Providing descriptions of visually presented information to video teleconference participants who are not video-enabled
Descriptions of visually presented material are provided to one or more conference participants that do not have video capabilities. This presented material could be any one or more of a document, PowerPoint® presentation, spreadsheet, Webex® presentation, whiteboard, chalkboard, interactive whiteboard, description of a flowchart, picture, or in general, any information visually presented at a conference. For this visually presented information, descriptions thereof are assembled and forwarded via one or more of a message, SMS message, whisper channel, text information, non-video channel, MSRP, or the like, to one or more conference participant endpoints. These descriptions of visually presented information, such as a document, spreadsheet, spreadsheet presentation, multi-media presentation, or the like, can be assembled in cooperation with one or more of OCR recognition and text-to-speech conversion, human input, or the like.
1. A method for providing non-video communications to non-video enabled video conference participants comprising:
recognizing visually presented information at a conference module;
the conference module determining information describing the visually presented information; and
forwarding by the conference module, based on preference information, the information describing the visually presented information to one or more destinations, wherein the one or more destinations are non-video enabled conference endpoints, wherein video content is not provided to at least a first one of the conference endpoints, and wherein the visually presented information is obtained from at least a second one of the conference endpoints.
2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising utilizing one or more of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and text-to-speech conversion to determine the information describing the visually presented information.
3. The method of claim 1 , further comprising recognizing when visually presented information is presented.
4. The method of claim 1 , further comprising forwarding the visually presented information to an interpreter for determining of the information describing the visually presented information.
5. The method of claim 4 , wherein the interpreter is a human.
6. The method of claim 1 , further comprising generating a transcript including the information describing the visually presented information.
7. The method of claim 1 , where the information describing the visually presented information is display by at least one of the conference endpoints as streaming text.
8. The method of claim 1 , further comprising associating a profile with a video conference, the profile specifying that one or more types of the visually presented information are to be described and specifying the modality for providing the description.
9. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:
for conference participants who have a single monaural audio-only endpoint, providing the information describing the visually presented information as an audio description via a “whisper” announcement;
for conference participants who have more than one monaural audio-only endpoint, using one of the endpoints for listening to a conference and utilizing the other endpoint to receive audio descriptions of the information describing the visually presented information;
for conference participants who have a binaural audio-only endpoint, using one of the channels for listening to conference discussions, and utilizing the other endpoint to receive audio descriptions of the information describing the visually presented information;
for conference participants who have an audio endpoint that is email capable, SMS capable, or IM capable, sending the information describing the visually presented information via one or more of these respective interfaces; and
for conference participants who have an audio endpoint that is capable of receiving and displaying streaming text, scrolling the describing information across an endpoint's display.
10. A computer-readable storage media having stored thereon instructions that, when executed, perform the steps of claim 1 .
11. One or more means for performing the steps of claim 1 .
12. A system that provides non-video communications to non-video enabled video conference participants comprising:
a visually presented information recognition module provided as part of a conference module that recognizes visually presented information;
a messaging module provided as part of a conference module that determines information describing the visually presented information and forwards, based on preference information, the describing information to one or more destinations, wherein the one or more destinations are non-video enabled conference endpoints, wherein the conference endpoints present the information describing the visually presented information, wherein at least a first one of the conference endpoints is not provided with video content, and wherein the visually presented information is provided to the conference module by at least a second one of the conference endpoints.
13. The system of claim 12 , further comprising utilizing one or more of an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module and text-to-speech conversion module to determine the describing information.
14. The system of claim 12 , wherein the visually presented information recognition module dynamically determines when visually presented information is presented.
15. The system of claim 12 , further comprising an interpreter that assembles the describing information.
16. The system of claim 15 , wherein the interpreter is a human.
17. The system of claim 12 , wherein a profile is associated with a video conference, the profile specifying one or more types of the visually presented information are to be described and the modality for providing the description.
18. The system of claim 12 , wherein the messaging module:
for conference participants who have a single monaural audio-only endpoint, provides the describing information as audio descriptions via a “whisper” announcement;
for conference participants who have more than one monaural audio-only endpoint, uses one of the endpoints for listening to a conference and utilizes the other endpoint to receive audio descriptions of the describing information;
for conference participants who have a binaural audio-only endpoint, uses one of the channels for listening to conference discussions, and utilizes the other endpoint to receive audio descriptions of the describing information;
for conference participants who have an audio endpoint that is email capable, SMS capable, or IM capable, sends the describing information via one or more of these respective interfaces; and
for conference participants who have an audio endpoint that is capable of receiving and displaying streaming text, scrolls the describing information across an endpoint's display.