Dan Breen: Perfect.
Dan Breen: Ben, should we begin?
Ben Watson: Let's go for it. Yep, let's go for it, Dan.
Dan Breen: Fantastic. So, thank you very much for everyone for joining. it's going to be myself today and Ben Watson from UCL.
Dan Breen: Really the focus is for this not to be a presentation, but for this to be… to be a discussion. Collaborative discussion around, evolving accessibility, all of the regulation which surrounds it, and some of the ways Ben and UCL have gone about rolling this out at scale in their institution.
Dan Breen: I will just do some quick housekeeping before we do introductions. So, in the spirit of accessibility, as all things should be, if you… you should be able to see the live captions here, and you should be able to access them. It should be on the bottom bar.
Dan Breen: These are verbit-powered live captions, so we're not using anything standard that's within Zoom.
Dan Breen: Also, afterwards, any recording, we're going to make sure that it's fully accessible with captions burnt in, and we're also going to be working to create an audio-described version of this content as well. So…
Dan Breen: We're talking about accessibility, and everything we talk about and do should be accessible as well.
Dan Breen: Ben, with that being said, do you want to give yourself a brief introduction?
Ben Watson: Yeah, hi. Hi, Dan. Thanks for the introduction. Hi, everybody. I'm Ben, I'm the Head of Digital Accessibility at University College London. I think it's one of the largest in-person universities in the United Kingdom. We have over
Ben Watson: 50,000, students. So it's, it's a, it, it's a large kind of operation with all the…
Ben Watson: the difficulties you'd expect with any large, you know, organization and information travel. My role is to… I always describe it as putting in ramps and lifts to information. We have an adjacent team who look after physical access to our buildings and the campus.
Ben Watson: And my job is to try and make sure all of our digital systems, services, any digital interaction where humans are involved
Ben Watson: We've tried to breathe on it from an accessibility perspective, in the way that Dan just described, that we want it to be an end-to-end experience for everyone, that accessibility is there by design, not by request.
Ben Watson: Or retrospective requests, sorry, yeah.
Dan Breen: Fantastic. Thank you very much, Ben. A brief introduction to myself. So, I'm Dan Breen. I've worked at Verbit for coming up on 3 years. We've really focused from an education perspective in partnering with
Dan Breen: the GISC team and group to provide much more accessible packages around, different tiers of institutions, both including higher education and further education.
Dan Breen: And… I would say, really, the whole time I've been at
Dan Breen: We've kind of evolved from a very,
Dan Breen: kind of small agreement to begin with for you to test and prove out the value, and then we've built that out over time to now a much more scaled subscription, which hopefully, hopefully covers a lot more of the student and institution's needs. So there's a very, very brief overview of myself.
Dan Breen: So, what we're going to go through today… so, fundamentally, and me and Ben talk about this a lot, we see it as two different types of, accessibility approaches when it comes to higher education and further education. You've got what we call the centralized approach, which is what
Dan Breen: Ben lives and breathes. And then you've got the somewhat decentralized approach.
Dan Breen: The different strategies which… which wrap around that. How we've evolved, kind of the partnership and the relationship around different facets of digital accessibility, over a period of time.
Dan Breen: And we're gonna reach a conclusion towards the end, where we're also going to invite some questions and answers as well, if I'm able to work that on my machine. That is the only… that's the only caveat there.
Dan Breen: Brilliant. Okay, so… I touched on the decentralized and centralized, sort of, functions within different, sort of, institutions, Ben.
Dan Breen: Could you just give us a lay of the land as to how it looks for you and the team at UCL right now?
Ben Watson: Yeah, we… I mean, I've been at UCL for 3 years, I think, now, and…
Ben Watson: A lot of work was done across the higher education sector in post-2018, when we had our own legislation, the public sector bodies, websites and mobile applications accessibility regulations, which…
Ben Watson: It was a really profound and important piece of regulation that said.
Ben Watson: We have to be anticipating the needs of people with disabilities, and building that into all of our approaches, rather than
Ben Watson: kind of a slightly more reactive approach that I guess people had often used before. So that put a real focus on digital accessibility, and I think UCL's no different to most universities in the UK, that we
Ben Watson: Really saw that as an opportunity to do a bit of a dusting down and review what we've got.
Ben Watson: And where we can, you know, make improvements. I think one of the key things for us was trying to identify
Ben Watson: the areas where we could have the biggest impact, most efficiently, and I guess you've got to start there with procurement, you know? When you're buying in a system, are you making sure that that system isn't going to let you down? You know, is that being designed to the latest, greatest accessibility standards?
Ben Watson: Not just the system itself, but the way that that system then allows you to create your own content, because there's one thing having a really accessible platform, but if you then fill that platform filing cabinet with inaccessible stuff, you…
Ben Watson: haven't solved that problem of that end-to-end journey that we spoke about right at the beginning, and I… I think it's… it's so important that
Ben Watson: accessibility isn't seen as a purely, kind of, technical pursuit. It's about a culture within your organization, you know? Just making front-end systems accessible, which, you know, of course it's important, it's a good start, but if the culture isn't there to create
Ben Watson: Accessible lectures, you know, virtual learning environments that contain slides, documents.
Ben Watson: PDFs, you know, that library reading list materials, all that stuff that somebody is going to encounter throughout their life as a member of staff, or a student, or perhaps a visitor, you know, someone interacting with a university.
Ben Watson: then I don't think you can say that you've done it, you know? You've made a start, but you wouldn't have done it. I think we then looked at, well, where can we have the biggest impact at scale?
Ben Watson: And that's where we certainly needed some external help from, you know, Dan's team, for example. I think what we'd always found was
Ben Watson: Doing, things in our virtual learning environment, we use Moodle.
Ben Watson: was a challenge, you know, doing things across hundreds of thousands of documents, hundreds of thousands of hours of lecture recording was, was difficult, and I think probably a lot of people who work in higher education would probably agree with what I'm about to say, that
Ben Watson: Although there is loads of goodwill, everybody gets it and wants to help, you know, ethically, everyone's completely aligned that this is important and needs to happen.
Ben Watson: I think what people struggle with is the time, and sometimes the complexity of what it seems like we're asking. And because this legislation, these requirements.
Ben Watson: feel like they're quite new, I think sometimes it feels like it's sort of like a whole load of extra work that's just arrived and is now being landed on people.
Ben Watson: So I try and…
Ben Watson: you know, we've got to find a way to compromise and make that manageable, you know? You can't just dump that on people, because the likelihood is they'll just fold under the pressure, and we won't get the improvements that we want, so…
Ben Watson: progress, not perfection, is something that definitely I've had to learn to, you know, live with. I think we all want perfection, of course we do. But I think you… if you seek that straight away, you won't get very far, because this is a bit of a journey we're on.
Ben Watson: I… forgive me, if you've ever heard me speak before, you'll be so bored of me saying this, but…
Ben Watson: I… I love this tweet I saw that said, accessibility isn't more work. The work we were doing before wasn't finished.
Ben Watson: And I think what we need to do is to almost remind people that this isn't a new requirement, this is something that we should always have been doing, and just find a way to kind of align
Ben Watson: everyday processes, module program, you know, approval, validation stages, you know, where we can be building these things in a new.
Ben Watson: at source, you know, I mentioned procurement, I mentioned, you know, in-house design, template design, those things where we can… we can make those relatively small tweaks that will pay off quite big over time, I think are some of the…
Ben Watson: the key areas where we've probably been able to, I think, have some of the biggest impact. And of course, you know, always seeking advice from our staff and student population, because if you have an active, kind of, listening channel.
Ben Watson: You get free intelligence about
Ben Watson: where some of the worst kind of blocks are, you know? And if you launch something and you've given that really clear feedback channel.
Ben Watson: and people, you know, two or three people come back to you and say, having a bit of a problem with, you know, these particular aspects of one of the navigation menus. You know you can go and explore that and try and get that fixed quite quickly. So I…
Ben Watson: actively encourage that feedback. I think that's absolute dynamite for us, and I never see it as criticism, I see it as, you know, constructive, valuable feedback to help us always improve. And I suppose that's it, isn't it? As long as we're always
Ben Watson: genuinely trying our best and improving and building it in to all new things where we can. I think we then approached the legacy material, which we all have, many years' worth of stuff that was perhaps delivered without accessibility in the forefront.
Ben Watson: We can then work on that on a prioritized basis, over time. So, so…
Ben Watson: Gosh, so that's a very long-winded answer, but I suppose that's the nature of this, that accessibility isn't the domain of just my team. We're a relatively small team within a very large university, so this is about
Ben Watson: Teaching people how to fish, and finding ways for people to do it, do what they do brilliantly, you know, they're top academics, top teaching staff, great students.
Ben Watson: Great professional service staff.
Ben Watson: finding a way to allow them to do what they do, brilliantly, but in the most accessible way, and building that into their workflow. It just doesn't work if people are going to be like, oh, I've just, you know, written this, I don't know, module program handbook, and I'm going to send it to you to make it accessible, because
Ben Watson: If it's something to do with chemistry or a particular subject, I'm not a chemist, I don't know what you're talking about, so I wouldn't be the best person to make it accessible. So it's, yeah, teaching people how to fish and do what they can, where they can.
Dan Breen: Got it. Thank you very much for that. So, you touched on a couple of these. So, if we think about, specifically here in the UK, European Accessibility Act was something which…
Dan Breen: I think different… so, I've got… I sit across both education and corporate, and the two different marketplaces sectors saw it in a very different way. I think the general consensus is, from a publisher's perspective.
Dan Breen: it's key for publishers to be across this, to understand this, and it's very well documented in there, how far publishers need to go back in terms of being accessible. P.S. Bar, you mentioned, we've got Title II just around the corner in the US.
Dan Breen: Are there any specific bits of regulation
Dan Breen: WCAG, which I've completely missed out there as well. Are there any specific pieces where you feel…
Dan Breen: more guidance from, Ben, or more jurisdiction around, or you sit there and you say, this is what we're going to look to follow, or do you feel there's elements of each which is relevant to what you follow?
Ben Watson: It's a great question. I think, I mean.
Ben Watson: The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, I think, underpins most of the international legislation, so if you wanted to… if you were relatively new to the world of trying to understand what accessibility priorities are.
Ben Watson: and how you're going to be measured against any proposed legislation, then I think you could do a lot worse than familiarizing yourself with the core requirements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Ben Watson: As far as I'm aware, most of the international legislation uses the WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 in the UK's case.
Ben Watson: AA standard to, to make that measurement, to understand whether somebody, you know, an organization is being compliant. So I think that would be a really important place to start.
Ben Watson: I've already mentioned this, Dan, but I think…
Ben Watson: things like the European Accessibility Act, or you mentioned it, Dan, that that commercial aspect of that is really helpful, certainly to us in the UK, although I'm very sad to say that…
Ben Watson: the UK left the European Union, I think we can still benefit from that. So, our particular legislation in the United Kingdom
Ben Watson: it's the clues in the title, public sector bodies, so it's very much focused on public sector bodies. There is no regulatory compliance leveled at commercial suppliers. However, the European Accessibility Act does make that requirement on commercial providers.
Ben Watson: So I think there's a huge opportunity for us here to…
Ben Watson: seek a bit more from commercial providers. And one thing, I'll just pop it in the chat, but
Ben Watson: With some other, universities, and with a large…
Ben Watson: charity for blind and partially sighted people in the United Kingdom, we've been working on some central procurement standards that I feel that we could all use
Ben Watson: To ask the same questions of external suppliers, commercial suppliers of, you know, systems that most universities will probably
Ben Watson: be buying, you know, there's a lot of commonality there. And if we were all to ask the same questions and measure those answers in the same way, and crucially use the same contract wording, all of which there are templates for in the accessibility passport, I feel like we could make some
Ben Watson: Really important progress with external suppliers, because we'd be creating a sort of business incentive, you know, a consistent level of scrutiny about their accessibility performance.
Ben Watson: That means we can just focus primarily on our in-house content, of which we have enough trouble, you know? We don't… we shouldn't be worrying about the systems that we pay for, and how accessible they are.
Ben Watson: So I think there's some… there's some brilliant opportunities for us to… to unify under the, you know, global legislation in this area, starting with an understanding of WCAG, and then looking at things that…
Ben Watson: would be universally beneficial for all of us, such as, you know, shared procurement standards, which we really lack in the accessibility space. I think it's much stronger in things like data protection and cybersecurity. I think you find there's more, kind of.
Ben Watson: a consistency of approach there, but accessibility still has a little bit of catching up to do. So, if we could use something like the Accessibility Passport as a template for that procurement, I think that would be really helpful, to, to,
Ben Watson: yeah, make some lovely progress quite quickly, so… but all of the stuff on there is almost oven-ready. You could copy and paste that into your own procurement,
Ben Watson: approaches. Certainly the contract wording, you can copy and paste. UCL's using it, a large number of London universities are using it. So, yeah, you know, the more the merrier.
Dan Breen: So, filling in a particularly provocative mood today, Ben. So, when we think of the regulatory landscape on this side, right, and then we've got on the opposite side.
Dan Breen: we've got the word which we don't like to hear, or the phrase that we don't like to hear, which is disproportionate burden, okay? So we've got
Dan Breen: focusing on accessibility, you know, transcription, captioning, translation, audio description, etc, for both live and recorded content. And on the flip side, we've got
Dan Breen: okay, disproportionate burden. From an institutional perspective, we believe
Dan Breen: The investment in this outweighs the potential
Dan Breen: upside for both the student and for the institution. What's your take on that?
Ben Watson: It's a tricky one, isn't it? Because it depends on the size of the institution, the type of content that that institution kind of leads on, and, you know, the complexity of it. I think…
Ben Watson: My feeling is you can always do something. You know, I think… I would never like to see disproportionate burden used as a means of just declaring yourselves out of the, you know, out of the requirement completely.
Ben Watson: I mean, for example, if we take captioning at scale, which has always been something that we have found really difficult to do across, you know, sometimes hundreds of thousands of hours of lecture recording, multimedia across, you know, different aspects of the website, social media.
Ben Watson: how on earth do you do that at scale? Because you can't necessarily rely on
Ben Watson: the academics producing it, who may not always have time to retrospectively go and make corrections. So how can you scale that up? Well, we took, as you mentioned, Dan, a sort of iterative approach of looking at, well, how can we target it initially to
Ben Watson: the people who need it most. So, students who we said would not be able to listen back to the original audio to check how any automatic speech recognition may have struggled, may have made mistakes, and we said anyone who wouldn't be able to do that absolutely should be given
Ben Watson: 100% gold standard human edited captions.
Ben Watson: And then we would… we would…
Ben Watson: automatically speech recognise everything else as best we could, and try and do that at scale. But over time, as, you know, automatic speech recognition has improved, certainly now with the injection of AI enhanced.
Ben Watson: automatic speech recognition. I think the…
Ben Watson: Those opportunities are growing for us to say, well, let's try and do that at scale, because over time, each time we, you know, we make corrections, that stuff's going to be learning and improving that baseline level of accuracy.
Ben Watson: And I think certainly the models we've been exploring with you, Dan, we've been able to offer human-edited captioning at a much greater scale than we've ever done before, and with greater kind of consistency and reliability, because we're not…
Ben Watson: we're not relying on individuals, you know? There's an external agency that we can know is going to be doing this within an agreed service level agreement. And really excitingly for me, because, you know, the pinnacle, I guess, of one of the hardest things to do in terms of making multimedia accessible is audio description.
Ben Watson: So, being able to explore
Ben Watson: You know, ways to get audio description done at scale, again, and not universally, you know, no one's claiming every video we do is going to have audio description, but being able to know that there is a mechanism you can use to create
Ben Watson: Reliable audio description that comes with its own player that's all been pre-edited, so, you know, you don't have any worry about integrating the new timing, the new timestamps with the audio description, conflicting with the original dialogue.
Ben Watson: That's been really wonderful. And again, you know.
Ben Watson: To avoid things like saying, well, disproportionate burden, you know, this, we'll say, well, let's look at
Ben Watson: the video that's got the highest amount of use across our webpages. And let's go and start with those, and make them the first things that we learn about how we can audio describe them, and develop that, and get feedback, and then see if we can scale up, because
Ben Watson: we now have access to AI audio description, which of course increases the scale and efficiency and affordability of these options.
Ben Watson: So I think we've… we've learned a lot in doing that, just in terms of the mechanisms and how you make this available to people. So I think if anyone has, you know.
Ben Watson: you know, possibly quite reasonably claim disproportionate burden in the past. I think there's… the landscape's changed enough to perhaps revisit that now, and say.
Ben Watson: What can we do, you know, that would be something that would make a really good start in this space, build our confidence, build those, you know, the capability of those systems that can do this at scale, and keep, you know, gently developing them so that we really can offer
Ben Watson: quite robust and accurate captioning, certainly, captioning and transcript at very large scale. And audio description, certainly not universally, but at an increasing level, prioritized to some of the places where we know we have the biggest demand, but also
Ben Watson: to allow it on request. I mentioned, you know, creating those feedback channels to let people, you know, people come to you and say, I really, you know, this isn't currently in a format that's fully accessible to me, it doesn't have audio description.
Ben Watson: Is there… is there a way you could provide this? And being able to do that, you know, have those… those… those roots kind of outlined in the background so that you know you've got that.
Ben Watson: capability that you can switch on at relatively short notice. I think that's… that's a sensible way forward, you know, in that, because no…
Ben Watson: it's disproportionate, indeed, to say we're gonna audio describe every single video that we've ever done. You know, that would be a lot to ask.
Dan Breen: Thank you very much. So this kind of feeds into this next, this, this, this next prompt. So,
Dan Breen: From a scale perspective at UCL,
Dan Breen: Lots and lots of courses, creates lots and lots of content, lots and lots of ways of consuming content and courses now.
Dan Breen: I'm keen to just understand how important for you the virtual learning environment that sits under all of this is. Because when you're talking about prioritizing content based on viewership, etc.
Dan Breen: how important would you say having that baseline, and having almost that virtual learning environment as the proxy, and then other solutions like Verbit, and multiple other solutions that the institution use, like, fully integrated and kind of embedded within that?
Ben Watson: I see, yeah, I mean, that's critical, isn't it? I mean, so our virtual learning environment we use is Moodle, you know, Moodle's an open source solution. Moodle themselves have been doing some really great work on
Ben Watson: accessibility conformance, you know, getting external agencies to test representative samples of the Moodle platform content to reassure people that that's as accessible as it, you know, reasonably can be.
Ben Watson: But of course, most people will then customize something like Moodle to their own local requirements, which can, of course, develop complexities that mean areas that…
Ben Watson: Moodle thinks, centrally, are accessible, then maybe become inaccessible. Certainly, we, in our local testing of Moodle, we seem to identify some areas that perhaps
Ben Watson: the Moodle central conformance hadn't tested, and we identified some areas that we felt they could improve, and we fed that back, and Moodle, as an open source solution, one of the really lovely things about it is that you can have that conversation and raise those tickets, and they will be addressed by a community.
Ben Watson: I think in terms of that wider interoperability, it's that thing we were talking about at the beginning of.
Ben Watson: Well, Moodle's, you know, great as it is, but it's effectively just a filing cabinet which you then fill with all of your local content, so…
Ben Watson: Having those checks and balances on…
Ben Watson: you know, staff awareness, training on how to create good, accessible content. Obviously, trying to influence things like template design, so you're not propagating inaccessible practice across a wide range of people using the same templates.
Ben Watson: We get lots of feedback from students, as I imagine lots of people do, about the consistency and the layout of things in the virtual learning environment that can have a huge impact. Not necessarily things that would mean you would fail a web content accessibility guidelines audit.
Ben Watson: But just in terms of students getting, you know, intuitively being able to find their way around your Moodle layout, because you're…
Ben Watson: information about the, you know, course assessment is always kind of in the same region of the course layout. That has been really problematic, because across different courses.
Ben Watson: even within the same faculty, we can sometimes find wildly different layouts. So I think trying to… trying to harmonize that has been really important. But then all those external, you know, services that we use to…
Ben Watson: help us regulate that content. We use, accessibility, checkers within our Moodle content to look at, specifically at the document format, you know, content. People may be familiar, Blackboard Allies is what we use, but there are, there are many out there. Brickfield will,
Ben Watson: will do a similar thing across your Moodle content. Again, it's difficult to do that at scale otherwise. You know, how on earth do you keep tabs on 100,000, perhaps even a million by the end of the year?
Ben Watson: individual document uploads in something like Moodle, and then if you then include all the links off to library reading list materials, you know, electronic subscriptions, it's very difficult for you to ensure that there are no breaks in that end-to-end student journey. So having
Ben Watson: systems in place where, certainly for us, where we've specified that certain content that gets recorded, lecture recordings.
Ben Watson: Have to be 100% accurate, have to be, you know, dealt with by human editors to check the recording, listen in, make the changes, and deliver it back in a timely way.
Ben Watson: Having that as an automated process with.
Ben Watson: a system like Verbit being instantly fed to by our lecture capture solution, which is Panopto, has been extremely helpful, certainly to me, because it means I don't perhaps have to worry about that quite as much.
Ben Watson: an administrative process you do at the start of the year. You identify all of those modules that are going to get that gold standard of treatment, and then pretty much everything else can get the kind of silver medal standard of
Ben Watson: the enhanced automatic speech recognition, but we obviously have that. People can escalate things on request to the gold standard human editing. That's been a bit of a game changer for us, I would say, in that
Ben Watson: it's allowed us to do that at scale. Before, it was all very administrative. In the first, kind of, year of me working at UCL, we did it all by…
Ben Watson: students, you know, paying students to edit the captions, or postgraduate students to edit captions, and that was really tricky administratively, just because people were busy, people were poorly, didn't turn up, the lectures didn't… weren't recorded effectively. You know, there were lots of things that were…
Ben Watson: really difficult to juggle, and it was almost a full-time job doing that. So, finding those sort of automations has been great, because not that you can forget about it, but it's something that you can get reassurance about, you know, will be done, and those systems can be effectively integrated.
Dan Breen: Fantastic. So, I'm… I'm aware that on this we've got to…
Dan Breen: I think we've touched on it in a number of different ways, but let's… so let's… let's… let's clean slate it, and let's say that there is…
Dan Breen: someone who starts new at an institution could be any size institution across HE and FE, and
Dan Breen: the kind of line in the sand is drawn to say, right, we're gonna… we're gonna scale up our accessibility efforts. If you had a completely clean slate, brand new institution.
Dan Breen: where would you start to begin with? Where would you… what's the first piece you would address?
Dan Breen: To put that kind of,
Dan Breen: initial template in place, or the initial groundwork in place,
Dan Breen: before you think about, kind of, scaling up and all the other… all the other fantastic things that we're looking at doing at UCL now. What would be… what will be the bedrock, is my question.
Ben Watson: I think you've got to start with the people, haven't you? I mean, I think if you can make sure that you're making everybody aware that they have a responsibility to deliver accessible content but by design, I think if you were literally starting afresh, and you had no…
Ben Watson: Backlogs of legacy, you know, thousands of hours of recordings and all of that stuff that most of us have.
Ben Watson: I think you could set that groundwork, you know, in job descriptions. You could be making that really, really clear to people, you know? Obviously, in the whole interview cycle, it's something that's part of the mission statement of the organization, that it's not…
Ben Watson: You do what you do, and then there's this kind of accessibility thing you do at the end to kind of retrospectively fix it.
Ben Watson: No, no, it's a single movement. You do what you do, and you do it accessibly, because that's just the way we work at this organization. That's where we'd love to get to, so that accessibility doesn't feel like more work. It's not an extra thing.
Ben Watson: Because you already did it. It was already part of… yeah, of course, of course I ran all the checkers on my Microsoft, you know.
Ben Watson: whatever, module plans as I was developing them, because that's just what I do, you know? Yeah, I always make sure I, you know, use a microphone and record my lectures. So I think if you were able to build that culture where everybody was aware of their responsibility.
Ben Watson: not to own it in its entirety, but to do their bit of it. The cumulative impact of that would be enormous, in that accessibility then would never be forgotten. I think one of the biggest
Ben Watson: Frustrations we have is that
Ben Watson: if, you know, and hopefully we're getting better now at places like UCL, because we're fortunate enough to have a digital accessibility team who can be nibbling away at people's ankles all the time and saying, oh no, make sure you include us, you know, can we come… can we be involved in that procurement? Let us, you know, we'll talk to the supplier. We keep doing that, nibbling away.
Ben Watson: But if you had… the procurement team were already doing that, because that's the way you do procurement, your design team were doing that, because that's the way they do design, you'd never have those gaps where people would say.
Ben Watson: Oh, sorry, we've got to ask you, we're launching this new timetabling system tomorrow morning. Is there anything you can do to make it more accessible? You're like, well, what do you expect in this time, you know? If we were involved at the beginning, and we could have helped you evolve it and, you know, iteratively test it, and it was designed with accessibility in mind, then
Ben Watson: You know, we would be talking about final… a final little bit of polish before it goes live, rather than
Ben Watson: any kind of fundamental overhaul, which is often what you might get if you haven't, you know, accessibility checked early enough in the process. So I think, yeah, starting with the people and the culture would be the thing. But given that most of us aren't in that situation, I love your term there, Dan, you know, lying in the sand. I think
Ben Watson: it's really daunting when you, you know, and I do it a lot, you know, you stare at the ceiling at 2 o'clock in the morning and think, oh, this is gigantic, this is so big, how are we going to do this? And you think, well, you can't do everything, but what you can do is draw that line in the sand and say, for everything going forwards.
Ben Watson: let's make sure our procurement is right. Let's make sure our in-house development is good. Let's make sure our templates behave themselves. And let's build in those systems where we can to directly remediate content at
Ben Watson: at the point of, kind of, design and delivery, rather than retrospectively, where we possibly can. And it's an imperfect system, you know? Please don't feel like, oh, we've got it all locked at UCL and everything's perfect. We really haven't.
Ben Watson: But we are… we are trying our best to kind of turn that oil tanker around, that we all have to turn around, because
Ben Watson: This isn't something that has always been
Ben Watson: Perhaps at the forefront of everyone's mind, because the legislation perhaps wasn't there historically to reinforce it.
Ben Watson: Or there wasn't the, you know, the resource or the funding for it, which perhaps there is a little bit more of now, although I'm aware that some institutions are more fortunate in that space than others.
Dan Breen: Got it.
Dan Breen: And I would also say, Ben, one big thing that, from working with yourself and UCL for a couple of years now.
Dan Breen: I think, to begin with, two years ago, we were always thinking about the student outcomes, right? So you've got… you've got the way students identify themselves with accessibility needs, you've got the growth in… the diversity of, you know, of neurodivergence, we've got…
Dan Breen: generally people now like myself that just like to watch things with captions on, they've become more mainstream, right? So, we've thought about these student outcomes, but actually, what we're really evolving into now with UCL is actually for the institution as well.
Dan Breen: working with lecturers who may be hard of hearing, thinking about open days, thinking about your Provost talks, thinking about all those other pieces of content you're curating as an institution, and making sure they're wrapped into this
Dan Breen: as well. That's… I would say that's the biggest learning I've taken from working with you in the last two years.
Ben Watson: And I think that's… that's… I mean, captioning is such a good example, you know? If you're…
Ben Watson: Trying to justify, you know, it's sad that you sometimes have to justify, you know, the accessibility of your institution's kind of materials, but if you have to kind of build that case for why this is all so important, why the investment is worth it and justified, of course you could, you know, purely point at the legal requirement, and that's a very powerful argument.
Ben Watson: But I… I like the…
Ben Watson: Of course, the ethical argument, of course it's the right thing to do. We want everybody to be able to access content and realize their potential and thrive. But there's also that extra element that you've just mentioned there, Dana, of the kind of universal benefits of accessibility.
Ben Watson: been doing this for a very long time. I must have been in the accessibility kind of space for over 20 years, and I genuinely have never seen an example of something that was designed to be more accessible in terms of
Ben Watson: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and things like that, you know, designed to be accessible to people who would otherwise face barriers to access.
Ben Watson: That wasn't just better stuff. It was just better stuff, easier to use.
Ben Watson: more usable, and I think captions is just one really good example of that, you know, that if you've got a really good set of captions.
Ben Watson: you've got that capability, or the flexibility for people to watch it on trains if they haven't got their headphones with them. You know, you just unlock the flexibility and the adaptability of your content to be
Ben Watson: accessed in so many different ways. You have a transcript that can then be searched or mined for, you know.
Ben Watson: you know, wider information, kind of deep-diving research, data mining, those sorts of things. Or just findability, you know? If somebody wants to look for every mention of Charles Darwin within an hour-long recording, they don't want to listen to the whole thing, but they want to zip through it to those sections.
Ben Watson: You know, the dynamic transcript will allow that kind of functionality, so…
Ben Watson: I think if you are struggling to justify, you know, an investment in this area with perhaps senior leadership teams, then
Ben Watson: you know, find the lever that works for them. Hopefully, it's the moral, ethical one. It might well be the legal one, or it might be that universal usability one. But somewhere within there, there is an incontrovertible
Ben Watson: argument that people should just be doing this, because it's better stuff overall, you know, for everyone, and that's a…
Ben Watson: That's a lovely thing to be able to genuinely say you can offer, because a lot of other stuff is very,
Ben Watson: very subjective, but I think, objectively, that's quite a fair thing to say, that a video with a decent level of captions and transcripts, and ideally, of course, audio description, is clearly a better, more usable thing than one that doesn't have those things. That's, you know…
Ben Watson: I don't think you can argue with that.
Dan Breen: So, when we think about where we started then, taking the clock back two, two and a half years, we were really just looking at, kind of, what we would call post-production transcription, weren't we? And you used that phrase to me when we… when we first met,
Dan Breen: I want a human breathing on it.
Dan Breen: to make sure it was up to those kind of, like you mentioned earlier, gold standards. And then you've obviously got these kind of interlinked pieces now, where you get, you know, you take something out of your live lecture recording, you get that into your
Dan Breen: virtual learning environment, you want to transcribe it, you want to caption it. Actually, we've got lots of international students that could benefit from it in their native tongue, so you can translate it.
Dan Breen: Actually, we've also got some students flagging that they'd like this audio description. We've got options for both human and AI audio description.
Dan Breen: And to your point there, also.
Dan Breen: you know, we're now working with you with live lectures as well, and then you've got the ability to do things like summarizing the transcription, you've got the ability to do things like you mentioned keyword searching for Charles Darwin.
Dan Breen: suit.
Dan Breen: It's all those different facets are kind of starting to be unlocked now.
Dan Breen: And it, you know, if I take it back two years, I think we've come an incredibly…
Dan Breen: long… we've come a long way together on that journey, and I actually think there's loads more bits we could be doing then.
Ben Watson: Yeah, and this is, you know, my previous kind of background career was I was a librarian. I did teacher training, and then I moved into librarianship. And so, helping people find ways to find information, exploit information, you know, get the most out of
Ben Watson: a particular resource is something I've always been really interested and passionate about, and I think
Ben Watson: This is about giving everybody that capability to use information in the way, or meet information in a way that suits them best. So, all of those things you've got there, you know, things like translation, that's just that extra capability, that single resource that
Ben Watson: By making it accessible and compliant, which kind of keeps that particular legislative requirement happy.
Ben Watson: you're unlocking all this potential in your information for just a much richer experience for everyone. I just find that really kind of lovely and exciting. And if we think of things like
Ben Watson: audio description at scale. I know we've spoken before, Dan, about what if you've got… one of the things that's always been difficult with alternative text description and audio description, certainly where AI is involved.
Ben Watson: is accurately, kind of, capturing the context in which to describe an image, because, of course, as we all know, context is king when you're describing visual content, and…
Ben Watson: without knowing the full context, it's very difficult for AI to say, well, what audience is this for? What level of complexity do I need to… you know, am I describing this to a scientific kind of audience, or is it for a primary school audience? You know, that would completely influence, of course, the way the audio description or the alternative text is put together. And having…
Ben Watson: Access to accurate captions and transcripts certainly gives you a greater
Ben Watson: body of information that AI can then use to perhaps make some more informed choices about
Ben Watson: how you can further enhance the performance of that material. So I kind of love the fact that
Ben Watson: This is a kind of… what's the word? You know, a gift that keeps on giving kind of thing, where, you know, you can make one thing more accessible, then you can…
Ben Watson: unlock its power for people to then go and do their own stuff with it. And I think…
Ben Watson: All this stuff, all the web content accessibility guidelines, you know, that doesn't…
Ben Watson: that doesn't necessarily make everything accessible on its own. And what I mean by that is that there's actually a whole other world beyond that, where
Ben Watson: If people aren't given the confidence and the skills to know what they can then do with that information, you know, you can make it accessible, but if somebody's not really confident in using a screen reader, or changing, you know, colors and the visual, you know, layout of a particular browser.
Ben Watson: then you don't fully realize that potential. So I think there's one thing to, you know, make the content, you know, rich in this way, and kind of more like a Swiss Army knife, and it can turn its hand to all these different potential scenarios.
Ben Watson: But don't forget.
Ben Watson: the magic of, you know, pointing people at assistive technologies. And there are so many out there now, and inbuilt ones into most of these standard operating systems.
Ben Watson: So, I think that's… that's a wonderful gift to be able to give people, whether they have disabilities or not, because as we've said, you know, who doesn't benefit from knowing how you switch captions on and off, and all of those things, so…
Ben Watson: Yeah, I love that.
Ben Watson: that extra capability. So, yeah, thanks for raising that, Dan.
Dan Breen: So, we have spoken about… we've covered the where to start. Shall we get into some questions now?
Dan Breen: So, I… There are a few in here, so…
Dan Breen: I've been scan… scanning some of it, so one of them was… so…
Dan Breen: Natalia's mentioned we have Moodle. This issue seems to be that tutors are uploading in a poorly accessible way.
Dan Breen: using accessibility… how do you convince the university to standardize good practice templates? That's definitely a you question there.
Ben Watson: That's such a good question. I mean, and I think that's where you need to, you know, this is top-down, bottom-up approaches, so I think if you can build things into module program validation, you know, the stages where those things are actually given approval.
Ben Watson: That's, of course, a really valuable step.
Ben Watson: I think given that we're talking here an awful lot about stuff that people might inherit, you know, stuff that kind of rolls over year on year, how can you seek to make those iterative improvements, you know?
Ben Watson: I think we spoke before about a line in the sand, and of course, I think you can build in some of those slightly higher expectations
Ben Watson: at the beginning for newly developed and delivered content. I know, certainly when I was at the University of Kent, we had something called Kent Inclusive Practices, which were
Ben Watson: Basically, what we did is we looked at all of the most frequently requested adjustments on behalf of disabled students across the, you know, the entire student population, and we said, well.
Ben Watson: Let's look at the ones of those that most frequently recur.
Ben Watson: And what could we do at an institutional level to kind of zap them at source, you know? And a lot of the things would probably be very consistent across all of our institutions. Things like recommendations to deliver slides in advance to
Ben Watson: record lectures, you know, wear microphones, offer captioning. Those sorts of things, I think, will be pretty consistent. But if you can build them into that core design, you're not going to fix everything, but what you might then do find is that you are able to deal with
Ben Watson: A kind of quite a large chunk of the kind of repetitive, you know, predictable kind of issues that might arise, which then gives you a little bit more time and energy with the limited resource that most of us have, to then really go after those specifics.
Ben Watson: If you're fortunate enough to have some of the accessibility monitoring software built into Moodle, your virtual learning environment, I think there's some interesting things there where, again, you could look at particular trends where you've got
Ben Watson: you know, different departments, you could look at, well, what are the things that are most frequently going wrong with that type of content they're uploading? Let's say you identified it was contrast and a lack of headings.
Ben Watson: then clearly there's some training opportunities there that you might be able to build into new staff inductions, certainly into that.
Ben Watson: program validation stuff, where you say, well, we… we want… we want all staff to attend some mandatory sessions on these things, and we want to see
Ben Watson: a percentage increase over time, which would then be measurable.
Ben Watson: And indeed, we have a digital accessibility policy, which makes this more than just a kind of…
Ben Watson: a thing that Ben and his team are banging on about. This is something that's actually supported by senior management, and people are expected to answer to in things like annual monitoring reports. So I think it's…
Ben Watson: it's very difficult, you know, to come down really hard and be really authoritarian on this, but I think… remember, what we're trying to do is to put stuff there
Ben Watson: put stuff there now that should always have been there. So how do you do that in a way that doesn't feel like you're asking the earth of people, and really spooking people when they're already at capacity, but in a way that feels kind of sustainable and manageable and a reasonable ask? So…
Ben Watson: I don't know if that's answered your question,
Ben Watson: And it is a difficult one, because you'll find that some…
Ben Watson: some departments are really engaged and really kind of on top of this, and then other departments are just harder to reach, or they just, by the nature of what they do, they have more complex material that is harder to make accessible. But I think finding… oh, another really important thing, I think, is finding champions, you know? People…
Ben Watson: Within a department, particularly within an academic department, who can help you, you know, span that… that… sometimes what feels like quite a chasm between
Ben Watson: professional services, so my team, I guess, is a professional service department, where we're trying to reach across that divide to academic communities and say, we'd like you to do this, you know? And how do you do that in a way that doesn't feel like, you know, you're teaching people how to suck eggs when, you know, they're the expert in what they do? So I think, again.
Ben Watson: I always have to, kind of.
Ben Watson: manage my expectations, I guess, and not set the bar too high, and realize that
Ben Watson: I can ask people to do something reasonable, and we'll make some progress, even though it's not perfection, we'll make that progress, and then we'll ask them to do the next level, you know, in the next round of the reports that we issue.
Dan Breen: Fantastic. So, there's… there's quite a few questions in here that are multiple questions at once. So, how accurate is the AI audio description is a great question. So, I think both me and Ben can answer this one. So, previously, two years ago, we would only have human
Dan Breen: audio description, for the exact point you've made here, Natalia, that it lacks context, purpose. Also, from an AI synthetic voice perspective, sometimes it misses nuance. So, the pronunciation, and maybe of a double-barreled surname, or the pronunciation of a certain word.
Dan Breen: a lot of meaning is lost if the synthetic voicing has missed the nuance, for example. So…
Dan Breen: Maybe a brand name, you know.
Dan Breen: Nick and Nike, for example, as very simple, you know, simple nuance. So I would say
Dan Breen: My recommendation would be
Dan Breen: at Verbot at the moment, we're running a program with JISC where basically you can test
Dan Breen: And we do one deliverable through the human, and we do one deliverable through the AI to allow you to compare. Ben's just done that, so hopefully he's smiling and nodding. I can't see him right now.
Dan Breen: We've just done that for your most recent audio description upload, and you're able to side-by-side and see the difference between the human versus the AIAD, so…
Dan Breen: we…
Dan Breen: we… I think the answer to that, Natalia, is we're gonna… we're gonna unpack that. There… it is new with anything that's new to market, it needs refinement.
Dan Breen: Ben touched on it earlier, though. The big… the big sea change that AI audio description is going to unlock is it just makes the barrier to entry so much cheaper.
Dan Breen: Because for human audio description, you are scripting, syncing, voicing, and mixing.
Dan Breen: effectively, that could be four different people's roles in creating that audio description. With the AI audio description, you are reducing that workload right down, so you're getting it quicker, and it's costing you less money, fundamentally. So, I definitely think it's something that needs to be explored. What are your thoughts on that, Ben?
Ben Watson: Absolutely. I mean, I think if anyone has been doing this as long as I have, I think there's been a similar journey, even with captions, you know. Probably 5, maybe 10 years ago, captions could be laughable at times, you know, actually, it's so dangerously…
Ben Watson: incorrect, and sometimes even a bit sweary, you know? It was kind of embarrassing sometimes, and you think how far we've come, and I think it's…
Ben Watson: you know, I think in terms of alternative text description, I can see, you know, great potential for that to help us at scale, but I still think we need a human touch to just, you know, check, because we can't always be certain about the context.
Ben Watson: And really, the only person who knows the exact context in which to deliver, you know, an effective bit of description is the person who chose that bit of content or that visual element to be included. One thing I've forgot to mention,
Ben Watson: I spoke to a fantastic guy called Jonathan Penny, who works for ITV, and the best bit of advice about audio description, of course, is to… sorry to say this, Dan, but to try and avoid the need for audio description at all, because
Ben Watson: If you can get the people who are delivering the content to effectively audio describe as part of their natural delivery.
Ben Watson: Of course, that, again, in the spirit of universality, that benefits everyone. Just because somebody, might be sighted and able to see
Ben Watson: something that's being described, or being referred to, sorry, it doesn't necessarily mean that they, you know, fully understand what it is they're looking at. So, having that additional
Ben Watson: Context being delivered.
Ben Watson: I think can really be a really useful exercise. So, you know, again, in terms of raising that awareness. Certainly, you know, trying to avoid that thing of people assuming everyone in the audience can see what they're talking about, and saying things like, you know, as you can see, you know, it shows it's been a very busy month for this company.
Ben Watson: what does that mean, you know? Like, bring that to life, you know? Spend a bit more time to really explain what you mean by that, and, you know, it…
Ben Watson: understand that there will be people who can't see it, for whatever reason. So, I think that… that…
Ben Watson: Yeah, that… that… that is something I would really encourage, and I think I'm excited to see where this develops. But the early signs are… are really good.
Ben Watson: But I think for audio description, you know, we'll always… well, not always. For the time being, we'll need humans just to check over the… that the AI has got it, or the AI has nearly got it, but we just need to make a little bit of an adjustment here.
Ben Watson: I don't think I'd say, and I don't think you would either, Dan, that it's ready to be used without that level of scrutiny just yet, but
Ben Watson: We would have said the same about standard captioning, you know, 5, 10 years ago as well.
Dan Breen: I couldn't agree more, and, I think… I think we are probably wrapping for the final question here from… from… from Jizzy. Did you address the quality of physical hardware in lecture rooms for audio capture quality to improve ASR?
Dan Breen: the biggest problem I still encounter is that AI suffer from hearing problems similar to my own. So, I'm gonna…
Dan Breen: You have 100% encapsulated some of the things that we put as best practices there, just… we can't create high-quality outputs without good quality audio. That's why they make me wear a headset at Burbit, otherwise I'm almost incomprehensible in free speech.
Dan Breen: Ben, how did you do that from a hardware perspective for lecture capture at UCL?
Ben Watson: It's… that… it's such a great question, and you're so right, you know, and it comes back to that thing, doesn't it? That this is everyone's responsibility, that it needs to be… accessibility needs to be that fundamental thing that goes through your organization, like the letters on a sticker rock, right? So, the team putting in the hardware in the rooms, designing the physical spaces.
Ben Watson: completely are in harmony with the digital teams and the requirements they have in terms of what's going to happen to people in those spaces, because most of us now have digital things happening in physical spaces, so it's such a great question.
Ben Watson: Well, I guess we were quite fortunate that we were undertaking quite a large-scale review of our sort of lecture provision in a move to a new lecture capture solution. It was all happening, you know, relatively concurrently. So, we were in a position to be actively reviewing quite a lot of the hardware.
Ben Watson: In our rooms. Of course, so even if you've got the hardware in the room, you know, that will mean that, you know, things… the capability is there.
Ben Watson: Obviously, it still needs to be checked, you know, these things break, people walk off with microphones, you know, or don't charge them, those things, so that you still need that level of, kind of, good housekeeping.
Ben Watson: And then, of course, you need that cultural thing of, like, people need to remember to do it. They need to remember to record if you don't have that automation running for all of your lectures. You need to make people aware that if they are somebody who wanders away from the lectern, that they… they… they will
Ben Watson: Where the, you know, the portable lapel microphone. And certainly things where there's more, kind of, audience interaction, to ask them to restate,
Ben Watson: some of their, questions from the audience who may not, you know, be wearing a microphone, in which case, you then just get these answers without any of the context in which, you know, what was the actual question that was being asked. So, I think it…
Ben Watson: it's a really difficult one, and I think it's, yeah, it's… hardware is another step on that kind of end-to-end journey, and unless everything is just right.
Ben Watson: And there's a break in any single bit of it, because you could have really brilliant lecturers who are really, kind of, you know, inclusively aligned and ready to go, and they go to the room and…
Ben Watson: You know, there's no microphones in the room, or there's somebody drilling just next door that's gonna ruin the kind of audio quality.
Ben Watson: you know, that's where we need everybody to be completely in lockstep. I suppose one other thing, and I presume this is more than just an issue for UCL, but where you know you might have some
Ben Watson: accessibility issues with your rooming. Not just about step-free access, but also in terms, perhaps, of, you know, some rooms, even if the hardware is good, just the acoustics of the space in old buildings sometimes is problematic.
Ben Watson: can you look at your timetabling systems to give priority to, perhaps, groups that need it most to be housed in rooms that are more conducive to higher quality audio recording? So, a lovely thing, again, a kind of line in the sand opportunity we had was
Ben Watson: Redesigning our timetabling approach.
Ben Watson: How can we get better data to allow us to maximize the suitability of our rooms? Of course, we want all of our rooms to be perfect for everyone, absolutely, but UCL, there are many historic sites, you know, it's central London, it's difficult to…
Ben Watson: to guarantee every room will be brand new and fully kitted out in the way we'd love it to be. So, how can we prioritize the rooming and the spaces available to the people who would, you know, ideally need it most? So that's another opportunity, perhaps, for us to look at where we do have limited resource.
Dan Breen: Fantastic.
Dan Breen: Ben, we've managed to talk for an hour instead of 45 minutes, which I thought might end up happening, especially with some of the great questions we've had today. Thank you very much, Ben, and thank you very much, everyone who's attended, and hopefully some people who go on to watch this once it's been recorded and posted.
Dan Breen: there's lots of touchpoints here. If you want to reach out to Ben, I know he's very sociable, accessible to collaborating, best practices.
Dan Breen: We'd obviously love to discuss further some of the collaboration we're doing with JISC, and also we've got the free trial being offered now for accessibility solutions for the upcoming term for any institutions across HE or FE. So, thank you very much, everyone, real pleasure, and look forward to hopefully hearing and speaking to the UCNC.
Ben Watson: Thank you, everyone.
Dan Breen: Thanks, all.