Tag: accessibility

Publishing Transcripts for audio/video content in VoiceThread

OK, you have a VoiceThread with audio and video comments and you find out that you have a student that self-identifies they require accessibility accommodations. What do you do?First step is to transcribe the audio. There are a number of…

OK, you have a VoiceThread with audio and video comments and you find out that you have a student that self-identifies they require accessibility accommodations. What do you do?

First step is to transcribe the audio. There are a number of ways to do this. You may need to export or extract the audio first. You could pay to export the audio from VoiceThread. This is the easiest method. I’m cheap, so I used an audio loop-back cable to capture the audio as it played back in the VoiceThread. Then you need to transcribe the audio. The easiest way to do this is to use MovieCaptioner. This software is worth every penny if you have to do any transcribing.

Then, I created an “Accessibility” identity and used that identity to post text comments that were copied-and-pasted from the transcripts I had made. After that, I used VoiceThread to move the transcripts so that they were adjacent to the audio content they were related to.

Click to see an example (slide 1)

SmartBuilder Authoring Tool

My department, OIDI, recently purchased a license for SmartBuilder and we began learning to use the tool for future projects.Melissa Hicks mentioned that she was talking with Mark Heckel about the tool. I just caught up with him on the…

My department, OIDI, recently purchased a license for SmartBuilder and we began learning to use the tool for future projects.

Melissa Hicks mentioned that she was talking with Mark Heckel about the tool. I just caught up with him on the phone and he shared some very useful insights…

Accessibility

  • content is only accessible is if it is being run Windows 8 on a Windows XP machine (?) using Window Eyes (a screen reader); user has to manually turn on CC and if this is done the audio is turned off
  • when asked if SmartBuilder will be upgraded to be more accessible, their (Nab’s) reply was that it is a possibility for the future (one to two years potentially if ever)

Interface/Features

  • A number of the commands are not very intuitive (publishing courses for example)
  • The layers feature and working with multiple displays is clunky
  • Lacks the ability to create back-end database integration that is relatively easy to do with HTML5
  • YouTube content doesn’t import [well] into SmartBuilder

Propriety

  • HTML5 developers are far more common than those with expertise in SmartBuilder here at Penn State; Bill Rose comments that there is a new LinkedIn presence/community growing

Publishing

  • entirely Flash – this impacts the accessibility of the published content and playback, or rather lack there of, on iOS devices; also Tim Plummer confirmed that “Adobe is shelving Flash” – so why would we build new content in a technology that is being phased out by the originators of Flash?
  • defaults to save on their servers – there was concern over where the content would reside
  • fixed resolution – a specific resolution or size of the project has to be established and the content is fixed at that size as opposed to being flexible for viewing across a range of devices; content that is larger than the specified resolution results in scroll bars that have proven to be problem when they nest within one another; this contrasts with the fluidity of developing in HTML5

Update 2/14/13 – A formal response from Leif Cederblom of SmartBuilder

Hi Kent,

My name is Leif.  I’m the Director of User Experience at Suddenly Smart.  I’m writing because I saw a post you had made a few months back regarding why you thought SmartBuilder was not a good choice for developers there at Penn State.

I agree with your points regarding our current Accessibility situation.  Flash has been a bear to deal with, and even despite our best efforts, Flash has made it nearly impossible.  Unfortunately, Adobe has not been a great development platform for a number of reasons, and this is a prime example.

Your points about HTML 5 are also valid, but (and here’s the main reason for asking your further reflection…) we are releasing an HTML 5 conversion utility for SmartBuilder next month.  This conversion utility is part of the core code of our next version of SmartBuilder.  (It’s really not an if ever thing… this is something we’re furiously working toward.)

In the meantime, this HTML 5 conversion utility will also put us a step closer to having a better solution for accessibility.

Regarding one of your other criticisms that our displays are cludgy, well… I partially agree with you there, but also would point out that their functionality has enabled some advanced capabilities that are very valuable for building more robust content — in particular regarding the Flow Chart.

You mentioned that we lack the ability to do back-end database integration, but that is not in fact true.  SmartBuilder has a Server Communication object built-in that does just that.  (To be fair, this feature is more about data reporting, than reading in large amounts of content.)

YouTube content can be played through our iFrame object, which is pretty easy to use.  (It’s true that you do need to publish your content to view the final result when using the iFrame though.)

The publish process is done a bit differently from other tools because it is a server-based product, not a desktop product.  It needs to be published and downloaded in two distinct steps.

As for your content residing on our server, that is a choice that Penn State made.  You could install SmartBuilder on an internal server there (and actually empower as many authors as you wanted for a very reasonable price.)

I realize that for relatively static content, HTML 5 does have some benefits.  However, the reason behind SmartBuilder, and why it continues to be a popular tool in the market-place is because it allows people to go beyond building static content, and get into building more interactive exercises.  While HTML 5 does have these capabilities, as our content converter will show, most other tools still focus on very topical levels of interactivity.

I’m making the assumption that others listen to your advice, so  I am hoping to change your mind about SmartBuilder, and encourage you to give it a second chance.  While it may be more tool than necessary for just getting content online, it is a unique tool in allowing instructors to build more meaningful practice exercises.  SmartBuilder can still build content that no other authoring platform can.  It also would allow your organization to re-use, share and collaborate on content in a way that only a content management system can.

Seeing as that you don’t have a community account of SmartBuilder, I’m not even sure if you’ve seen it personally first-hand, so if you’d like a personal tour of the software, I would be happy to take the time to assist with that.  Between our innovative approach to accomplishing more advanced tasks, and our unlimited live support policy for clients, I think you would find it to be very well-supported, and actually quite a fun tool to work with.  (It really takes off the design blinders and let’s you build pretty much whatever you want.)


Thanks for your time Kent.

I look forward to being a resource.

Cheers,

Leif (11/29/12)

Roundtable Understanding the Law – Online Higher Education and Accessibility

Today’s webinar was a one in two part series on accessibility and focused primarily on legal aspects to online education and compliance.Both the National Federation of the Blind and the lawyer responsible for much of the successful litigation against institutions,…

Today’s webinar was a one in two part series on accessibility and focused primarily on legal aspects to online education and compliance.

Both the National Federation of the Blind and the lawyer responsible for much of the successful litigation against institutions, Goldstein, said very plainly that if you call the NFB for help, they will not go after you. They are understanding of and pleased with institutions that recognize they are not where they need to be and reach out to the NFB for guidance with accessibility compliance. Too bad Penn State didn’t get that message before we were sued. They also acknowledged that they do not have the resources to sue everyone, but hope that a few lawsuits will make 100 other take notice.

There were three examples of good practice given during the Q&A:

  1. Cal State
  2. Ohio State and
  3. Blackboard

Interestingly, the speaker didn’t have any examples of online-only institutions. Another speaker didn’t have any examples, but did mention that some vendors like Google are trying.

Penn State World Campus was mentioned in a good light. It was used as an example that we understand that we need to take action and that we were perceived as very active towards accessibility compliance.

Apparently, the University of Phoenix uses a “homegrown” LMS and is unique because of its resources. For example, they buy licenses of JAWS for new students and work with those students to ensure that it works with their systems.

I thought it was interesting that Kelly Hermann was beyond an understanding tone. Compliance is not an option. She does work to help faculty become aware of shortcomings through hands-on development, however the circumstances are that they either make the content fully compliant or they take it down.

It was also interesting that the one deaf panel member used a translator rather than using the captions and typing directly into the webinar chat.

Accessibility: Triage Web Remediation

Christian gave a great presentation about how the PSU community can triage (turn one huge problem into a queue of smaller, more manageable problems handled through an iterative process) our commitment to the NFB agreement.I’ve posted my initial notes online.I…

Christian gave a great presentation about how the PSU community can triage (turn one huge problem into a queue of smaller, more manageable problems handled through an iterative process) our commitment to the NFB agreement.

I’ve posted my initial notes online.

I had a number of questions, but the big one for us would be: Does triage apply to our course content? We would expect that the “long tail” of any of our given courses would look different from a “normal” website since every page should expect to see significant traffic. How do we even go about gathering data on web traffic? Should we be using Google Analytics?

The cost of accessibility

This is a wake-up to everyone looking into transcribing content if you haven’t already. I’ve been doing the work, both transcribing and publishing media with captioning, but I haven’t been on the money end of things before.We recently send a…

This is a wake-up to everyone looking into transcribing content if you haven’t already. I’ve been doing the work, both transcribing and publishing media with captioning, but I haven’t been on the money end of things before.

We recently send a number of audio files to a quality transcription service who charges $150 an hour or $2.50 a min to transcribe audio. At these rates, it will cost us approximately more than $3700 for twenty three recorded lectures!

I’m not hear to complain about the costs since I think that $2.50 is pretty realistic for quality transcribing. I don’t know much about the business. I wouldn’t be able to say how much lower I think this charges could be. With higher demand and more competition, I wonder how sustainable business could be charging much under $2 a min.

The message I want to get out to other online course designers, program managers, and accessibility specialists is can we afford to transcribe all public audio content coming out of the university? Those fees don’t cover person-hours required to publish those transcriptions along with the media. The time to add transcriptions for video takes the least amount of time. I’m thinking 5-20 min depending upon the length of the video and publishing platform. Other formats, like published Captivate files can take considerably longer. How much to you pay your designers and multimedia specialists an hour? Multiply that for each video and then each course or website you support.

Please don’t mistake my post as an argument against accessibility. I strongly support designing for accessibility–what benefits a few, benefits all. We do have to take these costs into account when developing our budgets. I have a feeling that’s not really being done right now.