On 7 November, Pilar Orero, AccessCat researcher and member of TransMedia Catalonia, led the workshop The Future of Television for Europe at the ITU, the telecommunications agency at the UN. This session is part of a series of themed workshops promoted by the ITU, which explores television in different regions of the world, and which has already held seven editions since 2018.

In general terms, the goal of the workshop was to reflect on and discuss the future of television in Europe, focusing on topics such as regulatory political frameworks (from European to local), the infrastructure, interfaces, and specific user needs. In more detail, the following topics were discussed:

• The transition to cloud technologies and the adoption of media native to the cloud will optimise the distribution of audiovisual content in Europe.
• Inclusivity and accessibility are essential. Adaptive tools are necessary for the audience’s different needs, as well as advanced subtitles and personalisation options for interfaces.
• The importance of emerging tools in accessibility was highlighted, such as AI to improve simultaneous translation, adaptable subtitles and audio descriptions, or advanced translation tools to translate from dialogue to audio descriptions and sign languages to various languages and thus foster intercultural communication in the EU.
• The MOSAIC project was discussed, a European project that boosts innovation in audiovisual accessibility in Europe. Among others, its objective is to develop multilingual translation tools, automatic subtitling, and content adaptation based on AI. 

You can read more about MOSAIC on the project’s website.