Rewiring Inclusion: Barrier Free Learning

The Rewiring Inclusion conference in Notingham a couple of weeks ago was a refreshing look at the subject of accessibility. Perhaps it was refreshing because the word 'accessibility' was barely mentioned, and holistic, responsive ways to produce 'barrier free learning' and 'digital inclusion' were discussed.

I think that the sessions that I attended illustrated two different sides to accessibility very well.

On the one hand there is creating resources and software that can be accessed using a wide variety of input and output devices, as the user requires. The importance of this was talked about by Dr Dónal Fitzpatrick from Dublin City University.

The development approach that Google use was mentioned by Julian Harty from Google. They have a general focus on wider usability and accessibility for all, with post release improvements over time. This means that they wouldn't hold something back from release because not everyone could use it, but would aim to make it more usable for all users over time.

Julian's presentation proved to be a little controversial, as some people thought that Google weren't taking accessibility seriously enough. It is certainly a different approach than that talked about in Higher Education, perhaps due to our need to support every single student. Google users have a choice whether to use new Google services, while our students have to use the VLE for example.

Another side to accessibility that was covered was making changes to the way activities run, to meet the specific needs of individual students.

Dr Trevor Collins and Dr Jessica Bartlett talked about the Open Universities work making geology fieldwork available to students who for whatever reason, cannot travel out to the field.

They talked about working in areas with no mobile phone signals, and setting up wireless Local Area Networks to enable this. It was fascinating and showed that no-one needs to be left out of such activities.

So what should Edge Hill University's response be to all this? Is there a need to look at how can we make our online learning resources and activities more inherently accessible to a wider variety of people? How could we go about that?

[image by campuspartycolombia]


This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Using Speech Recognition Software to Help Create Accessible Resources

We've been working on creating more audio and video resources recently, and we've wanted to develop a process to allow us easily and quickly create transcriptions of them.

Transcriptions, we think, would be a step towards helping make resources accessible for all potential users. Not only that but it's nice to have a transcription so people can scan the contents to see if they want to spend time watching a video.

We've just purchased a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Preferred, which transcribes audio files in several formats:

.wav
.vox
.mp3
.wma
.sri

This is suitable for us as the software we are using for creating video (Premiere Pro 1.5) and screencasts (Camtasia Studio 3) both allow export of the audio as .wav files.

To test it I transcribed a short (134 second) video manually. This contained 391 words and took me about 20 minutes to transcribe (without any special transcription software or peddles).

Dragon transcribed this (before I trained it to recognise my voice) and it got 296 words right. After 30 minutes general training it got 308 words correct, and adding special words that I used in the videos but which weren't in Dragon's vocabulary pushed that to 311 words.

To correct this final file took about 10 minutes, indicating that this way of creating transcriptions would half the time it has been taking me to create transcriptions.

Spending 30 minutes training Dragon to recognise my voice raised the accuracy from 76% to 80%, which doesn't sound like much but I think would be worth asking staff to train Dragon if they were creating a lot of resources that were to be transcribed.

In conclusion, this doesn't look like it will make transcriptions almost automatic, and that would be important if we were to transcribe everything. However it will help us create transcriptions when we want to.

Looking online at transcription services, they charge from about £0.60 per minute for 1-2 speakers to £1.25 per minute for 5 or more speakers. Outsourcing to these services might be a good solution if we have too much work in this area.

dotSUB: Add Subtitles to Your Videos

dotSUB is an online service that allows you to upload videos, and makes it very easy to add subtitles (closed captions). You can add them in more than one language if required - in fact you can allow anyone from around the world to translate the video.

I've added our most downloaded Web Cats episode, and added subtitles just in English for now. It's embedded below. Click on the up and down arrows on the bar at the bottom of the video to move to the subtitled version.



Is was quite a quick process to add the transcription that I'd already created, as dotSUB allows you to use some helpful shortcuts.

The 'RSS in Plain English Video', embedded below, has been translated into several languages. Again click on the buttons on the bar under the video to flick through the languages.



More information about subtitles and other ways of making online videos accessible are available at webaim.org.

Accessibility Testing: Colour Blindness

The 'Colorblind Web Page Filter' allows you to enter a URL address, and view any Web Page as it would look to someone with various types of colour blindness.

For example Edge Hill's page looks different for those with red/green colour blindness (pronatopia).

This might be an interesting tool for learning about and raising awareness of accessibility issues in this area.

Accessibility

Joe Clark has some excellent resources covering accessibility. These could be useful when creating resources for the web and on DVD.

http://www.joeclark.org/access/

His book 'Building Accessible Websites' is available on that site, and I have a printed version in my office.