Pablo Romero Fresco
Principal Researcher, University of Vigo
He has been engaged in leading research and training on live subtitling and respeaking for the past ten years. He set up the first face-to-face and online respeaking courses in Spain (at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and University of Vigo) and in the UK (at the University of Roehampton).
He has published extensively on respeaking, including the only existing book on the subject (Subtitling through Speech Recognition: Respeaking, 2011, Routledge), and has co-authored the NER model, a tool for quality assessment in live subtitling that has been adopted by governmental regulators, broadcasters, access service providers and universities in more than 20 countries in Europe, America, Africa, Asia and Australia.
He has collaborated with institutions in many of these countries in order to introduce and improve access to TV and live events for people with hearing loss. Over the past 5 years, he has been appointed as the official external evaluator for the quality of live subtitles in the UK and Canada.
In 2008, he coordinated the subtitling part of the CPI-ICT EU-funded project DTV4ALL and he has since participated in other CPI-ICT projects on accessibility and live subtitling such as HBB4ALL and SAVAS. He is now the leader of MAP (COMM/MAD/2016/04), a project funded by the EU Commission for the development of the first online platform covering media accessibility worldwide. MAP will be used as a dissemination tool in ILSA, thus ensuring that its results reach all stakeholders with an interest in this area.