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Accessibility

Drop-in clinic 3rd June 2020

Transcript Hi, thank you very much for that as well. This is Kelly here and subject specialists for accessibility at Jeff, just to welcome everybody. Um, and before we kick off, I've got, I've just a couple of things to flag up and it'll also give people time to come in the room as well. So welcome to the June clinic and it's our last term was academic fashion.

So I want to keep my chat low to minimum so we can get the most out of the time we have with our guests today. Just a few things to flag up that will be of interest to you for the coming month. Registration is still open for the campus accessibility conference next week. And it has a fantastic program, lots of Herod numbers.

We're nearing five hundred participants. So definitely don't miss out. And I think Rowan is going to helpfully piece the link to the conference and the chat box. So you can have it have a note of that. I can see, can be ruin. There is always like lightning and other things just to meet your wheel and certainly desks and just implementing accessibility training courses are continuing to roll out the next one, which is with me and with Julia Taylor, looks at auditing and making a plan.

So we're offering and 50% of the course fees for that, just now the first course, which is on vision and buy-in with Julia and our strategy specialist market and picked up immediately. So if you want to do the next course of me and Julia don't delay and there's, um, mono be popping, popping a link to that in the chat box as well.

And, but you can find it just about. I think Ryan's having connectivity problems, but don't worry. We can we'll, I'll post it in myself. And as we go along and if you missed the fantastic webinars that government does still service two on four global accessibility awareness day, and the recordings are all online now.

Okay. So I'm just going to pause for a moment because I'm getting, I've got some messages from people saying that they're requesting access to the room and they're waiting to be let in. So it's just invoiced that 2:00 AM to, to Edward to see if, um, if you've got some, some people locked, I just need to refresh their browser.

Accessibility

Drop-in clinic 3rd June 2020 Transcript 1

So just close the timer window. So then try to collect them and just click the link again. So if you can, okay, thanks. I'll message my system back to let them know that. Just need to refresh that people, you know, so if, kind of imagine it's like being left out in the cold, wondering what's what's happening out there at the accessibility party.

Um, Okay. So don't worry about the links. I'll paste them in. Once I finished talking, I can't, I can't multitask. I can't please links and talk at the same time. So I'll do it for the finished anyway. And Oh, not from me. And as I mentioned, it's her last clinic. Oh, academic session, but we're going out with an absolute bang for the stick ass, Jennifer and Jeff.

I think are going to give everybody a real big with their infectious enthusiasm and also giving us a sense of where you might be a couple of years from now between the absolute wealth of experience, but I'll let them tell you more about themselves. So I'm going to handle for note to Jennifer and Jeff from packets access Keller.

Hi everybody. My name is Jeff breed and I'm here with my colleague. Jennifer is a gallon. And Kelsey Bronski, to talk to you a little bit about what we've learned here in the U S in terms of accessibility and regulation and best practices. Um, my name is Jeffrey once again, I'm the director of Perkins access consulting here at Perkins access at the Perkins school for the blind.

Um, I've been in the accessibility business for about 35 years. I got my start in the mid 1980s and the world of closed captioning for broadcast. Television. And in the early nineties, when the internet was placed before us and the world wide web, I began my career in web accessibility. Um, and I will let Jennifer introduce herself and then tell us a little bit more about Perkins.

Great. Thanks Jeff. Hi everybody. Certainly a special thanks to Kelly and Rowan and Steve for inviting us to present. And I'm really excited to be here and meet everyone virtually. So I started my career in accessibility in 1994. I'm also working in the area of multimedia accessibility, um, and then sort of moved into.

Uh, supporting, um, and helping organizations build, um, accessibility into their technology solutions and also into the culture of their organizations. Um, I worked with, uh, large tech companies, um, government entities, colleges, universities, um, and so on. So I now currently work in Perkins access. Um, my role is to build partnerships with organizations and help them.

To create, um, sort of what are the services that will help support, um, an accessibility initiative. Mmm. Okay. So the next slide, please. Let's see. Maybe I can do that myself. I can. Um, so on the screen is currently an image, um, of the Perkins. It's an aerial view. Of the Perkins school for the blind campus, with the Boston skyline in the background.

AccessibilityDrop-in clinic 3rd June 2020 Transcript 1

Um, something that's kind of interesting is the Spire that is shown, uh, on the close side of the image. Um, and it's actually visible from sort of the main highway that, that drives into Boston, Massachusetts, um, was influenced the campus design was actually influenced by the Wister cathedral, um, and early English, uh, domestic architecture.

Uh, very, um, uh, lovely, beautiful campus, um, Perkins school for the blind, um, is actually the oldest school, um, for the blind in the United States. Uh, we were established in 1829 and the organization is really focused on, um, supporting students with visual impairment and multiple disabilities. Um, we are, uh, have programs that are.

On our campus, but also across the United States and we operate in 63 countries. So we're, we're quite, um, a large organization with many activities, um, to help educate students around the world. With that in mind, um, Perkins decided that while we are educating students, when they go out into the world, it's so important that we're helping to educate the world so that we're ready, um, for the students and, um, with technology solutions, with education, um, access to health care, um, and so forth.

So Perkins school for the blind established Perkins access, um, we are. Professional accessibility consulting division of the school. And we really are founded on three key, um, key points and the main one, being that in all of the work that we do with organizations, we really bring the user perspective. In addition to sort of helping organization meet, um, the accessibility standards, like the web content accessibility guidelines.

So everything we do. Really, um, you know, from our knowledge from our colleagues, um, with visual impairment and, um, a range of disabilities, we really are able to help an organization. See what are the challenges and the barriers for the user in addition to what are the technical solutions. The second kind of main reason we're in this space is we're very mission focused.

So we are here to help educate, um, as we are, are looking to do today, and we really want to have an impact in the world. Um, our goal is to help impact, um, education, which is so critical, um, for, for people with disabilities and, and areas like health care. Um, while we work with. You know, a full range of different types of organizations.

We really are thrilled to help support, uh, colleges and universities and the technology that supports students. The last sort of reason that we really believe, um, that, that it's really critical for us to be working in this space is that everyone on the team at, at Perkins access and certainly all of our colleagues across the school have just such extensive experience and an understanding of the needs and challenges, um, of accessing digital information.

Um, we are. All career, uh, accessibility, uh, folks, and we are very dedicated, um, to, to the mission. So we are able to kind of take all that information. We've all learned across our careers and help. Kind of think about the strategy for accessibility and not just, you know, doing an audit or testing, sort of, how do you build accessibility in to everything that you're doing so that you not only addressed your immediate barriers, but you also really have a sustainable approach to accessibility.


Let's, let's do this and let's, you know, really, um, make it stick. So with that, I'm going to pass things back to, uh, to Jeff, um, to sort of lead our conversation today. And, uh, I'll jump in to answer anything. Questions, um, and Kelsey will be helping on the chat. Um, if there's any, uh, anything else that kind of, um, comes to mind that you'd like to know.

So thank you. Thanks Jennifer. Hi everybody. Once again, uh, let me do this. Okay. Um, we've been asked to talk today about the lessons we've learned here in America. Uh, in our, as Jennifer said, our collective experience. I'm in the world of accessibility, uh, to help you learn from the things that we've learned in terms of mistakes, as well as good things that we've discovered when it comes to implementing accessibility strategy and techniques, and also conforming with various laws and policies and regulations.

Um, it's a gigantic topic. And so we've decided to focus on three areas. Um, one is called inclusive design. Um, the other is accessible multimedia, which I know is of concern to you all. And then also, um, creating a strategy for working with larger institutions, which I know is also a big concern for everybody.

Um, we'll focus a lot on the world of academia, universities, and colleges, but a lot of what we're going to talk about certainly applies to just about any sector, uh, commercial or noncommercial, governmental and so forth. Uh, please feel free to type your questions into the chat windows at any time. And, um, I will pause periodically, uh, we'll pause periodically and answer questions as they come up, but certainly feel free to, um, let us know what your concerns are.

And this is sort of an informal discussion. So we're happy to sort of veer here and veer there. If we need to, to help everybody out. Um, Jennifer made a good point, uh, just a minute ago about, um, not necessarily focusing on audits and remediation and thinking about what we sometimes call inclusive design or accessible design.

And of course we will talk about audits and remediation. In fact, in the early days of what accessibility in the nineties, that's pretty much all we talked about because, um, nobody really had developed a plan yet for making things accessible. It was all about, I've got this new website and somebody is telling me that people with disabilities can't use it.

What am I supposed to do? So the mindset of sort of reactive, um, accessibility was established early on. Um, but we have one thing that we have learned is that the idea of acting inclusively from the beginning, which is to say, thinking about accessibility from the gecko is really the best way to, um, make things as accessible as possible.

Granted, if you're in the middle of, um, you know, a school scrambled to make sure that your existing website or your application. Make sure that they're accessible. You're not necessarily talking about, um, design from the get go, but


in the world of accessibility, as many of you I'm sure know. Um, the best thing to do is to think about how usable your site is and how it can be made accessible from the very first day.

The first time you gather in a room or when you used to gather in a room and talk about, um, Creating a new website. That's when you start talking about accessibility, one of the things that we focus on a lot at Perkins access is the idea of inclusive design. And this is, um, this is something to really think about because the idea behind inclusive design is to include members of your audience in the design phase from the beginning.

And that includes people with disabilities. Um, it's one thing to have accessibility experts, um, such as the team here at Perkins access, advise you and help you through the inclusive design process, but bringing in people with disabilities from the beginning is certainly, um, one of the wisest things you can do, you'll get a different perspective.

You'll get the perspective of somebody who uses say assistive technology. Every single day, um, and that person, or many people will bring to you new ideas that you likely will never have thought of. Also part of the inclusive design process is iterative testing, which is to say you design, then you create a prototype and then you test it with people with disabilities, with accessibility experts.

And then you refine and repeat and refine and repeat. This will help guarantee that when you finally launch an application or a website, that it will be as accessible as possible. From the beginning. That's not to say that it's 100% accessible because as many of you know, that's almost impossible to achieve, but you will have sort of covered all of the bases from the beginning and you'll be launching with something that is already accessible as opposed to launching it, and then having to go back and remediate, which is, we all know is not a good idea.

Um, there's a question here. It's interesting. Um, have lawyers jumped on legislation to push people to Sue or is that not really needed as there's a proactive approach already? Um, as many of you know, here in America, we live in a very litigious society. Um, I can't speak for lawyers and I am not a lawyer.

Um, I can't necessarily say that lawyers have jumped on this legislation or the rules here to make people Sue, but it is, it is commonly known here in the U S that a number of law firms are, um, actively, uh, spraying the country with complaints in lawsuits. In order to force websites to be accessible because here we actually don't have a law that, uh, covers the commercial or the non-federal sector online that our websites are required to comply with, uh, accessibility regulations, effectively, the web content, accessibility guidelines, 2.1, the AA, just like you.

Um, but in the commercial sector, um, there is no rule yet for that. There is the expectation. Based on previous lawsuits that things have to be accessible. Um, but there's no law yet. Um, so lawyers aren't, um, pushing legislation, but they are taking advantage of this whole in the American regulations.


Um, please feel free to take more questions. One other thing about, um, thinking about inclusive design, uh, and, and this is something that I think is very valuable is the idea of, um, building blocks. Um, in other words, taking things like, um, A component library or a style book and building accessibility into these major blocks of major building blocks of any website or application.

Um, one sort of straightforward example of that is when you're choosing colors for a website, um, and you're developing a style book there, that's the point at which you checked for proper contrast levels between texts and background or UI elements and background and so forth. Before you even start building anything, you deal with those styles upfront.

And that way there will be no questions at all. When you're building the site about whether or not colors and backgrounds meet contrast levels, you've dealt with it upfront. The same thing with a component library. If you're going to be using things like widgets, accordions, tad panels, and so forth. Media players on your website, build those to be accessible before you start putting them into use.

And that way you don't have to worry about when I use this accordion component, do I need to text it for accessibility? Well, I've already tested it. I've already built it. I'll test it in place, but I don't need to worry about making sure that it's accessible because I already know that it's been designed to be that way.

This will, of course, save you one of your time. And, um, when you have work. Down the road because you will have taken care of everything up front.

Um, and then, you know, as we mentioned earlier, this is not just about, um, you know, thinking about audits and acting reactively. This is all about proactive design. Um, as you all know, I'm sure, you know, proactive design and inclusive design saves a lot of time and money, uh, and grief farther down the road.

But, um, one thing that we have found to be very useful when we're dealing with, um, websites or applications or vendors of these things, um, is that when you're trying to convince people, basically that accessible design, it's a very good idea from a number of standpoints. Um, it's really useful to point out to people who are new to accessibility.

To point out to them. The fact that accessible design is not just about accommodating people with disabilities. Accessibility is not just about making sure that people who were blind or visually impaired can. Uh, move through the site, using assistive technology. It's really about making sure that the website, the application, the app, whatever it is is, is usable by as many people as possible.

It's not just about designing for a teeny audience is designing for the entire audience. And this is usually eye opening for a lot of people that most people think about accessibility here in America about disabilities. But when you point out that. Everybody benefits from it. And you use a sort of simple example, like color and contrast, um, you know,


color and contrast levels have been set in order to make sure that people with certain types of visual impairment, it can read text on the screen, but really anybody who comes to a website benefits from good color and contrast and nice clean design, when you point out something like that, that is easier for people to understand who are new to this.

That's generally when heads start to not and people say, Oh, I never thought about that. Um, so you want to sort of find an easy way in that way in order to really open the door, um, to people accepting accessibility as a good idea for everybody, not just for one piece of the audience. Um, any questions so far, Jennifer Kelly, I don't know if you've seen anything in the chat.

So far now we're keeping our eye out. Okay. Okay. Very good. Uh, I don't see any hands raised. Okay. Very good. Um, I know that, um, uh, multimedia is a, is a big concern for, um, for you all. What's come up in past sessions and, um, Uh, Kelly and I talked about it as well. So, um, this is a, this is a very broad area.

Like all of these things are, and, um, there have been a lot of, there's a lot to learn from what, um, from what we have discovered. Here in the U S about captions and audio descriptions, and even the accessibility of the players, uh, media players themselves. Um, when we're talking about captions these days, We're often talking about captions that have been created, uh, that had been created by machines.

Um, I'm sure you're all familiar with YouTube autocaption. Um, other forms of, uh, AI captioning of is a company called Otter AI, which relies heavily on artificial intelligence to create transcripts, which can then be turned into captions. Um, in the old days of captioning, um, humans were the only things writing captions either in real time for live events or what are sometimes called offline captions for prerecorded events.

Um, but nowadays, because the amount of material that in the U S must be captioned. Um, in terms of broadcast as well as online captioning. And then of course, um, captions for online lectures, online demonstrations in academic settings, because there's so much material, it's not always possible to have an army of humans or an army of captioners to do all the work.

And so, um, a lot of people now rely on auto captions. Um, I would like to launch this discussion with a warning that I'm sure many of you know, which is that, um, the use of artificial intelligence for captions should only be part of the workflow. It's never to be considered as the end product. Um, as good as some, uh, auto captioning functions are.

They're not, um, they're not a hundred percent accurate. They're not even usually 95% accurate. Um, some tend to be around 60% accurate and the better ones tend to be, you know, more like 85 or so, but this is often not adequate for captions, especially in, um, Oh, I wouldn't confine that rule to just one setting like academic settings.


Um, caption accuracy is as important as the accuracy of the audio that you present to your audience, who can hear you. Wouldn't provide the hearing audience with audio that cuts in and out and maybe fades and is filled with noise. Um, when you provide captions that are not accurate, that's effectively what you're providing to the audience who is deaf or hard of you.

So, um, it's absolutely crucial to provide captions that are as accurate as possible. Obviously you can, um, you can use, uh, auto caption or auto transcript software to make an initial pass, but then there's always cleanup and always, I mean, always clean up. It has to be done to in certain punctuation deal with capitalization deal with, um, words that have been, um, Inserted incorrectly.

Profanity is sometimes a problem as well. So you really do need to make sure that the captions are as accurate as possible. There's a question in here about how the institutions in the U S handle captioning for large scale or mass produced lectures and recordings and things like that. Um, Know, all the parents to tell you the truth.

Um, in, in academic settings, it is like anywhere else, not uncommon to, to rely on auto captions. What some institutions will do is if, if a lecture is to be posted right away, if it's been recorded, um, they will sometimes include an autocaption track and then clean up at track within a certain number of days.

And then post, um, post that cleaned up track. But frankly, what a lot of people do is they simply use auto captions and that's the caption track and things aren't typically cleaned up, unless somebody points out an error. Um, but, um, I know that live captions are not necessarily part of the rules in which you operate right now.

They're not required, but, um, there are a number of academic institutions that have gone that way is that they simply hire realtime captioners or they hire an agency to caption everything live. And then, um, those captions then make it to the recorded version when that's posted and posted online. One of the things to think about is when you're in a university or an academic setting, you actually have an army of captioners at your disposal.

And none of the students in the, uh, in the late 1990s, I was involved in a project at Massachusetts Institute of technology, MIT in Cambridge, where we actually hired students. Um, and pay them to learn how to caption lectures and then set them loose on a library of lectures. And these students would work for three or four months at a time before they then moved on to the next shiny object.

But, um, there was a steady amount of interest from students who had never heard of captions or wanting to know more about how they worked. And so they were, they were happy to do a certain amount of work, um, for pay or even for free. So this is something to think about when you're dealing with captions in a uterus, in a university setting is making, you know, making the job available and making it attractive to students, teach them how to use software.


Um, in fact it would also be a good idea to, um, create a training session that you can record and then give to students, new students as they come into sort of captioning world. And that way you've got in a way it's sort of continuous flow of people, capturing videos for you. This is one, one thing to consider.

Jeff. There's that question about, um, the accuracy and sort of, is there a standard in terms of how accurate captioning needs to be in the U S yeah, there are I'm catching quality standards, or I'm sorry, what. Okay. Um, yeah, there, there are rules about caption quality that, um, applied to broadcast captions and those same captions that are moved into the online world.

Mmm. Uh, capturing advocates will tell you that their captions should be as accurate as the audio that is given to people who can hear. Mmm. In rare cases, you might be able to get away with auto captions being pretty darn accurate, simply because you have a single speaker who speaks slowly and has a nice, clear speech pattern, but that's likely not the case, especially in a lecture setting where things can be noisy and professors can talk quickly and things like that.

So, um, I mean, obviously you want to shoot for 100% accuracy. That's not always going to be possible. Um, as long as, you know, basically the rule is the captions must be accurate as accurate as possible. They must follow the rules of grammar, conventional grammar. Um, they must be free of typos and they must contain punctuation, um, that, that all involves humans, even after automatic captions have been created.

So that's sort of a long way of saying, make them accurate and. Yeah, it involves time. I think the audience of students who are deaf or hard of hearing will certainly be grateful for that work, but since captions are used by so many, uh, hearing people, um, for either audio reinforcement of what they're hearing, um, students with cognitive disabilities benefit from, um, from captions as well, for clarity, and to help them focus.

And everybody benefits from captions in noisy environments. Your entire audience will appreciate the efforts that you've put into catching accuracy.

Okay. Up to date on questions. Okay, great. Um, there's also the, the idea of course of not necessarily doing it all yourself, although you can do it yourself. Um, but when do you decide that you've got too much material to deal with in house and you want to send it out to a caption vendor? Um, there's no solid tipping point, uh, and I can give to you, but I will say that, um, when you decide that you've just got too much material that is generated every day to deal with.

It, it can pay an up and does pay to hire a vendor, hire the workout and have them write the caption for you, and then send the captions back to you. So you can integrate them with the video stream, um, and save yourself a lot of time, but it will cost you money and how much money to have. That's always the case here and in the UK that you do get what you paid for.


So it's not necessarily best to go with. With the cheapest solution. Um, in the early days of captions, people would pay, um, broadcasters would pay up to $2,500 per program hour actioning nowadays. Um, you can get it for in the U S uh, in some cases about a dollar a minute. So the price has come way down, but in some cases, the quality has followed.

So one good lesson to learn here is that don't necessarily go with the cheapest solution. Um, that you may need to pay more, to get a higher quality solution. And then once you set up a relationship with a vendor, you will then be able to take advantage of all the services that's under supporting captions for different types of players, um, perhaps hiring for realtime services as well, if you need that.

Uh, but always having a constant, reliable source for generating captions for the dozens of videos that you might be creating every day. Often worth.

And then, um, once we deal with captions,

which these days are, you know, somewhat straight forward solution, we then step into the thorny area of audio description sometimes called video descriptions. There are, there are rules in the U S about audio descriptions as well for broadcast. But online there's actually no rule that says, um, material created solely for online use must have audio descriptions, which is sort of a gap in our accessibility policies here in the U S but that doesn't mean that, um, audio description should be cast aside.

Um, if you're following the web content accessibility guidelines at the AA level, obviously audio descriptions are required or at least some media alternative is required, which in some cases can simply mean a text description of what is happening. And there are, um, there are a number of solutions here to think about with audio descriptions, uh, in an academic setting.

One that is sometimes overlooked. And it's not necessarily the easiest thing to do, but is, uh, from my point of view, one of the most obvious things to do, and that is in a lecture setting, train the people who were speaking, the professors, the students to speak descriptively. When they're talking about, you know, the topic.

In other words, if a professor is writing something on the board, Say aloud. What, what the professor is writing on the board. If somebody is giving a demonstration, using know physical materials, talk about what is happening as you're running the demonstration, or as you're running the experiment. Um, I know that it's not necessarily easy to, um, retrain professors who have been doing their jobs for 20, 30, 40 years.


Um, but this is definitely an approach to consider for, um, newer members of a university faculty. Um, to teach them to speak, uh, descriptively and creatively. This is definitely the case. Um, also for prerecorded materials, when you write the narration for something include descriptive narration in the main soundtrack.

So you don't have to add it later, uh, at the separate audio track, or if some other type of, um, alternative. Um, depending on the material, you may not even need to have descriptions, audio descriptions. If you have, you know, a simple talking head, um, you don't, you don't really need to describe anything that's happening unless, you know, somebody has edited in some sort of visual presentation or inserted titles.

Those kinds of things really can typically get by without descriptions. So before you decide. Uh, to attack audio description first, decide what material actually needs it. And then from that point, you can decide, do I simply need to provide, uh, a paragraph of text that introduces the person, uh, and perhaps this person's position or title, because that is displayed on the screen?

Or do I need to do something more thorough?

Just looking for question two. Um, and then also when you're talking about audio descriptions, you don't necessarily need to jump right to the idea that you need to record a separate soundtrack and integrated with the video. Um, you may need to, you may be able to get by with a text alternative, which if you think of a caption transcripts, um, an audio description alternative in text is simply, um, a list of brief descriptions at that.

Perhaps describe very basic things that are happening not necessarily in time or synchronize with the video. Maybe it's just a list of the people who were speaking and their titles, um, information in words that has appeared on the screen, things like that. But when you step into the world of recorded audio descriptions, Um, this is a world of great creativity.

Um, audio descriptions are time consuming, but they really do pay off not just for the audience of students who are blind or visually impaired. Um, but again, they can pay off for students with cognitive disabilities, they can pay off or any student who can't watch the screen in a dorm room, uh, in a library for whatever reason.

Um, but can still listen. And so the audio descriptions feel the gaps for everybody, not just, um, people who are blind or visually impaired, and the way that you create audio descriptions is not as straightforward as the way that you create captions. Um, it's always best to write a script. Uh, so you know what you're going to say?

So you're not fumbling for words. Um, it's always best to know, um, uh, where you're going to put these descriptions in the audio. Are there enough gaps in which to insert them? Do you need to, um, think about a more extended audio description method. And then of course you need to, um, record the description and then have audio editing


software to either create a new soundtrack with descriptions or a way to insert those descriptions into the existing soundtrack.

What one thing that you can definitely think about is while it's often best to use humans to record these audio descriptions, in some cases, You can get by with high quality, um, text to speech. And, um, there have been a number of experiments conducted here in America with text to speech subscriptions, and it really can be effective if you use high quality speech output, um, or instances of lectures, demonstrations, and things like that.

Um, DDS descriptions, Texas speech descriptions are often perfectly fine when it comes to, um, things that may not necessarily be generated, uh, in academic settings, like more dramatic material drama, things like that. Human descriptions tend to be best, but using TTS. Or the creation of an audio description soundtrack is really something worth considering it is a time saver.

It is a money saver as well. And, um, depending on the situation, it can be perfectly adequate.

Just checking for questions here, Jennifer Kelsey here.

Well, here's a good one. How would you suggest handling audio descriptions for objects or visual experiences where the experience is subjective or maybe academically relevant? Um, this is interesting too,

and there have been, um, Number of studies, uh, and projects done here in America that I'm aware of, at least that have specifically approached this kind of situation. Um, there are a number of museums here in the U S that actually do provide. Um, descriptions for paintings, uh, for objects on the floor. Um, things like that in museums.

Um, it is as you know, probably almost impossible to keep subjectivity out of descriptions. When we're talking about objects like park, let's say, uh, or photographs or pictures, um, generally the best approach is to. Be as objective as possible from the beginning. Um, don't necessarily, um, say from the beginning, what your impression is of his painting, talk about, you know, the person who painted it.

Um, talk about the important visual elements within the painting. Um, if it's important to talk about the use of color, it's important to talk about the use of shape and design. Um, these things will all change with context, of course, but these are the objective things. But you can present first. Um, and then, um, if it's appropriate, you can then talk a little bit more, uh, subjectively about the impressions of his painting.

Um, but the important thing is to be objective first and then if it's appropriate then to bring in subjectivity. The Mona Lisa, a lady smiling or issue. Um, good question. Um, one way to get around something like that is to describe the,


you know, the expression on somebody's face. Um, instead of saying smiling, um, you could use more objective language, like, you know, lips, uh, in a sort of upturn fashion.

That's probably not the right word. Um, it may not be appropriate to say someone is smiling. Unless, you know, the painting itself, obviously depicts people who are happy, who are enjoying themselves in the situation of, of the Mona Lisa. I would actually pull back from saying the word smile and use something.

Um, I wouldn't necessarily say more clinical, but something that is descriptive, but leaves it up to the user to decide is, is she smiling or is she not smiling? There are guidelines available. If you do a search for a museum, um, image, description, accessibility. Um, you'll find a number of guidelines that have been published or at least information that has been published about this very topic.

Um, you might also take a look at the museum of modern art website here in the U S, which is dot org, dot org. Um, they have done a lot of work in the field of image description for, uh, paintings that are available online photographs and things like that. Those are a couple of good sources and thinking about this.

Okay. Hi, I was just going to jump in there and Jeff, cause it is a question. I think that was a little bit further up, which was Lily and I'm just scrolling up now. And asking, have you seen situations where learners are also provided with tools to have their own auto captioning on their phones? So I wonder if that, you know, thinking about like the altar app and things, um, is that pretty popular where people can take control of the subtitling themselves?

Um, I can't say how popular that is. Um, um, frankly, the situations where I see people using. Um, auto transcription apps on their phones tend to be conferences about, uh, technology and people with disabilities. Um, and, uh, but, um, I have been in at least two situations in restaurants with people who are different with people who are hard of hearing, actually they have simply put their phones on the table and they start up a transcription app like Otter.

And, um, it's of great benefit for them in noisy environments, um, to have a transcription being created for them live. Um, so I can't necessarily say that students are doing this every day. Um, it is something that people do and it would be absolutely within, you know, for somebody who is, um, deaf or hard of hearing, this is absolutely a tool to take advantage of in life situations.

Um, but somebody using that tool would, would I think be aware of accuracy problems and, um, would expect errors. Uh, and you know, they may be in a situation where they can tell the person speaking. Can you say that again? I didn't understand it. It's not a solution. I think that university universities can rely on as a way to make things accessible because it requires students to maybe download something or pay for something.

And they may not have the facility for that. They may not even have a smartphone, but it's something that students can certainly take advantage of.


um, I want to move on now to, um, dealing with accessibility on a large scale, uh, such as an academic institution, because I know that this is a big focus for everybody on the call. Um, one of the most important things that we've learned here, About dealing with large institutions. Is that easy to get into a tailspin when you think about dealing with accessibility of a, an enterprise like university, because it's so big and there are so many websites and there are so many applications and services and things like that.

Um, and yes, it is crucial to, um, make sure that you look at the accessibility and the approach toward accessibility at the full university level. But it is very, very, very, very important. We've learned to speak with all departments and schools within the university, um, to find out what tools, what websites, um, these departments are creating and using.

Not only to discover what is unique to each department, but also what is common across the university. You may find that, um, you know, everybody is using zoom may find that everybody is using WebEx. Um, and so you can deal with those kinds of things from the sort of whole level, as opposed to. The kinds of things you need to deal with at a targeted level, um, special applications that are used in the school of business versus special websites and applications that are created by the school of computer science and so forth.

Um, so it's very important to, um, look at it from the high level, but then also to dig in and speak with each individual school or department and develop an inventory of what things are used there. Um, we have found that to be very useful, to, um, start a conversation with a specific school by, you know, introducing the project, introducing the idea of accessibility and then asking them to literally just come up with a list of all the things that they use in creating that school, you know, they create and maintain five websites.

So you use a special application for, uh, presenting lectures online and so forth. Um, once you develop this inventory, um, you can then start thinking about priorities and by priorities. I mean, um, you know, obviously what things that we're going to tackle first. Um, but those things may not be immediately obvious.

Because you need to decide, are we going to deal with things that students need to use every day? Or are we going to deal with things that faculty used to create things that students see every day? And this will all depend on the context. It will all depend on the school and the services that they provide, but you know, one sort of easy and obvious thing is.

Um, forms and applications that students use to request housing, to buy meal plans, to register for courses. These student facing things are of highest priority. And so that would be sort of an easy. Um, area to focus on because they have such a high impact on students. Um, speaking with, uh, individual universities, I'm sorry, individual schools within universities and departments will also help you figure out, um, the types of services that they provide.


Uh, and that will help you prioritize the accessibility approach that you take within those schools as well. But then it's also important, not just to think about remediation and audits, like we're talking about now, helping people fix things, they already have also taking the inclusive design approach, helping them figure out how will we make the next thing that we design accessible.

And one way to do that is by training, uh, offering role-based training is something that is of very high importance. And this is something that we do here at Perkins access is, um, offered training sessions. Uh, aimed at specific audiences, developers, contents offers, uh, visual designers and the people in charge of QA quality assurance, um, make the sessions available, uh, have them recorded so that, um, there's always a library of information that, um, people in these roles can turn to when they're fixing things or developing new things.

And this also helps teach the idea of sustainability. And accessibility. It's not just about fixing stuff right in front of me now because I'm in a hurry. It's about creating things in the future that will be accessible. Uh, investment will avoid the need to be fixed later on.

Just checking for questions here. Here's one, uh, Kelly, uh, is it common for universities and colleges to have dedicated accessibility roles? Or do people instead, uh, embed these skills into multiple roles? Um, yes. To both, um, uh, larger universities. Well, actually just about all universities, I believe, um, have, uh, um, disability services office, um, for students to take advantage of, um, and depending on the size of this procedure unit, but disabilities office within a university.

Um, they may have the job of helping, uh, others at the university design things to be accessible as possible. And then maybe using student labor to do the checking, uh, and the validation. Mmm, very large universities. Mmm. Do in fact, have a entire departments dedicated to accessibility. Uh, these big departments deal with the accessibility of, um, you know, websites across the university, um, captioning across the university.

Um, uh, they hold classes. Uh, teaching designers and developers and content authors, how to make things as accessible as possible. But it's equally common that, you know, somebody in the computer science department, uh, maybe assigned the role of making sure that all the stuff that computer science develops is accessible just for that department.

Um, it all depends on the size of the university and the situation and how much money they have, how much funding they have as well.

Further questions here. Um, the final thing I wanted to touch on is the idea of getting buy in from everybody at say the university. That, of course, it's important to get buy in about accessibility from people who work in the development and the content offering and designing worlds, but really the buy-in has to go all the way to the top of the chain.


I'm presenting the idea of accessibility being, not just for students with disabilities, but for everybody at the university faculty and students and staff alike, um, that idea needs to be driven home to the very top levels of the university. Um, once that is achieved, then the cascade of commands down the chain, um, takes on a lot more weight, uh, and a lot more validity.

As universities, um, deal with making things accessible and fixing things that are already there. Um, the fact that the buying comes from the very top levels creates an impression that accessibility really is important and we're taking it seriously across the entire university. Uh, and with that, we've got about five minutes.

Um, Jennifer, do you have anything you want to add? And I'm looking at the questions as well. Well, I just, I was going to respond to the question about whether us, um, institutions in the U S are embedding accessibility awareness, um, influencing into generic job descriptions, recruitment. Um, I do know there's.

Definitely quite a movement to include, um, accessibility for developers. Um, we are encouraging that, uh, the same skill sets, uh, be part of designers, um, and, uh, job descriptions. Uh, and we are seeing some increase, um, just sort of in, in general technology roles. I think that within universities, we're seeing that the accessibility expertise.

Um, is really being, uh, kind of focused on that team. Um, that's, that's creating the accessibility, our partners in most cases have, you know, a department. Um, one of our, uh, one of our clients has, uh, close to 50. Um, it's sort of they're, they're called accessibility coordinators. Um, and they are embedded within.

All of the different departments, it's a very large university. And so they sort of each have a role of looking at a very high level at a procurement of third party tools, um, and sort of helping to do kind of that high level training. Um, for their individual departments. So it's, it's, they're kind of trying to take that approach to building in some accessibility, um, knowledge across the organization.

But generally we are finding they're still a centralized point, um, for the accessibility and then, you know, growing it by building that, that knowledge across, um, sort of, as you, as you mentioned, sort of generic, uh, roles, it's a great plan for building it in.

Thanks guys. I just am absolutely perfect. That's just the 29 minutes past three. Didn't you to wrap up perfectly on time. Um, I could, I could just spend a day like our vote with multiple days asking you guys questions or things, your experiences. Um, I just feel like I learn so much, um, and I love your positive and enthusiastic attitudes, folks.


All of this, I think that, um, Kelsey has popped up a link there for people to subscribe to your newsletter and also how to, to keep in touch by asking questions. I know that, um, Jeff, I'm not sure possibly Jennifer or members of our accessibility community and teams as well. So there's also the potential to carry on the conversation there too.

Well, this was our last at clinic of academic session. Obviously Jessica mail list and the team is going to keep going and throughout the summer, And they've also got the just training programs as well. So w we'll still keep in touch with each other and as well, but I would just, I just want to massive, thanks to Stanford Jeffords D um, for, for sharing their experiences and knowledge.

This session has been recorded and the session will be online along with the transcripts as well. So if there's bits of detail, I know I'm going to go back to the transcript, picking up bits of detail, especially around. I love the questions about describing. And art things that are more subjective. I feel that was really good.

Good question. And so, yeah, just enormous. Thanks. And I hope we stay in touch and then, and carry on the conversation. So thank you so much, Jeff and Jennifer. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks everybody for coming. Thank you very much.

Okay. I can address just pops up some tips there on how to leave the room, if you need to, that will let you know, everyone loves to say their goodbyes and things. It's really nice. Nice to see so many people in here today. Cause I know at the moment people are maybe feeling a bit webinar's eye

and so it's great to see so many people at turnips D and, and benefit from the. From your experience and some good questions. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Thank you very much.


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