As you know, one of the 4 main themes for this year’s Polyglot Conference was disability. A major battle being fought to make content more accessible to the disabled is to get creators to caption all videos. We even have ASL lessons being taught this year, but the majority of the videos aren’t accessible to the teacher or any of the deaf/hard-of-hearing participants. And hearing loss isn’t the only reason for captions - see my presentation for more info. It’s not fair that all these language enthusiasts be left out.
This is also The Polyglot Conference and we were encouraged to make our presentations as global as we liked, be that in a language other than English or in a mix of multiple languages. Unfortunately, any videos that aren’t entirely in English are going to suffer severely in performance, if they don’t at least have English captions. But wouldn’t it be so much better if they had captions in lots of different languages, so even people who don’t speak English could watch?
My presentation features 5 languages and I would love to share it with deaf and non-anglophone communities and invite them to join this platform to watch, but I can’t do that until it’s fully accessible to them. Unfortunately, because of the health problems I discuss my presentation, I can’t do captions myself either.
Those of you who have the energy to spare, please sign up as a volunteer to help the team organizing the conference get everything captioned as soon as possible and make this platform truly accessible to everyone!
I found someone willing to take the multi-lingual transcript of my presentation and create English captions. Beyond subtitles, captions make it accessible to deaf and blind viewers. If anyone’s willing to help with translations into other languages, please let me know!
I managed to find a few people willing to help with translations of my own presentation into a few different languages, but you can still volunteer to help add subtitles to other videos!
As a disabled attendee, I would find this so helpful. I struggle with auditory processing and rely on subtitles a lot, even in English which is my native language.
I would also love to see clearer information about when clicking a link will take you to a zoom room - I’ve ended up accidentally clicking to go into zoom rooms and then having a panic attack because I didn’t understand that’s what would happen.
When we focus on making all our communication as clear as possible, and as easy to access, it becomes a more universally helpful and accessible experience for everyone.
It’s amazing that there’s ASL but I also hope that there’s at least a small primer to make sure people understand that ASL isn’t a global sign language and is useful in America, but that each country will have its own sign language to be learnt.
When I click the link, it opens up this tab and I have to allow before it opens Zoom. Can you set that up? Also, my Zoom is set to connect without video.
I originally wanted to sign up to do a Q&A on my presentation. But I’ve been waiting for subtitles to be added to the video, so I could share it with the disabled communities who’s comments were featured at the end. I was happy to use my presentation as a platform to encourage you all to caption your videos, then ended up feeling embarrassed when my own video didn’t even have captions. In my closing, I also thanked the Polyglot Conference for making disability one of it’s major themes this year and said I hoped future years would remain accessible, because I thought (with disability as a focus and an offer to provide subtitles) that the conference would be accessible this year. This has created a lot of conflicting feeling that I’ve been combating this past week and I thought maybe we could all discuss it together. Join me, Sunday at 17:00 UK time for a live-captioned discussion!
Thank you, Alesia. I really wanted to complete your presentation in full but my German is not nearly proficient enough to follow the nuance I knew you were giving in that part. I finally gave up because the auto-captions were pretty non-sensical. I had it in mind to provide this as overall end-of-conference feedback, but since you mentioned it here…! Thank you again for presenting!
Once I was informed the conference organizers wouldn’t be able to caption my video, I found a handful of volunteers willing to work on monolingual captions, but they’ve been at it all week and are having a lot of difficulty. This has turned out to be much more complicated than any of us anticipated, especially with youtube removing community-contributed captions less than a month ago, making it so volunteers are unable to add captions directly unless they’re added as managers of the Polyglot Conference youtube account. Instead they have to watch the video while making text notes, which is much less precise, or download a program and the video to work on a version that can later be uploaded. Either way, it’s been incredibly time-consuming! Hopefully they’ll be up soon, but probably not until after the conference ends and who knows how long until the videos are made public.
Description: "The basic right to equal access to info is often forgotten by those who don’t require accommodation, even though the tech available makes providing access easier than ever. Join a panel of passionate, disabled, Accessibility Advocates discussing why access is essential & how you can help ensure it’s provided!“
