Julie Edwards: Kind of important. Hi, everybody! I see you all joining us.
Julie Edwards: Feel free to hop over to the chat if you would like, and
Julie Edwards: say, Hi, let us know where you're from. We do publish the Chat Transcript, because there's so much great information that goes back and forth. So you don't have to jump over to the chat if you don't want to. But I love seeing where everyone is from, and we already have people from
Julie Edwards: Illinois and Alabama and Texas, California.
Julie Edwards: More people from Illinois, hey? Probably if you probably have an audience for Professor Wong there. Wow! Now everybody is rolling in Oklahoma. Hey? Worcester. Oh, my gosh! That's where my family is from. So nice to see you, hey? Marilyn, Lancaster, Florida! That sounds nice.
Julie Edwards: hey? Boston, hey, Alaska! So nice to see everybody coming in Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan, Delaware.
Melissa Wong: It's so fun to see where everybody is logging in from.
Julie Edwards: I know. I say, this every week, but I really like the the license plate game, and this is my like, yeah, yeah, hey? Vc: there's our Canadian friends. Hello.
Julie Edwards: hey? Nebraska, Ohio, Illinois.
Julie Edwards: So great to see everybody. Well, we are right at the top of the hour, so we will go ahead and get started. I am Julie Edwards. I'm. Joining you all from Missoula Montana, which is not Florida, or any other nice warm place.
Julie Edwards: I am the librarian and instructional designer with Niche Academy, and I would like to welcome you to this Webinar going beyond captions, creating accessible instructional videos.
Julie Edwards: So i'm going to do a bit of our standard housekeeping first, and then turn it over to the presenter. Let me start by introducing Niche Academy. We are an easy to use all in one learning platform to help libraries create and deliver effective training and measured learner success.
Julie Edwards: Our software is the perfect tool. If you're looking to increase your E resource, usage, improve and measure learner's success and deliver training to impact your staff and your patrons. If you're interested in finding out more about our platform chatting with a member of our team. Hearing what your colleagues have to say, I will drop a link to our website into the chat in a few minutes.
Julie Edwards: We are recording this Webinar and I will make the recording the slides, the Chat transcript, and the audio transcript available to everyone who is registered a few days after the presentation, so probably by Friday you'll get something from me.
Melissa has also generously put together a large resource list, and I will send that out as well. I will also be dropping some of her links into the chat as she's speaking, so that you have ready access to those
Julie Edwards: you can turn on closed captioning at the bottom of your zoom screen. If you would like to use that. The chat is open. Please feel free to talk with each other and share ideas in there.
Julie Edwards: If You have questions for Melissa, though please put those in the question and answer box. We do that because there are already over 400 people here this morning or this afternoon. Wherever you are, things can get lost in the chat. So if you put a question specifically for her in the Q. A. Box, I will be able to moderate those at the end of the Webinar.
Julie Edwards: This Webinar series is part of our commitment to solving bigger problems together in the library world, and providing continuing education for librarians and library staff. I am so happy I have so many of you here today.
Julie Edwards: I will drop the link to our upcoming Webinars in the chat. So you have access to that as well. So, without further ado, I want to introduce Melissa. Wong Melissa is an instructor in School of Information sciences at the University of Illinois, at Urbana Champagne, where I went to school.
Julie Edwards: where she teaches courses in instruction, e. Learning, higher education and reference. She's passionate about creating online learning that is relevant and engaging through the use of authentic content and inclusive accessible design.
Julie Edwards: She is consistently recognized on Uiuc's list of teachers ranked as excellent by their students. I think you will figure out why, by the end of this presentation, and in 2,012. She was recognized with the campus award for excellence in online and distance, teaching. Melissa is the Co editor of reference and information services, sixth edition and co-author of the open access textbook, instruction in libraries and information centers and introduction.
Julie Edwards: Her book instructional design for Lis professionals is a guide for faculty teaching graduate courses in library and information science. This is the second time that we have had Melissa here at Niche Academy. I am absolutely thrilled. I'm going to turn it over to her.
Melissa Wong: Julie, thank you so much. It is such a pleasure to be here. I am so excited to talk about accessibility. I see a few familiar names in our attendee list. So it's really fantastic to see some of my former students here. But, thanks to all of you for being here it is. It is really great to see how many folks are excited about improving accessibility in our libraries services.
Melissa Wong: The as Julie mentioned, the slides will be available after the Webinar with the materials that Niche Academy sends out. But I do also have a Google folder.
Melissa Wong: and i'm going to put that link in the chat that Google Folder does have the slides from today. It also has a resource list, and I do tend to mention good readings or good resources
as I'm. Teaching and everything I mentioned should be available in that resource list.
Melissa Wong: Okay, so
Melissa Wong: we are going to talk about creating accessible instructional videos. We will be talking about captions, but we're gonna go a little bit beyond that today.
Melissa Wong: Sorry one. Sec: now my slides are misbehaving. There we go. Okay, so i'm going to start with a kind of a quick introduction to disability and accessibility, mostly just to give us a little bit of shared background knowledge about why some of these practices are necessary or recommended.
Then we will get into talking about captions and transcripts and descriptive audio, and then we are going to go beyond that to talk about some other things we can do to improve the accessibility of our.
Melissa Wong: And then, in addition to that, we i'm trying to set aside 10 or 15 min at the end for the Q. A. I apologize. If you can hear my dog barking. I think that he has either seen the mailman today, or possibly a cat in our driveway which
Melissa Wong: really drives him crazy.
Melissa Wong: Okay, and I do see some notes here in the chat about the closed captions not working. But I'm going to let Julie take care of that one.
Melissa Wong: Okay.
Melissa Wong: it was for your dogs participate. Mine loves to participate. Some days we have to appreciate our our pets that are trying to protect us from the dangers of the outside world, right, even if it is just the neighbor's cat.
Melissa Wong: All right. So let's talk about the importance of accessibility. My my suspicion is that if you are here today, you already know that accessibility is important, and you care about accessibility.
But I know that sometimes we do work with colleagues who are maybe less convinced right? So it's always good to have a little bit of of some, some reasons to kind of arm ourself with that way. So number one. Let's keep in mind that a significant percentage of our patrons do have a disability
in the Us. Population as a whole. 26% of the population has a disability for those of us who work in the academic environment. At 19% of undergraduate students have a disability at that number drops a little bit. It's 12% for graduate students, and if you're working in the K 12 environment and school libraries. 15% of students have a disability. So those there that's a pretty high percentage of our patrons who have a disability.
and it is really important to remember that under Federal and State laws we have a legal obligation to ensure that our library services and resources are accessible to all of our patrons
beyond that. And I think for me, what in some ways is is more compelling
Melissa Wong: is that we have a professional obligation
Melissa Wong: to practice accessibility. We say that in the library world
Melissa Wong: we provide equitable resources, equitable services to all of our patrons, and that
Melissa Wong: includes our patrons with disabilities. Right so there to me, is this really profound ethical obligation to do this work? The other thing to keep in mind is that accessibility improves access and learning for everyone.
If we think about something like captions in a video like captions are necessary for our deaf and hard of hearing patrons, but they are used by so many other people. They are used by patrons who are working in noisy coffee shops and want to watch a quick video
or a patron who's working in a quiet study room. They're used a lot by non native speakers who want to make sure that they picked up everything that was said, and there are many, many accessibility practices
Melissa Wong: that that have a wide range of benefits for a lot of our patrons.
Melissa Wong: So, as we talk about disability, disability, Professionals generally divide disabilities into 4 major groups, auditory, visual, physical, and cognitive. And I want to talk just very briefly about each of those categories, and some of the accessibility considerations that they bring up
so auditory disabilities are disabilities related to hearing. It includes individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as individuals who have difficulty hearing soft sounds or sounds in certain ranges.
Melissa Wong: and the main consideration here and and remember today we are only talking about videos. There. Certainly there are issues in other areas of our library services, but we are only going to focus on videos. But the main consideration here is ensuring that patrons can either hear the audio component of a video.
Melissa Wong: or that there is an alternative way to receive that information, such as captions and transcripts.
Melissa Wong: Visual disabilities are those that are related to site. They include individuals who are blind, or have low vision, or perhaps a narrow range of field in their vision. They also include color blindness.
Melissa Wong: The main concern here is ensuring that patrons can easily see and read visual content, or have an alternative way to receive that information such as an audio description of an image or on screen action.
Melissa Wong: We also need to be aware that visually disabled patrons may be navigating our websites with screen readers and keyboards rather than mice. So the pages that contain our videos and any video players that we're using should be compatible with those alternative input devices.
Physical disabilities include mobility issues. So we often think about patrons who might be using a wheelchair or a walker or other mobility. Aid. It also includes disabilities related to fine motor skills. So somebody who has arthritis or another disability that makes it difficult to control a mouse or to make very fine or quick movements with their hands.
Melissa Wong: Also, people might be again using an alternative input device like a pointer stick.
So our main consideration here is that our patrons can interact with the web pages that are hosting our videos and with player controls any buttons or controls should be large enough that the patron can easily locate and click on them with the mouse.
and that they are compatible with keyboard navigation and other alternative input devices.
Melissa Wong: Cognitive disabilities is a very broad category. I think it includes a lot of disabilities that many of us would
normally think about a separate categories. But in the world of disability. Professionals are usually put together under the umbrella of cognitive disabilities. It includes a developmental disabilities.
It includes learning disabilities that affect how people process information for example, dyslexia or an auditory processing disorder. It includes attention, deficit disorders, and it includes autism and other forms of neurodiversity. Again, very broad category.
Melissa Wong: When we think about cognitive disabilities and videos. Our main consideration is ensuring that content is easy to understand. This includes having a clear logical structure for information.
Melissa Wong: using concise, straightforward language in our text and iteration, using a reasonable pace for narration, ensuring that visual stay on screen long enough for people to view and process that information, and avoiding extraneous content.
Melissa Wong: sound and images that might contribute to cognitive overload.
Melissa Wong: I want to briefly mention that there is a set of technical standards for accessibility. The web content accessibility. Guidelines usually just referred to as W. C. A. G.
Melissa Wong: The main set of guidelines is W. C. A. G. 2 point which came out in 2,008. The and that that set of guidelines did 2 things: Number one. It's structured accessibility
around this framework of poor. I've seen a few people mentioned the poor framework already in the chat, and we'll look at it here in just a second. It also introduced the concept of compliance levels of a
Melissa Wong: double a and triple a. Since Wcag. Came out in 2,008 there has been a Wc. A 2 point, one it doesn't replace 2.0. It's supplements 2.0 that mostly looked at things like mobile devices and touch screen devices.
Melissa Wong: Also there is a forthcoming 2.2. It is currently in draft form, and it's expected to be finalized now in May of this year, and it will also be a supplement to 2, not a full replacement.
Melissa Wong: And the reason mostly this is important. A. The poor framework is a really useful way to think about accessibility, and, in fact, we're going to use it today. Also, those compliance levels of a
Melissa Wong: double, a and triple a are important, because most Federal and State regulations point to compliance with a and
Melissa Wong: double a as kind of the legal standard.
Melissa Wong: So we aren't going to do a lot with with the web content Accessibility guidelines today. But I at least want you to be familiar with that concept if you have not heard of it before, and the resource list has a couple of places to get you started with learning more.
So this idea of poor the
Melissa Wong: Wcag. Is organized around this framework of poor meaning that a websites and media need to be perceivable.
Melissa Wong: operable, understandable, and robust.
Melissa Wong: Perceivable means that all information must be perceivable to users. People must be able to hear or read the content that is in a video.
Melissa Wong: Operable means that the interface and any components within the video must be operable. Patrons must be able to interact with websites and media by using those video controls like play and pause
Melissa Wong: clicking links on a page. And again, including being able to do that with a keyboard only, or alternative input device.
Melissa Wong: Understandable means that people need to be able to understand the content. So content should be well organized. Narration and text should use clear, simple language.
Melissa Wong: and any visuals should be easy to understand, and then robust websites and media should be robust enough to work with a wide range of technologies, including assistive technology.
Melissa Wong: So with that background knowledge. Let's start with this idea of perceivable. How do we ensure that PE patrons can perceive the content that is in our videos, and we're going to talk about captions, transcripts, and descriptive audio.
Melissa Wong: And I know that people often have a lot of questions about captions. So i'm going to try and spend a little bit more time there today. Compared to some other topics.
The first thing to do is to make sure that we're using the right vocabulary, and I have to. People use captions and subtitles as if they're interchangeable.
Melissa Wong: But they really are 2 different things. Captions are a text version of the audio track. and include all. Not only all of the speech, but any other sounds like laughter or background. Noise subtitles are actually a translation from another language, and they address only speech
Melissa Wong: because they appear in the same places captions. If we're watching something like television or a movie, I think that's why people sometimes think of them interchangeably, but but that's not accurate. They really are 2 different things. You may also have seen cart. It is, at live event, live events like a conference.
These are captions of the speakers presentation. They typically appear on a separate screen, and they are human, generated by a card professional.
Melissa Wong: You may have also seen real time automatic captions. In fact, we have them in Zoom. Google Slides will do this
Melissa Wong: again. They are intended for live events like a Webinar. They are machine generated captions of the speakers presentation. They use voice recognition along with some artificial intelligence, and the quality of those automatic captions is continuously improving. They they really are quite good.
Melissa Wong: But we should keep in mind that they are not a substitute for real captioning in recorded media. When we talk about putting a video on our library's website we need to use. We need to be putting in real captions.
There are actually 2 kinds of captions, open captions and closed captions.
Melissa Wong: Open captions are embedded in the video stream and cannot be turned off. The advantage is that users do not need to ha know how to turn on the captions, because they are always visible.
Melissa Wong: and and they are sometimes used in settings like museums or a lobby kiosk, where you want the captions to be on at all times. Closed captions can be turned on and off by the user
Melissa Wong: That's what you see in a place like Youtube Closed captions may also allow the user to adjust the size, the color, the display, which all of which increase accessibility and closed captions are generally preferred, because they can be turned off
Melissa Wong: by users who might find them distracting, and because users who need them often can control the display.
Melissa Wong: And I appreciate all of these comments here in the chat where people are sharing advice about creating good captions. there are technical guidelines for caption quality.
Melissa Wong: so captions should be verbatim.
I
Melissa Wong: you they should accurately reflect what the speaker said. You should not correct or alter what the speaker said, Even if there's a mistake.
or there are arms and odds those should stay in the captions.
Melissa Wong: You should also include any non-spoken audio content such as laughter background noise music.
Melissa Wong: If there's more than one speaker. You may need to indicate who is speaking. If it's not
Melissa Wong: immediately clear from watching the video, somebody spaces on screen, they're clearly the speaker. If somebody speaking off screen, you'd want to indicate who's speaking. It's really important that the captions stay synced with the audio. You don't want to let them get offset, because that will be very confusing for somebody who is listening to the narration, but also
Melissa Wong: watching the captions as a backup. We need to make sure those 2 things stay in sync captions should use proper spelling.
Melissa Wong: capitalization, and punctuation. This is very important.
Melissa Wong: This is where automatic captions often fall short. For instance, youtube's automatic captions do not add capitalization and punctuation. So we need to go in, and we need to make sure that we've got all of that correct.
There are some technical standards for how those captions should be laid out. It's a one to 2 lines per caption, no more than 32 characters per line, and the rationale here is that those shorter lines reduce I fatigue from scanning back and forth. And if you want to get into some of those technicalities, or how to break
your captions properly from line to line. There are some resources in that resource list, and, in fact.
Melissa Wong: for anybody who maybe joined us late. I just put a link in the chat that will take you to that resource list again. Okay.
Also
Melissa Wong: make sure that your captions are easily red. If you have control of the player, or if you're picking a player, you want to look for one where those captions are going to be large enough in place for easy readability. So I think many of us sometimes are putting our
Melissa Wong: videos on places like Youtube, where we don't have a lot of control. But it is something to keep in the back of your mind.
Now, how do we actually get those captions in there?
Melissa Wong: Generally speaking, depending on how you're creating your videos. There are 2 opportunities to add captions. One is in the recording software that you're using like a camtasia or a screen cast automatic.
Melissa Wong: The other is with the media server that you're using. So if you're uploading it to a campus media server, or you're uploading to Youtube or Vimeo, those will also give you an opportunity to add in captions.
Melissa Wong: and which one you pick really just depends on the ease of use and the quality of captions that it is helping you create.
Melissa Wong: And this is where, then, thinking about automatic captions becomes really important. Both
Melissa Wong: video recording software and the media servers that a lot of us use will allow you to generate automatic captions.
Melissa Wong: hey? So again they're using voice recognition and some artificial intelligence to figure out what you said and generate these captions.
Melissa Wong: but they're really intended to be the first step in
Melissa Wong: generating captions with the with the expectation that you will then edit them, depending on what service you're using. The accuracy varies.
It's usually between 80 and 90. I see somebody in the chat mentioning Kaltura, which is a very popular option for campus media servers in higher LED. There
Melissa Wong: voice recognition is phenomenal.
Melissa Wong: and it has been pre-populated with some professional language like lib guide. It recognizes Ebsco host and capitalizes it properly. It's amazing how well it does
Melissa Wong: Other services I've used really struggle with some of that professional jargon, and almost all automatic captions are going to struggle with proper names.
Melissa Wong: so you can kind of play around with both your recording application and your hosting site to see what might give you the best start. But just remember that you will always need to correct those automatic captions for Miss Herd. Words for punctuation
Melissa Wong: on their own. The automatic captions are not accurate enough to meet accessibility requirements.
That's a really important point on their own.
Melissa Wong: They are not adequate. So if you have colleagues to say, well, it's better than nothing, or it's good enough. It it's not. It is not meeting accessibility standards
Melissa Wong: also it because it struggles with things like names. It can, it will mangle the names of presenters in a Webinar, or, if you mentioned the work of other scholars, it usually will not be able to capture those names correctly, and I think that also becomes an issue of citational justice in our work.
Also, I will give you a heads up
Melissa Wong: that many of these auto captioning
Melissa Wong: services
Melissa Wong: can introduce profanity into your automatic captions.
Melissa Wong: I have made captions for work, and I have had Kaltura right very great service. It did introduce an f bomb into one of my videos, which, of course, because I added my captions, I caught
Melissa Wong: right. But that would have been really embarrassing in the resource list. I also gave you a link to an article from wired about these kids videos on Youtube right things intended for young children like Sesame Street style, educational videos.
Melissa Wong: and the producers are relying on the auto captions and the auto captions are bringing in profanity they're using like they're mis hearing the word corn and putting in the word porn instead. Yeah. So we we really, as Craig is saying, need to prove everything before it goes out to the public because it's it's in
Melissa Wong: potentially very embarrassing or even just creating problems. Right? A lot of other libraries are under challenges. We do not need to be introducing something inappropriate into our educational videos. So you gotta correct those auto
Melissa Wong: captions.
Melissa Wong: So some options for for generating your captions.
Melissa Wong: One is that you just listen and transcribe. This is kind of the old school way of doing it. You do it all by hand. It obviously takes the longest.
Melissa Wong: Another option is if you used a video when you excuse me if you used a script when you made your video. Usually you can upload that script, and then the voice recognition will just match the script
Melissa Wong: with the timing in the video, and it will generate captions. It will format them properly, and because it's using your script, you know that it's going to be accurate now that only works if you stick to your script really carefully.
Melissa Wong: But that is, that is often a great option.
Melissa Wong: The other option is to use that automatic captioning feature, and then you just go in and correct it. I do this a lot with my own videos in the courses that I teach. I I want to make a video that shows my students how to search a database. I
Melissa Wong: I make a quick video. I let the auto captions do their work, and I just go in and and correct them.
Melissa Wong: And, by the way, I really love all of these examples of of M. Herd. Auto captions here in the Chat, which are great examples of the importance of editing those captions.
Melissa Wong: So let's see. I can give you a couple of examples. Some folks find it really helpful to see a few examples. So in my courses at Illinois, excuse me, we do have a a campus media space. It is run by Keltera that we've mentioned earlier.
Melissa Wong: And so because that automatic captioning is so accurate for me, I usually will plan a video with just a very loose outline of what I'm going to show my students
Melissa Wong: when I record the video, it's pretty extemporaneous. I saved that video file, and then I upload it to the campus media space
Melissa Wong: request the automatic captions. It takes me usually just a few minutes to edit them, and then we have an extra step. You just have to say Yes, I like these captions. You enable them, and i'm good to go. It's very, very efficient.
Melissa Wong: but I will say it only works because our media space captions are so good. So I also teach a course right now at Simmons University
Melissa Wong: and those videos I put on Youtube. Youtube's automatic captioning is pretty good.
Melissa Wong: but it doesn't do punctuation and capitalization.
Melissa Wong: and it. I just get frustrated editing it. So i'll there. Do one of 2 things. I'll either write a script for a video. And then I just read that script. As I record my video.
Melissa Wong: I upload the video file to Youtube.
Melissa Wong: and then in Youtube. If you save your script as a text file, you can upload it, and Youtube will convert it into captions. And
Melissa Wong: now I I do find sometimes it it will make a little mistake it, for whatever reason tends to drop apostrophes.
Melissa Wong: So I still proof, read it. But then, when you save your video it, the captions and Youtube are enabled automatically. So if i'm able to stick to a script really carefully, that's a really efficient way of getting those captions in there.
Melissa Wong: But I will say I do have videos where I find it hard to stick to a script. If i'm demonstrating a database. It is hard for me to both be
Melissa Wong: looking at the database, navigating it and then following my script. And so there I actually use a relatively low cost video recording application called screencastomatic.
Melissa Wong: It also does automatic captions. I think they are a little bit better than you 2, and so I will make my video in screencastomatic.
Melissa Wong: I'll request the automatic captions in that software, I and then I do still have to edit them. Now it particularly struggles with that professional jargon like lib guide and ebsco host. And then I actually just save those as a text file.
I can upload the video to Youtube. I upload that caption file to Youtube and give it a quick proofread, and i'm good to go.
Melissa Wong: There are
Melissa Wong: third party voice recognition applications you can use. I see how there's mentioning one in the chat. So there are a lot of different options, and and a lot of it comes down to what video software are you using to make your recordings? Where are you going to upload these videos?
Melissa Wong: And and then what process are you using? Are you creating a script? Because if you're reading a script, it's easy to turn that into captions. If you are speaking a little bit more extemporaneously, it's going to take a little bit more work. And you just need to figure out a process that that works with the technology that you have.
Melissa Wong: Okay.
Melissa Wong: So that's captions.
Melissa Wong: I see Craig mentioning Auto AI. So for folks aren't familiar Auto AI is a speech recognition software that's kind of the state of the art. It's very, very accurate. I actually think that Kaltura
Melissa Wong: is using Otter AI, but I couldn't find proof of that when I was looking yesterday. Zoom uses auto AI, actually, and that's that's why zooms are are quite good.
Melissa Wong: It's never going to be perfect. But again. And this is why I say, you have to look at what recording technology are you using what media server are you using? And it kind of pick the best of the options that you have?
Melissa Wong: Okay.
Melissa Wong: So that's captions. Let's talk about some other accessibility practices. I do want to briefly mention 2 other things related to perceivable content. Transcripts are a single document. That's just the transcript of your entire video.
Melissa Wong: It follows the same rules of captioning. It should be verbatim. It should indicate speakers and background noise, right? It should be edited for punctuation, etc. And, in fact, you can typically generate your transcript from your captions, which is super quick and easy. Just keep in mind that that transcript file should be formatic for ease of reading. Think of it as like producing a document. So have some paragraph breaks.
Melissa Wong: Put a little bit of white space between those paragraphs, so that it is going to be easy to read. Make sure that you are making it available in an accessible medium like HTML or word, and that it's easy to find with your video
Melissa Wong: another accessibility practice is descriptive audio. So descriptive audio describes what is happening on screen for users with visual disabilities
Melissa Wong: in the resource list. I give you some excuse me examples of descriptive audio, just some short videos that you can watch on Youtube. If you'd like to get a sense of what this sounds like.
Melissa Wong: Also, also, descriptive audio is required for television and streaming programs. So if you have something like apple TV or Netflix pick up, pick a favorite program. You can go into the settings and turn on descriptive audio. It is
very fun to listen to how this is done.
Melissa Wong: Okay, descriptive audio is contextual. The the writer is making decisions about what to describe, based on what the the listener needs to know about the on screen action. So they aren't necessarily describing everything that's that's on the screen. Right? They're making choices.
There are technically 2 ways of doing this standard audio description fits into the pauses and the dialogue
Melissa Wong: extended. The video actually has to be paused to describe on screen content. Now. descriptive audio is not currently required for things like instructional videos that our libraries are doing.
Melissa Wong: But I think there's 2 things to be aware of there.
Melissa Wong: It is required for things like television broadcasting and streaming programs. Right? So I think it's a good idea that we should all just be keeping an eye on what's happening in this area. It certainly would be something that you might want to include in a promotional video for your library.
Melissa Wong: And there are places that will help you create descriptive audio. You can essentially kind of contract this work out right.
The other thing to consider, though, is that
Melissa Wong: you can minimize the need for some of that descriptive audio in an instructional video. If you're simply describing what's on the screen
Melissa Wong: at the time. So if i'm making a a slidecast video for my students, it's a powerpoint. It goes with a lecture, and there is a figure on the slide. I'm going to describe that figure.
Melissa Wong: So it's just part of the built in narration of the lecture. Not expect that i'm going to add it as audio description later. Right?
Melissa Wong: So again it is. It is probably a step beyond what a lot of us are able to do at this point. But I just at least want to mention that as an accessibility practice as one that you can explore and keep an eye on for the future.
Melissa Wong: Yes, and I think you know to Craig's point it can be inconsistent how you access it. But again, it is. It is one of those areas that is a in some ways a developing accessibility practice right? And so I think it will become more common and more standardized over time.
Melissa Wong: All right. Let's get beyond captions. I know that captions are are something that people often think about with accessibility. They certainly are extremely important. Even if we could get all of our libraries to accurately caption videos, that would be a huge step forward. But let's talk about a few other things that we can do as we create video.
Melissa Wong: And here we're really going to focus on this idea of ensuring that our content is understandable.
Melissa Wong: So content of our videos, we want to create short
Melissa Wong: focused videos, particularly with instructional videos. We want to teach one skill per video. This allows people to focus on one skill at a time and then pace how they learn the material to prevent cognitive overload.
Melissa Wong: If you are covering complex material, then you can break that into multiple videos.
Melissa Wong: Also be sure to script your videos carefully, so that you're eliminating unnecessary information like lengthy introductions or trivia, or that tangential content that sometimes creeps in to our videos.
Melissa Wong: As you work on your narration, you want to make sure that when you record you eliminate background noise
and
Melissa Wong: speak clearly. A good mic can really help with this. It'll both capture your speaking clearly, and usually will eliminate some minor background noises, and then it can even help with things like decreasing popping sounds
Melissa Wong: in your voice. When you speak, you want to be sure that your narration is evenly paced, that you're enunciating words clearly, and that you pause at appropriate points to give listeners time to process information.
We should use simple jargon, free, conversational language.
Melissa Wong: We are not writing novels. We are not writing scholarly articles. We just want straightforward.
Melissa Wong: simple sentences.
Melissa Wong: Again, any images that are on screen you should describe Don't. Assume that people can see them, or that they understand what the figure is telling them. Go ahead and describe it. Yep, as Craig says, right. We're like building a picture for someone.
Melissa Wong: If you're doing screencast videos in particular, that is showing somebody how to use your online catalog. Let's say.
Melissa Wong: try to use descriptive directional language as you narrate actions so that viewers know where to look. It can be a little hard to keep up with somebody's mousing around a database screen, so we can say things like in the upper right of the screen.
Melissa Wong: Click on the chat with a librarian link. So we're just queuing people where to look on their screen.
Melissa Wong: Be careful that you are naming the buttons that you're clicking on. Sometimes we have a bad habit of saying click here or right it it, but they may not know where here was. If they missed what you did so make sure that you're naming those, buttons
Melissa Wong: be careful to stay synchronized with your on-screen action. We want to narrate each step as we take it, but make sure that we don't get ahead
Melissa Wong: of the database, and that sounds so obvious. But it is very easy to do when you're showing someone how to search a database that you use a lot. You know
Melissa Wong: what's going to happen when you click on that search button. It is very easy to be talking about the results screen before it's actually appeared. So we want to.
Melissa Wong: We just wanted to be really careful that we're staying synchronized with that on screen action, as we narrate.
Melissa Wong: If you are using text in your video, make sure it's legible. Think about folks who maybe have low vision, large, simple fonts, plain background, strong color, contrast.
Melissa Wong: use, concise, straightforward writing. Make sure that any text stays on screen for a sufficient amount of time that people can easily read it and avoid fancy transitions. Text effects, you know, flashing
Melissa Wong: all of those things just cause cognitive overload, and we don't need them.
Melissa Wong: If you are using images, every image should have a purpose. Avoid things that are just there to be decorative, or that maybe are meant to add some humor, because what can happen, of course, is that they can be distracting, or they can be confusing, as people try to make sense of them.
Melissa Wong: I try to use a simple, consistent design. Remember that with our images a less is usually more.
Melissa Wong: Again, make sure that those images stay on screen long enough to be viewed and processed.
Melissa Wong: Avoid using color to indicate meaning. If you have a a chart, maybe you have a list of do's. And Don't, you want to be careful that you are only indicating the difference between 2 things with color, because that will be lost on somebody who's color blind.
So we always want to label things. We're going to label our list of dues with do at the top, and our list of Don't. We don't at the top right rather than
Melissa Wong: using only colors in a chart, we might be sure that we label every line with the data point that it indicates. And then finally, if you, if you're doing something like a a slide presentation where you are going to share that slide deck online, you'll need to make sure that you've added all text for any images.
Melissa Wong: if it's just a video, nobody's going to see the slides. Then all text isn't really relevant. But I know many of us make presentations. We share the slides online, and we want that all text to be there.
Melissa Wong: Couple of other thoughts related to screencast videos in particular. Again, the kind of thing where you're showing somebody how to search your online catalog or a database.
Melissa Wong: make sure that you give some consideration to how you want to focus that frame and focus it on the essential contact. Decide if you need to show only the browser window. If you need to show tabs in your browser, you just trying to avoid distracting or or non-relevant content
also depending on the recording software that you're using. You may be able to use some of those editing options to zoom in on content, and that will both enable better viewing and eliminate some extraneous content.
Melissa Wong: Make sure that you are mousing and typing smoothly and slowly enough that people can follow you and try to avoid extraneous mouse movements or scrolling. That might be distracting
Melissa Wong: again. I know that I have a bad habit of playing with my mouse when i'm thinking. But of course that will get picked up by my recording, software so I have to be really careful to not play with my mouse when i'm making a video.
Now, if you want to know more about good
Melissa Wong: e-learning design in particular, and especially things like extraneous images or content. There is a lot of research in that area. The major researcher is Richard Mayor. I'm. Going to put his name in the chat. He has developed a set of principles for multimedia learning that are really widely used in the instructional design Field and the resource list has some recommended publications to get you started that I would have
highly recommend.
Melissa Wong: If you are ready to sort of take your video creation beyond captions.
Melissa Wong: Mayor is an excellent place to start, and again i'll just put that link to the resource list
Melissa Wong: in the chat.
Melissa Wong: Okay.
Melissa Wong: very quickly. If you remember we were looking at that poor framework we've talked about the P. For perceivable. Then we skipped to you for understandable there is the operable and robust, and I will just very briefly mention thinking about player accessibility.
Melissa Wong: So we should always avoid auto play videos on our websites. If people go to a website page and the video plays automatically. That can be very disorienting, especially for people using screen readers who can't see where the video is to stop it.
Also that content might play before people are ready for it.
Melissa Wong: So we just want to avoid auto play. Also, we should always give them access to the player controls that would allow people to pause the content to rewind and re-watch, etc.
Melissa Wong: Do make sure that both your web Page and your video player are compatible with keyboard navigation and and sort of in general. Right? It's at that point. If you're putting a video on your library's web page, you need to think not only about the accessibility of your video, but the accessibility of that surrounding web page.
Melissa Wong: Okay.
Melissa Wong: And I think that leaves us about
Melissa Wong: 10 min
Melissa Wong: for questions. So, as Julie said earlier, it's because we've had so many fantastic resource and idea sharing in the chat. I really appreciate that. But it means the chat's been really busy. If you have a specific question, if you can put it in the Q. A. Julie is gonna help feed me questions.
Julie Edwards: Thank you so much, Melissa. Thank you, everyone, and just a reminder. I will be sending out the Chat Transcript because there is so much good information in there, so you'll get that as part of the package of all the resources for this Webinar. So we'll get through as many of these questions as we can. Someone is asking, how did the Wcag principles apply to social media.
Melissa Wong: So w cag principles apply to any kind of media web pages.
Melissa Wong: documents, videos. They would also apply to social media, for example, that any images you use in social media should have all text.
Melissa Wong: any video. If you embed a video into your library's social media feed it should meet those Wc. Principles. the Wc. A. Principles, I will say they. They are quite large. They are a lot to wrap your head around, but they absolutely apply to any kind of media, including social media.
Julie Edwards: Thank you. Someone's asking should a library be using closed captioning when showing a movie at the library.
Melissa Wong: Oh, yes. absolutely
Melissa Wong: because you I I would assume that at least some of your attendees would. White either might be hard of hearing or have other reasons that they would like to be able to see the captions. So why wouldn't we turn them on?
Julie Edwards: Excellent. Thank you. What are your thoughts on the use of AI voices for instructional videos. Do you know of any accessibility concerns?
Melissa Wong: So that is so interesting because Richard Mayor, who I just mentioned a few minutes ago did some early research on
Melissa Wong: artificial voices and learning.
Melissa Wong: But I think that that research is a little bit in flux, as artificial voices get much stronger, so
Melissa Wong: I I don't feel like I know enough to comment on the accessibility of that. Yeah, certainly. You have to look at the quality of that around things like mispronunciation of words. But a great place to start with, Mayor, is there something called the embodiment principle?
Melissa Wong: I'm gonna type that into the chat, and if you want to do a little bit of research that might be sort of the the place to start with some keywords.
Julie Edwards: Excellent! Thank you
Julie Edwards: 2 questions have come in about how do we? Oh, I just lost it where you go. What tips do you have for urging vendors to improve their accessibility. 2 questions have come in about that.
Melissa Wong: What i'm sorry was that what strategies?
Melissa Wong: Yes, what tips do you have for urging them for the Ios electronic resources, any of that to improve accessibility, you know. So one of the things I I kind of like to remember is, I actually think that many library vendors are trying to do the right thing. Many of them have staff who specialize
Melissa Wong: in accessibility. They are the staff that are producing what what somebody just cited here. The Vpad. The voluntary product, accessibility, template, which is a document that they fill out. But there certainly are.
Melissa Wong: you know there is not enough. There is never enough attention to accessibility right now in our profession, and even well intentioned vendors can make mistakes. So
Melissa Wong: I, One of the things to me is is, you try to find the right person to talk to and approach them in a sense of. But assuming that they want to do the right thing, and they just don't realize that something Isn't working correctly or something, could be more accessible.
Melissa Wong: Certainly 1 one strategy is to point out the legal requirements, and that is where Wc. A. G. Is great right? That is the common standard that everyone is looking at.
Melissa Wong: So that is your set of of guidelines to point to, particularly because State and Federal agencies do look at those and require compliance with the a and the Double a.
Melissa Wong: Also. you can look at your own procurement guidelines right, especially if you're working within a larger institution like a large university, You probably have campus procurement guidelines that mandate accessibility, and you can point to those right you can kind of say, Look, I have to know that this is accessible, or I have to.
This product has to be able to do Xyz for me to pay for it.
Melissa Wong: You might also look at how you can band together with other libraries through your local consortia, so that you are right. It it's just more. We have more purchasing power when we work together.
Melissa Wong: Yes, and Catherine is putting in here. The Big 10 has done quite a bit of work around accessibility for libraries, and that library Accessibility Alliance has a lot of great information, and might also be a place to find people to collaborate with.
Melissa Wong: Vpad is the I'm. Going to type it in voluntary product
Melissa Wong: accessibility. template. It is essentially a document that lists a bunch of areas
Melissa Wong: where products should be accessible, and vendors fill it out and say, do they meet the standard or not, and sort of what are they doing in this area. It is voluntary, right like you might. You should always double check what the vendor is telling you. But that is a great place to start to understand
Melissa Wong: how accessible a product is, or and where the vendor is currently doing work.
Julie Edwards: Thank you for any of you who are interested. We post ours on our website. So if if you are curious about that, you can see what one looks like.
Melissa Wong: Thanks, and and and to Julie's point, Many vendors do right, like. If you go look for it, you will find it
Julie Edwards: awesome.
Julie Edwards: So this is an interesting question. It it leads into instructional design. When videos broken into chapters be a reasonable option rather than having a separate video per part of a complex.
Melissa Wong: you know. That's a really interesting question. Certainly, by breaking something into chapters. You are doing some of that segmenting that helps make the content more understandable, and allows people to either find a a convenient place to pause, or to easily jump back to a section that they needed.
Melissa Wong: I do find, I I think, like Kia saying here in the chat that people still do often prefer a bunch of shorter videos, and they're
Melissa Wong: is some research on that for academic libraries around students and instructional videos about really preferring. And and when we say short. we mean short, like under 2 min.
Julie Edwards: Thank you.
Julie Edwards: Someone's asking, what are the pros and cons of captions versus transcriptions? Are there different situations that are best for each type. Or do you recommend just offering both at all times? You should have both at all times?
Melissa Wong: That's that's the short version. You should have both at all times and transcripts are usually quite easy. Once you've generated your captions, your software will typically give you a draft transcript document. So making a transcript is just a couple of more minutes worth of work.
Melissa Wong: One of the nice things about both captions, but in particular transcripts is that they are usually searchable. So that's really nice for maybe the user who wants to just go back to a particular point in a video or grab a piece of
Melissa Wong: vocabulary that they missed. Also, transcripts tend to help with search engine optimization. If you want your content to be more findable.
Melissa Wong: But yeah, you should just do both.
Julie Edwards: This is a question, Melissa, actually about your slides and the resource list. Someone is saying that their organization doesn't allow for access to Google drive. Is there another way to get the resources.
Melissa Wong: Julie? The resources? You said you were going to put on the Niche Academy website, right?
Julie Edwards: So if people wait till the recording comes out. You'll also give them access to it.
Melissa Wong: Yes, or if if you can't access the Google drive that, drop me an email, and i'll send them to you. I I don't want 500, and I think most of us can probably access the Google drive. But if your organization blocks access. Send me an email, and i'll. I'll zip it back to you this week.
Julie Edwards: and by Friday you'll have all of this from you guys. Tomorrow you'll you'll have access
Julie Edwards: access to it. Let's see there's so many more questions we're not going to get to all of them. I'll try to to to hit as many as I can. This one came up in the chat, and it'd be interesting to have your perspective on it, Melissa, which is more accessible. Dark text on a light background or light text on a dark background.
Melissa Wong: Oh, okay, so
Melissa Wong: sorry. It. It really depends on a lot of things right, including exactly which colors you've picked, and how large your font is. There are arguments for both, and sometimes it depends on. If people have a particular visual disability, they might have a preference for one or the other. So in general, like websites that allow you to kind of flip, the colors and things like that are really nice. But i'm gonna say that is probably more than we can tackle today.
But I also think there are some resources out there. If you want to do a little bit of research.
Melissa Wong: That's a kind of a not answer, Julie. Sorry.
Julie Edwards: no, that's fine. That's great.
Julie Edwards: Okay, I think we've got time for one more question. So one more question someone is saying, I see the examples of descriptive audio videos. But do you have any libraries that you recommend learning from that use descriptive audio techniques for database tutorials. Specifically.
Melissa Wong: I have not seen that, to be honest. the the University of Illinois has started experimenting with some descriptive audio, but mostly for more promotional videos. And, in fact, the resource list. That's where I give you 2 examples, and those are like the Chancellor's holiday messages, and they do descriptive audio for those. I have not
Melissa Wong: seen a library that does it, but I also haven't gone looking really hard.
Julie Edwards: Thank you.
Melissa Wong: So yeah, let's see. Maybe we've got time for for one more. Do you know of any software that's good at captioning in languages other than and other languages. I don't. I'm sorry that is outside my expertise.
Melissa Wong: That's great. No, thank you so much. And with that we are at the top of the hour. I want to respect everyone's time. Thank you so much, Melissa, for this excellent presentation. It was such a pleasure, and thank you to everyone for coming
Julie Edwards: as a reminder. I will send all of this to all of you within a few days. Chat, Transcript audio transcripts, slides, resources, and recording. So check your email for those. If you're interested, you can check out our blog for upcoming Webinars, and I hope you all have a great rest of the week. Melissa. Thank you again so much. Thank you, Julie.
Julie Edwards: Have a great afternoon. Everybody.