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What Accessibility Issues Come Up?
Mon, 07/09/2007 - 14:12 — ejp10
I thought I would start this area with a question for the group on what accessibility issues you encounter? Is it transcribing audio, labeling images or something else?
FYI - Anyone can answer!
Captioning AND transcripts?
A bit of a different question related to the need to provide transcripts for audio and video...
I was recently introduced to MAGpie (http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/magpie/), which sounds like a great way to add captioning to audio and video materials. We are already starting to routinely provide transcripts for those resources. So my question is...should we be doing BOTH? Or, since screen readers like JAWS are able to read captions created with MAGpie, does just captioning suffice? Pros/cons either way?
Love to hear your thoughts!
:-) Annie
accessibility issues
We recently had a situation in which a faculty member was using Breeze Presenter to capture course content and loading it into ANGEL. He had audio files and notes of his lectures, but no complete written transcripts. A student with a disability recently registered for the class and we (he and I) were notified by Disability services that we needed to provide complete written transcripts before the beginning of the semester (less than 2 weeks away at the time). Needless to say, we were scrambling. The instructor is creating the transcripts now and keeping just ahead of the students in the course but it would have been easier to incorporate from the beginning rather than retrofitting. He is doing a second course using Breeze and has learned from this experience!
Transcribing resource
FYI - we hire someone from WPSU to do transcription work "on the side" (not her normal job duties). I believe the rate is something like $45/hour and she is really fast/good! I'll find out the contact info for you, in case you want to pursue that strategy...
-Annie
Contact info for transcription services
Hi again!
Eric Spielvogel gave me the following info regarding the woman we've been hiring to do transcription work here at the e-Ed Institute:
"Our transcription person is Lindsey Faussette, who works up at WPSX. Her email is lrb159@psu.edu, and phone is 863-5489. She does her transcription work on her own time. Additionally, she bills her work through her husband's business ID, because she's essentially doing the same work she gets paid for at Penn State, but as WPSX doesn't make outside transcription work available to clients, that's the route she has to take. And I'm pretty sure that $15/hour is about as good a rate as you'll find. Finally, Lindsey is also expecting in early September, so that's likely to impact her work schedules in the fall, but quite possibly, in favor of more transcription time."
NOTE: the hourly rate is much cheaper than I said my previous posting!
-Annie
Lots of Captioning
Interestingly, Bill Welsh from Office of Disability Services that the biggest requests are to caption poodcasts/audio/video
It sounds like we really have to train instructors to write scripts before they do their podcasts...and it won't be easy.
Podcasting Scripts
One of the beautiful things about podcasting is that they can really be done off the cuff -- without a prepared script. I've done many of them now (interviews, tutorials, ETS Talk, etc...) and at most, I've had an outline of discussion points. Creating a script for a podcast ahead of time fundamentally changes the nature of podcasting -- and it's not something that I would do. In most cases, it's not something I *could* do. The content starts as audio instead of starting as a script and being converted to audio. It's the same as a faculty lecture -- they may outline the material, but the exact spoken words aren't scripted.
Maybe Power Podcasters Need Dragonspeak?
I appreciate your point about the beauties of "off the cuff" content, but I sure wouldn't want to transcribe a series of them after the fact. Seriosuly... you never know which course could have a hearing-impaired student or which media could be requested in alternative format "on demand."
I'm wondering if we should be hooking up frequent podcasters with a voice recognition system like Dragon Speak. There's a training curve, but it does produce very reliable transcripts in the long run. Then you would have an archive of what exactly you said...on demand. ;)
Has anyone used Dragon Naturally Speaking for transcription?
I hear that several folks have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking. I haven't looked at it for years...time to check in again, I guess!
http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/
Has anyone tried using it for after-the-fact transcription of an audio or video clip? Does that work well? And how do you do it? Normally one wears a headset/mic and speaks...what if the "speaker" is an audio or video recording?
-Annie
ETS Uses Dragon Naturally Speaking
We are having instructors use it, but am not sure of exact set-up (I'll look into it).
I know that the training issue is still there (i.e. it' sset up to work with a particular speaker).
Accessibility Issues
The issues I generally run across deal mainly with the way many courses don't meet general Web standards. Lots of courses still use tables for layout, fail to adequately describe images, and contain media without an alternative element. When you add all this to the Eolas bug and the need to make media accessible for users both with and without javascript, it gets messy.