The Italian Association of Respeaking, onAIR, celebrated its tenth anniversary on 4 March—a milestone in its work representing Italian professionals in the fields of live subtitling and reporting through respeaking, as well as participating in the work of the Intersteno federation and collaborating with universities, associations and software companies.
The organisation has worked on many European and national studies of accessibility and conducted numerous projects on intralingual and interlingual live subtitling. These have included accessible concerts for signing and oralist deaf people, the training of primary school students to write with their voices and the alternative use of speech recognition technology in schools and universities.
In pioneering work, onAIR tested the first live web subtitling systems in collaboration with various Italian software companies. This resulted in the provision of live subtitles for web radio programmes, as well as for webcasts of the Euroscola educational project in the European Parliament, a papal audience with blind and deaf people and the canonisation of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII.
