were members of the W3C Timed Text Working Group. Much of the early timing model in timed text was based on SMIL, a web standard to which the Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) research group at CWI contributed fundamental technology. Dick Bulterman commented: "It is nice to see that the impact of W3C timed text technology has gone far beyond the traditional Internet. When we started work on the standard, the principal community was the hearing impaired. By taking a broader approach, fundamental problems for TV broadcasting were also included. This is an important example of how solutions for one community can grow to meet world-wide needs. We congratulate W3C with the Emmy Award!"
For more information about the Emmy® Award and TTML, see the W3C press release.
Source: W3C and CWI
