Speaker 1: We've heard a lot today about how modality has changed, reach has changed, I mean I can upload a video to YouTube right now and someone in Spain can watch it five minutes later. I mean that's amazing. When I went to college, I didn't have, there was no YouTube. Things have changed dramatically. No, we sat on the couch and watched TV and that was it. When you talk about user experience, it was about, you know, what can you do with your remote and the cable box. Everything is different now. People are walking down the street watching a video. People are on the BART watching a show. People are taking a break while they're supposed to be working watching something on Netflix. I mean it is crazy how much this has changed. So real quick, show of hands, how many people here drink coffee? Great. Now how many of you brew coffee at home and only drink it at home? One person. Great. So now if everyone else here were to go to a coffee shop and they say, would you like that for here to go, will you say, well most of the time probably to go these days. What if they said no, you're going to drink it here? You'd think they were crazy. You'd say, give me my money back. So it's the same thing now with content online. We're talking about giving people a choice and letting them consume content in the way that's best for them, whether they're walking down the street, sitting at their desk, or even now sitting on their couch streaming something from iTunes or Netflix. So that's really important to keep in mind. So we've talked about captions. Remember, everyone, if you go to Bar Trivia, first caption show, anyone? There we go. All right. So here's a frame from a popular show. Seems pretty simple. Might be nothing. But if I flipped here, if you watch Stranger Things, you know this is actually really significant. So it says, static crackling on radio, feedback whines, there's something interesting happening. And so in the previous shot, where there's no captions whatsoever, there's still no one speaking. But what's really important is that captions are capturing not only what's spoken, but also the relevant sounds to the plot. And that's something we shouldn't forget. So now if I'm watching this, again, somewhere where I can't put sound on, or the background noise of a jet engine or a subway train is so loud that I can't hear it, this is the only way I can consume this content. So let's talk a little bit about why captioning. We'll get to the more obvious, more traditional reasons. But this is some data from Facebook. 12% they've measured that captions increase viewing time on videos by 12%. That is really significant. Now, video is your business. Why would you not take 12% more viewing time? 41% of videos on Facebook are actually incomprehensible without sound or captions. That's an enormous amount of content. Now, what this also says is that video creators are adapting to the way people are consuming content and putting text-only videos up because of the way people are consuming content. So now there's a question. Which is cheaper? Reducing your production process or just adding some captions? 80% of viewers actually react negatively to videos that autoplay if they can't have sound or captions on. So now this goes back to the coffee issue as well. If you're telling me how to drink my coffee, I'm upset. If you don't give me a choice of how to consume my video content, I'm not going to watch it. So here's what it looks like in Facebook. You've got scrolling feed. There's a video. I can't pay attention to it. So I'm going to keep going. Whereas captions, and I do this subconsciously, I mean, clearly I'm biased. I'm interested in captions. But I absolutely am scrolling through their captions. All of a sudden, I've been basically reading a video for the last two minutes. And I had no intention of doing that. But it grabbed my attention. So going to the educational setting now for a second. In a study we did with Oregon State, and this was a nationwide study of how students use captions, this was not paying attention to students who need captions or don't need captions. This is just students who had access to captions. 98.6% of them found them helpful for learning. Not because they needed to consume the content, but because it was helpful for learning. 75% of them were saying they used it as a learning aid. And the number one reason for using captions wasn't because they couldn't hear the content. It was because it helped them focus. So now the accessibility side of it. I think there's no debate. There are millions and millions of people who actually need captions, audio description. There are 60 million people who need it. What's interesting is turning that into the reality of a web experience. 71% of people, or people with disabilities specifically, will just leave a website outright if it's not accessible. That's really important. How can they spend time on your site if you can't offer them the content? So what do these companies have in common? Does anyone want to take a quick guess? They've all been sued for a lack of accessibility on their website, and mostly with video content. And so have 1,700 other companies. So a lot of that is related to captioning. Some of it's audio description as well. So audio description is, sorry, speech recognition, we'll go to that first, is a topic we've talked about quite a bit today, even, is is this a viable solution to this captioning problem? It's getting better. There's no debating that. But is it good enough? So I'm going to play a quick video. Hopefully you can hear this. Sorry, it looks like the audio cable has actually been unplugged. Audio is not in the cards today. But what's important here, if we scroll ahead, if you look below, there's a line here that says, growing up in Boston, I went to the new wing of the Coran and picked up horseshoe crab. Now, this is actually about visiting the aquarium in Boston. And that's actually really important because it's not about anything religious. It's something quite different. And so, you know, speech recognition in some cases will get you the gist of what is happening. That's great. But we do want to be sensitive to the realities of the mistakes it can make. And in a setting like closed captioning, where especially if you've got unconstrained speech, it is very difficult for it to work consistently. Okay. So let's talk about audio description. Audio description is essentially the complement to captioning. So it provides an aid for visual impairment. And it actually explains what's happening visually on screen for someone who maybe can't follow along as well. Okay. We're going to try to figure that out. We took it back out. Okay. We'll see if this is working better. So in an ideal world, if we had audio, I would play this video clip, which is a trailer from Frozen. And the trailer from Frozen has very little speech in it. But there is an enormous amount of activity. And if you were to close your eyes, you'd have no clue what's going on. You'd hear scratching and all kinds of noises that would mean nothing to you without the visual. But when you turn the audio description on, it is a completely different picture. And you can absolutely follow along. And so I will encourage you. We have an example of this on our website. I absolutely encourage you to take a look at it or certainly search for it on YouTube. It is a great example of the power of audio description. So one of the challenges with audio description, and it's been alluded to today, is the cost. It is behind captioning in terms of innovation. That's something that we're working quite a bit on. It's one of the biggest projects we've been working on over the last year. And how do you use technology to make this more scalable and more user-friendly? So we're looking at things like synthesized speech. How do we enable more usability and really address even the reality that many media players don't support audio description very well? So that was one of the things that I think everyone should really understand with what Terrell was talking about, that the idea of a truly accessible media player is actually still pretty rare. And so that's something that we need to work on. And we've certainly worked on a few workarounds for that reality as well. So the point of all this is to think, again, about content consumption. This doesn't have to all be about accommodation. This is about enabling people to consume the content the way they want to consume it and the way that's best for them, whether it be a learning aid or because they are now walking down the street. And so us as publishers need to take that very seriously. And clearly, you're here because you care about this stuff. The hope is we can start changing the tone of the conversation with everyone so they can appreciate that this isn't just about accommodation. This is about enabling content to be consumed, period. So I'm happy to take some questions, or I'll turn it over to the rest of our program. Yeah? Hi.

Speaker 2: I saw a study out of England, and I haven't seen anything similar. I'd like your statistics about how many people use captions.

Speaker 1: Are you talking about the BBC study?

Speaker 2: It was a study that said that 80% of the people that use captions are not deaf and hard of hearing. And I wonder how many studies there are like that.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So the question is about there's a study that I believe was commissioned by the BBC, came out of the UK for sure a few years ago, that said that 80% of people who used captions had no hearing disability whatsoever. We've done some studies of our own, and the numbers were actually pretty close. I think they were in the 70s percent. We haven't seen other studies quite like that either. But I think that's probably pretty accurate, that the majority of captioning users are not doing it because of a hearing impairment.

Speaker 2: So I'm wondering why this hasn't been understood more widely by businesses that want to try to get more customers. Because, well, I'm going to talk now, so I don't want to use too much time. But it's always, there's never ever, when I'm sitting across from a proposal council, there's never a recognition that it might actually be good business.

Speaker 1: Right. So the question is about why aren't people recognizing that it's good business? Great question. I think that's the goal. I think that's the idea, is that we need to change the tone of the conversation for people to understand that this is good business. A great example of this, and we were talking with Ken, who works at YouTube and Google, about this exact piece of the conversation. That this isn't just about deaf and hard of hearing. This is about what's good for business. And the reality of that, content consumption has changed. And we need to recognize that. Great example, think about the everyday things we're all accustomed to, like sidewalk cuts. Well, if you have a stroller or a suitcase, you're using that constantly. It's not just for accommodation, which is what it was originally created for. Automated doors that open and close in the grocery store, or the airport, or wherever you may be, was originally designed out of an accommodation. We all take it for granted. Video needs to catch up and basically be talked about the same way. All right. Arlene, can I invite you up then? All right. We'll move right on to Arlene Marison. Thank you.