Speaker 1: Welcome. Thank you for coming. So we're 3Play Media. We're a captioning, transcription, subtitling, audio description company. We're in the video accessibility space. We are all about really making the process easier for publishers and institutions that are putting content up online. And that's a really important part to all this and really reducing the barrier to making content accessible. That's really important. Yeah. What today is all about is really about education, sharing best practices, sharing stories, and being able to, you know, hopefully learn a little bit about making content accessible and why it's important and how to how to tackle it. So one thing you'll see on our website is a number of resources. These are all free. We definitely encourage people to check them out. We're gonna be posting sessions from today on our website as well. So please, please do feel free to check that out. In addition to the how-to guides, we've really been working quite a bit on industry research and kind of how are institutions tackling this challenge. What about the viewers? What do the students say in the education space? This is something we're gonna be doing more and more on as well. That is also really important. A lot of what we're gonna be talking about today is somewhat related to accommodation. One of the messages we really want to deliver is why accessible video is actually just better video for everyone. So let's talk about that. So first, captioning. Let's all make sure we're on the same page. Captions originated in the 1980s for broadcast television. So if we look at, it's a little hard to see this image here, but this is a still frame of a show. And if you look at it, you can't really tell what's going on. In fact, it might be nothing, but it might be something. And if you turn the captions on, if you weren't hearing what was happening, you'd realize this is actually a pretty important scene. And if you watch Stranger Things, you have a really good sense, oh, this is actually, something's about to happen. And even if, you know, if you don't watch Stranger Things, seeing this kind of makes you think, what's going on here? Because that's not a normal thing to see. Clearly, there's something happening. So the other part of captions that I think sometimes gets left out is that it also is capturing the non-spoken sounds that are relevant to the plot, and that's really important. So why should we caption? So let's talk about this first. This is really important. I'm going to try something we went through yesterday. How many people here drink coffee? Great. All right. How many people here only drink coffee when you brew it at home yourself? Wow, that's awesome. So two people. So yeah, totally. Now, the rest of you who are going out and buying coffee at a coffee shop, you're probably given a choice. Do you want this? If you were to buy your coffee and they handed it to you without any choice and forced you to drink it how they wanted you to drink it, you'd say, no, I want it to go, or I want to put milk in it, or I want a choice. You don't want to be forced into consuming your coffee how they want you to consume it. Content's the same way, and things have changed. So I'm sure you'll hear from a number of our speakers today just how content consumption has changed over the last few years. No one here only watches TV on their couch anymore. We're watching videos on the subway. We're watching videos while we're walking down the street. People are watching videos while they're supposed to be working. I mean, things have just changed dramatically. And so the idea of why captioning, why audio description has just dramatically changed, and it's not just about accommodation, it's actually about enabling content consumption. So in a recent study from Facebook, where now video is king, we saw that...or they saw that captions actually increased viewing time by 12%. That's a huge increase, especially if content is your business. And they also noticed that 41% of the videos are completely incomprehensible without the sound or without captions. Now, what's really interesting about Facebook videos also is that it's completely changed the way some people are producing content. People are actually producing content that's text only because of this. And the other part is that 80% of people would react negatively to content that doesn't have captions or sound because it's just going through your feed. So let's take a look at that. So if you're looking at your feed and you don't have captions, you just keep going unless you have your headphones in. But even then, you have to click on the video and open it up. It's not a very good user experience. Whereas if you're going through and the captions are there, you actually stop and start watching it. I've done it myself where I'm sitting there, I'm just quickly going through my feed. All of a sudden, I've read a video essentially for the last two minutes and I have no intention of watching it at all. So on the education side, we did a really big study with Oregon State University. This student study, which is a nationwide study, it did not single out students who needed accommodation. This was just students in general. 98.6, that's nearly everyone, found captions helpful. And they use it as a learning aid for the most part, 75%. And the number one reason for captions wasn't because they couldn't hear the content or that they needed captions, it was actually to help them focus. Really interesting. So of course, there's the accessibility side. And we don't want to ignore that because that's a very real, very big reason for this. But what's interesting is 71% of people with a disability will leave that website immediately if it's not accessible. But there are 48 million people who are deaf or hard of hearing, 24 million people who are blind or low vision. That's a huge population. So if you go back to the coffee example, what coffee shop is going to say, we're going to count off every five people? Nope, you just go ahead, don't even bother. That's bad for business. You wouldn't do that. So what do these companies have in common? And not to single any of them out, it's not the point, but this is the reality of what's happened. They've all been sued along with 1,700 other companies for lack of accommodation. Part of what's happening now is with the change in landscape of content, unfortunately, there are organizations that are spending more time trying to sue people than to help educate and show how easy it is to actually caption content or describe content now. Now, it certainly does bring attention to what's happening, but then you have to wonder, where's the time better spent? Is the time better spent in making content more accessible or is it better spent on legal fees? So speech recognition has come a long way over the years. And so a lot of people ask, well, why can't we just use speech recognition or the auto captions on YouTube? So let's take a look at what that is really all about. One of the most challenging aspects of choosing a career is simply determining where our interests lie. At one time, a characteristic we saw in the majority of people we interviewed was a powerful connection with a childhood interest.

Speaker 2: For me, part of the reason why I work here is when I was five years old, grew up in Boston,

Speaker 3: I went to the New England Aquarium, and I picked up a horseshoe crab and I touched a horseshoe crab. I still remember that. I still, you know, I love...

Speaker 1: So that's a very clearly recorded piece of content. And it did pretty well. But it got some really key words wrong. And that's the challenge of speech recognition. So you might be able to get the gist of it, and it might do pretty well, but it's going to often get some of those really key words wrong. So now, are we watching something about the Koran? No, it's the aquarium. Big mistake. So there's still some things that we need to work on with speech recognition. It's come a long way, but it can't stand alone for this application. So then the other side of captioning or certainly accessible content is audio description. So audio description is almost like the inverse, and the idea is it's for blind and low vision users, and it provides an auditory support for what's happening on screen. So let's try this. So I'm going to ask everyone to close their eyes for a second. And try to follow along.

Speaker 2: Okay. Now we're going to do the same clip, but with audio description. So keep your eyes closed. We'll try that again.

Speaker 3: So you can tell right away, it's a completely different experience.

Speaker 1: If you've got a piece of content that is extremely visual, and maybe not as auditory in terms of what's being spoken, you have no clue what's happening. So it's really important to consider this as well. So one of the challenges with audio description, and one of the reasons why a lot of people aren't as aware of it, is that it's expensive. The process has not been built out as well as captioning has. There hasn't been as much innovation around it as captioning has over the years. And because of that, there's been successful pushback to keep the scale or the requirements lower. So this is one of the biggest projects we've taken on over the last year, to make it more scalable, to think about what pieces of technology can be used. And one of them right now is the idea of synthesized speech. And what can you do with synthesized speech, assuming that you've got humans who are doing the writing, to make sure you've got accurate description, but can start to find ways to make it more scalable. So that's something that we're spending quite a bit of time on.