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INTECO has released a project called IDTVOS (INTECO Digital Television Operating System ).
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This project began as an initiative of the "Secretaría de Estado de Telecomunicaciones y para la Sociedad de la Información " (Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Society) (SETSI) with the objective of making prototype decoders available to both people with disabilities and the industry in general so as to improve interaction and access to digital terrestrial television services while at the same time meeting another milestone set by Spanish legislation: "Ley 10/2005 de Medidas Urgentes para el Impulso de la Televisión Digital Terrestre, de Liberalización de la Televisión por Cable y de Fomento del Pluralismo" (Law 10/2005 on Urgent Measures for the Promotion of Digital Terrestrial Television in Liberalization of Cable Television and promotion of pluralism), that states that the government must ensure, from the outset, the accessibility of digital terrestrial television services for people with disabilities. To this end, INTECO has collaborated with ONCE throughout the development of the first prototypes, including the acceptance of functional specifications and prototype testing to verify specifications compliance and problems resolution.
From the beginning, IDTVOS was conceived of as an operating system for digital television decoders so that on could implement accessibility features without requiring modification of HW.
Thus, INTECO analyzed several international initiatives of free software oriented to implement easy screen interfaces (OSD) in digital television decoders. In that case, we will be able to reduce our development effort by being focused more on the new accessibility features.
Therefore, due to the state of the art, the technology, the market at the beginning of year 2009 and thinking about the great job that should be performed in a short period of time for developing such volume of new features, we based main tasks of IDTVOS on a free software called Jet (which origin dates back to the Interuniversity Consortium CINECA and was working for one hw vendor). IDTVOS is supporting also another vendors to demonstrate its compatibility.
Today, after a hard development phase, our operating system provides interaction solutions via speech technologies, so that, through an integrated voice synthesizer, the user can access and navigate through the system and use services such as the Electronic Program Guide, full menu navigation, activation or deactivation of the subtitles, the management of font sizes, color themes, high-contrast interface, etc..
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Through numerous interviews and national and international user surveys, all features implemented, such as defining font sizes, different speech synthesis engine (slow, normal, fast) speeds, color contrasts and available shades in RGB mode, the personalization of verbosity modes and various customizable speech parameters for the information displayed on the pilot channel information, etc., were properly justified and prioritized.
The system is available in Spanish and English and comes with the voices integrated into the system so that they are automatically changed when the interface language is changed via the menu.
One of the key pieces of the project was the optimization and adaptation of the speech synthesis engine and the voices in Spanish (male and female).
A digital television receiver is an embedded environment. A typical embedded environment is a mobile phone. And so, the speech synthesis engine or "text to speech" (TTS) software that IDTVOS uses and provides the basic features available in the receiver, is based on the Carnegie Mellon University Festival Lite (or Flite) engine.
In addition, the English language voices used in the receiver are from the same Carnegie Mellon University project.
The Spanish voices for the IDTVOS platform were initially developed by the Hispavoces project of the Junta de Andalucía for the University of Edinburgh Festival software platform. Festival, while providing excellent results on a PC, could not be used in an embedded environment.
For a set-top box or digital television decoders (embedded environments), the memory, processor and operating system architecture and features are more limited than those available on any standard PC and so major adaptations and optimizations were made to both the speech synthesis engine as well as the voices including the programming language used; from C++ and Scheme to the C programming language which is more portable.
As a final note, despite the adaptations to reduce resource consumption, it was necessary to use a specific SOC (System on Chip); in this case, the IBM Power PC was selected as this is the HW the commercial products selected for the project use.
However, the system can be completely adapted to other models provided they meet some basic compatibility characteristics.
Additionally, as part of the project, and due to a lack of necessary standards and clear legislation, INTECO has created an Accessibility Recommendations Guide for DTT, combining current technology, our expert’s recommendations, and national and international user feedback from the surveys, that is intended as a starting point for more accessibility initiatives in Digital Television.
The IDTVOS system was born as a real and current solution for many of the problems that citizens face today in accessing digital television services.
The project is based entirely on free software and is available in the Software section.
Thus, it is our intention that the IDTVOS project and documentation will serve as a basis for developing the industry nationally and internationally, ensuring accessibility for all citizens to the devices and technologies available.
If the project sounds interesting and want more information about it, you can contact the project team. They can help you understand not only the capabilities in the published versions, but also those that are currently under development.
Encuesta sobre la navegación en los servicios interactivos
Actualmente se están desarrollando numerosos servicios interactivos para TDT con el fin de ofrecer un nuevo canal de prestación de servicios. Esta encuesta permitirá comprobar si conoce estos servicios y si éstos tienen una navegación intuitiva.
