The Cake is A Lie, Manual Captions and Educational Realities

Another shortish post from me today, a few days early because I have a lot of article editing to focus on on Sunday and I don’t want to be distracted by a blog post rattling in my head. Today’s post is about accessibility, which is pretty much what my posts are always about. In particular I would like to focus on captioning, especially for live events and why I have only really seen three webinars so far during this whole COVID thing that did it correctly and they were all from the same Center. It is not that the others did it incorrectly, it is because the others didn’t bother to do it at all and that is so upsetting, ableist, inequitable, and goes against both ADA in the US and AODA here in Ontario.

Most live stream events don’t even think about captions and it’s really a tragedy. The worst is one that I tweeted about and wrote about before, which was an event on “Inequity in Higher Education” with no captions by The Chronicle. They followed it up a week later with a panel on “Contingent Faculty in Higher Education during the time of COVID” with an all-white panel. Add to that how they are basically promoting a service that curates course notes, old exams, and assignments for a fee (you know like essay mill type things), I feel it is safe to say that The Chronicle is cancelled. But that’s not the real point.

This week I was on another webinar where the importance of captions was expressed but the webinar itself was again captionless. Links to how to do it on Zoom or using other video services built in to LMSs are always floated around but what they never say, or in fact try to hide, is that these links are links to show you how to manually caption a live event. Yes manually captioning a live event is by far the best way to have an accessible and accurate captioning experience, and it will always be better than ai automatic captions. But again what they fail to mention is that people go to school for years to learn to be a captioner. Just because you happen to type a lot for a living as an educator does not make you a captioner. That just makes you a person who types a lot.

I attended 3 webinars hosted by the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials (AEM) in the past few weeks and they are the only ones who have gotten the captioning right. Why? Because well they are the Center for Accessible Educational Materials but also because they PAY for a live captioner to be on the call, like the service offered by AI Media. This is a professional captioner creating captions. It reduces errors to almost 0 and it has no lag time.

When I do live presentations or webinars I either use this great trick on Google Slides shared by Eric Moore or Office 365 PowerPoint captions. Neither of these are perfect or correct though I will say I would give Google live caption a 9/10 and Microsoft a 6/10 but they are trying to get better (they just don’t have the data that Google has). Neither of these solutions allow for toggling captions on or off depending on your preference; it's an all or nothing solution. But again you have to use the tools that your institution has. And that is the point. The institution should have the tools. Accessibility isn’t an option. So when I hear faculty members being asked to do their own live captions or to assign someone to live caption a lecture, like a student or a TA I have to go WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? Do you know how much work it is to live caption? Did that student or TA go to school to create captions? Do they have a background in disability theory or accessible media? I guarantee the answer is no. And what exactly are we trying to do to our faculty? This is already an incredibly stressful time and now you are telling faculty well ya you just caption your stuff yourself while you are lecturing, easy peasy, you can do 3 things at once right?

The cake is a lie folks. If anyone tells you they have live captioning ability I bet you a 100% it is manual captions and they are going to try to get someone who has absolutely no training to do it. The educational reality is no faculty or graduate student should be manually captioning unless they have experience manually captioning. What institutions should do is pay for the captions to happen. Yes we can promote asynchronous delivery great, but that doesn’t stop synchronous delivery from being necessary sometimes. Accessibility is not negotiable, so we need to fund live captions if we are to deliver courses remotely. This is the drum that I bang many times a day, every single day. I know my coworkers are probably fed up of hearing it, I know some of my other colleagues are too. But until live captioning that isn’t instructor supplied manual captioning that should magically happen while they are also facilitating discussion is a thing that institutions invest in then I am not going to shut up. Your cake is a lie and it ignores educational realities.