cielo24 Media TechTalk Podcast, Episode 004

Title: Rolling Out a Transcription Program

Date: December 12, 2020

>> Hello and welcome. You're listening to Media TechTalk, an ongoing conversation about innovation, resilience, and what's ahead in media technology. I'm Nicole Flynn, your host. I'm a marketing executive in the technology space. Each week, we will be exploring the latest trends around how leaders adapt in a disrupted world and prepare for a brighter tomorrow.

We're going to speak to the innovators who are re-imagining technology in new ways. Thank you for joining us. Hi there, I'm Nicole Flynn and this is cielo24 Media TechTalk. Today, joining me for this discussion is John Jones. John is the Director of Media Resources Center at Wichita State University, as well as the interim accessibility coordinator.

John, thank you for joining us.
>> Of course, good to be here.
>> Yeah, I'm actually personally very excited, John. So before I turn the mic over, just let me get this part out about you and why I'm so impressed with what you do. We work with many educators, as you know, and probably most people listening.

What struck me about you, and I know you're gonna laugh, is how organized you are.
>> Yeah.
>> But you are, and you get everything about accessible education, how important it is, and how to carry it through. And that's, obviously, near and dear to our hearts but probably anybody listening to this conversation.

But most importantly, and what struck out to me is that you know how to execute on making these accessible programs a reality from execution to champion training, etc. And I can't forget training cuz that came up a lot. I wanted to get you on to talk. Just tell us how you do it.

What your secret sauce is and any magic tips? You have the tricks.
>> I can't imagine anything that you say to the group here would be uninteresting. So with that, I will turn it over to you. Maybe you can introduce yourself a little, start there.
>> Yeah, well that's a heck of an introduction.


>> Send me the check.
>> Yeah, yeah, so I'm the director of the media resources center here at Wichita State. Thats a unit that includes a lot of teams that serve the intersection between technology and instruction. So I have the team that puts technology in the classroom and the team that helps faculty move their classes online, and a video team and a web services team.

And in about the in the past four years, we've had a major push to become more accessible. And as part of the efforts on that team, I have a fifth team that is very involved in producing materials for accommodations, primarily Braille and tactile graphics and that sort of thing.

But my background, I have an MFA in fiction, which is why I'm very good at creating illusions of things like organization and competence, but it's all fiction just like everything else I do. I've been doing web development work and instructional design and training and a lot of that sort of work my whole career.

I worked for a Fortune 500 company that has a location here in Wichita, and I've worked for startups. I've worked for higher ed and K 12 service centers, so I have a very broad amount of experience, and accessibility has become important in many of those roles and many of those jobs.

Ever since in the early 2000s when I was doing development work for the university and we had some initial conversation about what web accessibility needed to be. So it's been a value for me all along. But when we started our big push about four years ago, and as is typical with a lot of these sorts of major initiatives, that was triggered by a complaint that we had from a student.

That complaint started with us really focusing on service for students with visual impairments and people with visual impairments. But since then, as we've gotten more involved in the accessibility efforts, we've branched out, obviously, and tried to meet the needs of everyone in our community that that has alternative needs and that sort of thing.

So captions and stuff became an important part of that. One of the things that isn't in the media Resources Center is an Office of Disability Services. And so at a lot of institutions, this sort of work comes out of a Disability Services Center because it's so close. It's not the same work.

But it's close enough and relies on a lot of the same expertise that in a lot of places they end up being either closely allied or the same office, if there's somebody that owns accessibility. For us, I got involved because just as a personal value, I could see that all of the teams that I ran in the Media Resources Center were teams that really needed to exhibit a certain amount of leadership if we were gonna achieve accessibility.

Especially the team that put content online, but the video team needed to be thinking about captions, the classroom technology team needed to be thinking about what it means to be accessible in a physical classroom. The web team obviously had big accessibility things to worry about. So everybody needed to be getting on board with this, and we could wait for somebody else to try and give us a mandate or we could just get going, and and we just got going.

And so since then we've been very active in pushing hard on the accessibility thing. At the moment, I'm interim accessibility coordinator. We're in the process of trying to hire an accessibility and ADA coordinator. So if there's anybody out there in the world who is looking for a job like that, and who would love to live someplace where the cost of living is relatively low year, so.


>> Good plug, good plug.
>> Yeah, there we go. I'm doing what I can. All right. But that's the situation that we're in. I think that that the idea that we came to this work, me and my team came to this work from a lot of the sort of HLC influenced conversations around the transition to online.

And other sorts of instructional concerns that really think a lot about parity put us in a position to really think differently about accessibility and accommodations. It has been a habit, I think, in many offices that handle accommodations especially, but also accessibility, that we have to try, and because resources are limited, we try and triage decision-making and stuff like that.

So if we're dealing with somebody who is going to need captions for video, what's the least amount of video that we can caption for them? Or if we're gonna have to Braille materials for somebody, what's the least amount of materials we can get away with Brailling what's going to be on the exam?

And that fails right at the outset to to meet any sort of parity standard. So that would not meet a standard, because we were looking at, how do we take a physical class, an in person class, and transition it to online? And for HLC reasons, there has to be parity.

The student needs to be hitting the same objectives, getting the same amount of resources and interaction, and all those sorts of things. Well, we should be using those same standards for students with different abilities. And in most cases, we're just not because it's too hard. So we push hard on that idea that it's too hard and are really doing our best to try and make sure that we get them as close as possible.


>> Yeah, you just described in a nutshell something I think that organizations come to us with, which is we just need to do this. We just need to get this little bit done for this student or this situation and we've checked the box. It's not exactly right. So what we do in our efforts is try to walk schools through sort of what we call a stair step plan.

We don't expect anyone to come into and this is obviously cielo24's coming at this from video captions, transcripts, audio description, etc. And caption every single video or transcribe everything, etc. However, our best promotion to achieve parity and help these organizations is suggest a stair step. Plan this out methodically every year, how can we help you on that journey.

And I would love to hear a little bit from you about your organization and some of the things that you would suggest to other organizations to kinda not just get beyond the hey, let's just get the bare minimum done but how do you actually make it a reality?

That is not an easy feat.
>> We're having this conversation now in November of 2020. That makes us, what, six months into the big COVID-19 adventure that we're all on.
>> Yeah.
>> And that has changed the rules and changed the landscape in so many ways, Where it was not possible for us to find funding for a sort of large captioning program.

Because our initial complaint had been related to visually impaired students who don't typically need captioning. It was very hard to get support for human captioning in a broad way through our administration. So we ended up doing a lot of training faculty to edit their own captions. Cuz the various video environments we use have automatic captioning systems and you just need to go in and review those and make sure they're accurate.

We tried to be on top of how that stuff was happening and whether it was happening and make sure that the faculty were doing it. So we create this sort of need for human captioning by creating resistance and frustration and stuff like that as the faculty are being asked to do that work, which we don't have an alternative at that point to do.

And then COVID-19 comes and it frees up resources. And we were able to finally subscribe to cielo at a level that would allow us to caption all instructional video that was being produced in our video platform. Of course, I should be honest, we're guessing at how much we're gonna need.

Because we've never had all of our classes online before the way we do right now. And so there's a lot that's new that we're just figuring out. So I'm hoping that the amount of minutes that we bought will meet those needs. But what we're able to do at that point now is take that expectation that faculty will review their own machine captions off their plate and say you're dealing with a lot right now.

You need to let us handle this for you. And that ends up being a really useful way to work with faculty on that.
>> You're bringing up COVID-19. It's kinda hard to have any discussion in 2020 and not bring COVID-19 into the dialogue. Especially, we're seeing a rise in cases, as we all know, across the country and it's affecting states and shutdowns are happening in schools.

No doubt our students are affected. So budgets are a real concern. We just got to call it out, budget is a big concern. I can wax poetic all day about the other advantages of using your written content that is derived from your audio, your media content, to in fact help schools create value in other ways that sort of buy back their money.

But any advice that you have about this budget dialogue that happens at schools. Because you're right, pre COVID-19, getting the budget to do the things that we knew we had to do anyway. The Department of Justice was after everybody to do. It was still very difficult. It was like getting a couple root canals in a day.


>> But here we are at COVID-19, we're sitting in a different position in a different seat. However, it's still very difficult. It is very difficult and this is one of the main problems that comes up, so any advice that you have.
>> What makes our situation maybe a little different is that because of the portfolio of responsibilities I have and because of a chunk of that is in the technology area.

When federal money came down and we were able to look at ways that we might be able to use this federal money to help the university overcome the COVID-19 challenges. I was in a position to be able to say hey, I know something we need-
>> And get it in there.

And I mean I had more ideas than one. But the important thing there is if this work is being done by a small team of people in the your universities of disability services space and they don't have access to the technology leaders on campus. If those folks aren't hearing from the leaders in that accessibility and accommodation front on a regular basis, then it's not gonna be in the conversation when it needs to be.

But that becomes really important because if you're gonna get some of that Thanksgiving dinner, you have to be at the table.
>> I like it, very apropos.
>> Yeah, there you go.
>> So on that note, have you guys created internal tasks force or cross departmental sort of groups to champion this?


>> We have several actually, we have, Accessibility committee, it's sort of an ever evolving committee that the coordinator runs that has, at any given time in it, the people who need to be addressing the specific parts of the project that we're working on. Excuse me, right know we have a major effort, working on textbook accessibility and trying to make sure that we're making accessible choices.

That means that the bookstore folks are a big part of the committee. And there is academic affairs leaders and technology leaders. And the library has a big presence and just all of those sorts of agencies in campus are pitching in and working with that. There's a faculty senate committee that's dealing with accessibility issues that pertain specifically to the faculty.

And there are a couple other smaller groups that are working on particular tasks and stuff like that. There's a group looking at physical accessibility and things like that. So we've put together teams that are trying to address a lot of these issues. So what I find and I think what I'm hearing you say, and you can correct me if I'm wrong please, is that your group, it seems to be the hub of these teams.


>> We were not directly involved when the conversations first started happening. But I think by nature of our willingness to step in and get involved and eventually our interest in becoming leaders in this space, at least on campus, really helped us, yeah, become that hub for a lot of this sort of effort.

We run a website through which we try and share accessibility resources with other members of the Kansas Board of Regents school system, so all community colleges and universities. We're doing some things. We set standards, for example, for how large text should be delivered in a classroom, whether it's projected on a screen or written on a whiteboard, how big should that text be?

And we played around a lot with point sizes and PowerPoints and stuff like that, but there was so much variability in that that didn't work. So we came up with stickers, super high tech. Stickers that we put on the wall to whiteboards and screens that said, text presented in this room should be this high.

And it's based on ADA sign standards, but it sets a standard for how big instructors should be writing on the whiteboard. So that low vision students can access that content wherever they're sitting in the room. And that's not a thing most schools are even thinking about right now.

When we start looking at captioning and a lot of other things, one of the big realizations we had early on that I'm not sure many other people have keyed into is, if you're setting out to make all instructional content accessible. Whether it's captions or the right sort of accessibility features in Microsoft Word or whatever you're doing.

If you're setting out to make that stuff accessible, you have to also address student generated content. Because students are, in many classes, creating content, whether it's a video or a live presentation or a Word document, that is gonna be used by another student in that class. And if it's being used by other students, it needs to be accessible.

And that means that student video needs to be captioned just as much as the instructor's video does. And all the other types have to have their features as well. If we hold ourselves to that standard, and I think we should, that means we have to have bigger investments, all these things.

We have to have the ability to train students in creating accessible content for the classes they're in. So through this website, we have a bunch of little 20 to 30 minute trainings that deliver a badge. It's a Credly badge, or now Acclaim. You can earn a little digital badge for Microsoft Word accessibility or web accessibility or presenting accessibly, and we offer those for free.

Anybody can use them. Because we don't expect the instructor to know how to do that and to teach it to their students, but they can at least require a student to earn the badge.
>> I think that's a great idea. I mean, what I'm seeing and what I've seen with other schools that seem to get this right is that they have these centralized resources and they're working amongst task forces, I'm gonna pluralize that.

It's a little different at every organization, every school is its own world, I've learned this as well, but it's what it takes. It takes a village, I mean, that is a cliche, but it's true, it does, it takes a village, but it's tenacity. And I think ,there's in every successful situation I've seen there is this central point.

And it always comes down to some sort of resource center, and you're talking about easy training and you're talking about badges. And I think anyone listening to this dialogue can see some really easy low hanging fruit to help them get started and what to advocate to and who to even put on their committees.

It's interesting cuz now we do more with students than we've ever done before as an organization. Especially hard of hearing students. That's a big one for us. And we've learned so much, but it's only until you broaden your bubble, if you will, your circle, that you invite this kind of knowledge in and you can make the real changes so, wow.

All right, I could probably talk to you for a long time on this.
>> Let me jump in. I think I said the name of the website.
>> I was gonna ask if we could list that. So that would be great.
>> We call it the Kansas Accessibility Resources Network.

The website Is ksarn.org.
>> I will link that in these resources. And of course, I'm gonna hand it all to you. But I think that'd be really good example for people to take a look at. Just having worked a little bit with your organization. You guys are very organized and you're presenting something that I think is to be commended.

And certainly, I don't know if you're comfortable with people contacting you, if they'd like to. Okay, I could put any contact information that you want as well in the resources, or link to your LinkedIn or something like that, I'm really grateful for your time. And to have the opportunity to talk to you in depth.

I get a lot of educators that say, you guys are, you're supposed to know this, I'm like, no, really we don't, we are the media portion of this, but we want to help. We want to be able to take people that we know that have this knowledge and get it out to others.

So thank you, John, for joining us. Really appreciate it.
>> Thank you very much.
>> Yeah, and, I may have to pick your brain at a later date, so I'll let you know. And should you need anything, let us know. All right, everybody, thank you for listening into this episode.

I am Nicole Flynn, and you've been part of a Media Tech Talk conversation, and until we meet again, bye bye.