Thanks for the listing of descriptive videos.  Where can i getinformation
on showing these films here in St. Louis?   I'm willing to contact a number
of theaters to try this out for the blind, deaf and visually impaired folks.
    I'd also like to ask about something that has been a real problem for me.
 I have good peripheral vision but little cental vision.  The result
essentially means that I can't read very well at all, and certainly not in
sub-optimum conditions.  Before I lost my central vision, I was a big fan of
foreign films.  Though there are still a fw dubbed-to-English films, mostly
older films, almost all foreign films are subtitled.  though  I can rent them
as videos and try to stop the video to read the subtitles, it's a cumbersome
and frustrating, sometimes impossible task.
    what I'd like is for someone to come up with a way to simply read the
captions over the foreign language dialogue.  Since the captions are usually
pretty minimal, that would help alot.
    It almost seems like some sort of DVD CD-ROM version might offer help
with this. Since you can add so much more to a DVD, it shouldn't be a problem
to offer a separate track for the subtitles.

   I don't need to have the videos described - my vision is effective enough
to catch the main actions, though someof the subtleties are lost.    Quite a
few people have problems with reading subtitles even with optimal vision.
And as the population ages,  this will become more common.
      In addition, there are now more and more Hollywood films that include
subtitling when they protray a events in non-Engilsh dialogues.  For example,
"Traffic" relied extensively on subtilting when it portrayed the scenes in
Mexico.   I suspect Pearl Harbor may also include some subtitled scenes.

     Any ideas?  Anyone tried running a DVD through your computer, and
searching frame by frame for the subtitles and then letting Omnipage or
Kurzqeil or Arkenstone software scane the image and read the subtitle,
perhaps save it in soe form to be played with the DVD or better, to have a
system fast enough to catch the words while the movie is playig and read them?
      Or  just have RFBD or the Library of Congress watch the movie and read
the subtitles onto a subtrack on a video tape?
   This *can't* be that difficultof a problem, I'm sure someone has come up
with a solution.
     I'd appreciate any sources, ideas, contacts, so on.   I'm tired of
guessing at what's going on in the dialogue.

thanks,
Dan Flasar
Informatics Core Director
GCRC
Washington University School of Medicine
St. Louis, MO
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