About the Liberated Learning Consortium

Headquartered in Canada, the Liberated Learning Consortium (new window) is an international research partnership dedicated to using speech recognition technology to improve access to information for persons with disabilities. The Consortium is pioneering speech recognition (new window) applications that automatically caption and transcribe speech. To expand universal access to these emerging tools, the Consortium created an accessibility ecosystem that includes leading Canadian disability organizations.

Targeting the Promoting Accessibility and Youth with Disabilities themes, Saint Mary’s University (new window) , Learning Disabilities Association of Canada (new window) , Canadian Hard of Hearing Association (new window) , Neil Squire Society, Easter Seals Canada (new window) , Trent University (new window) , Cambrian College (new window), and IBM Research (new window) , are collaboratively developing emerging speech recognition technologies that increase information accessibility for Canadians with disabilities.

Objectives include:

• Increasing organizational access to speech recognition captioning/transcription technologies
• Increasing individual access to speech recognition based captioning/transcription technologies
• developing transferability strategies that enable other disability organizations to effectively utilize speech recognition based captioning/transcription technologies

Neil Squire Society and the Liberated Learning Project

The Neil Squire Society has recently added an audio layer to their e-Learning course materials, enabling participants in the Employ-Ability program to hear, as well as read, any Career Development program text resources.

Spoken information will be automatically captioned using speech recognition, allowing those with sensory disabilities to utilize multimodal learning channels. Asynchronous media (video, audio, e-Learning content) will be captioned and transcribed using speech recognition, allowing ‘anytime’ access for on demand learning.

For a demonstration of the Society’s work, please visit their moodle website (new window).

Youth with Disabilities in University

To empower youth with disabilities, students with disabilities attending post secondary education will be given special user accounts for a hosted transcription service. Students will be able to upload recorded media such as lectures, and receive a speech recognition generated transcript, which can be used for study or review. Accounts will be provided to youth with various disabilities in all provinces and territories.

The Liberated Learning project will profoundly impact the lives of Canadians living with disabilities and help an array of organizations adopt universally designed best practices to improve information access.

For more information about the Neil Squire Society and the Liberated Learning project, please contact Chad Leaman at chadl@neilsquire.ca