The Next Generation

By Charles Silverman

Several years back, my teenage daughter started her high-school journey at Ursula Franklin Academy in Toronto. She became involved in videography, loved it and learned to make movies, everything from documentaries to film noir. Each year, the young filmmakers, their parents and teachers attend “Night at the Movies,” a special screening of their works at the National Film Board of Canada.

As I sat in the theatre with the other parents, I realized I couldn’t fully share in the experience. I have severe to profound hearing loss, and although I did my best to guess at what was going on, I soon realized it was a hopeless task without captioning. Instead of dwelling on the barrier this presented, I did the next best thing and started daydreaming about getting the kids interested in accessible media. There are so many high-school students who want to make a difference and who care passionately about the big issues affecting the world. Shouldn’t accessibility be right up there with justice and equity concerns? Wouldn’t it be interesting to teach them about the benefits of captioning and video description, universal design and how accessible media can benefit everyone, including people with disabilities?

Incredibly, what I wished for that evening actually came true. Two years later, I was presented with the opportunity to work with high-school kids on creating accessible new media. Two projects, Stretch and Artists as Innovators, enabled this to happen. Both are funded by the Canadian Culture Online Program of Canadian Heritage. Artists as Innovators is part of a larger research network, CulturAll, a multi-partner initiative aimed at discovering innovative ways to include people with disabilities in Canada's online cultural exchange. The opportunity to work on the project was not just timely, but also uniquely personal. Ursula Franklin Academy was identified as one of the schools that would partner in the Stretch project, along with Vaughan Secondary School and Parkdale Collegiate in Toronto.

So, there I was, actually living out my daydream of teaching those students about accessible media. I spent quite a bit of time in the classroom, exploring the twin themes of accessibility and inclusion with kids and teachers, talking about media accessibility from a curb-cut metaphor point of view, and actually making access happen (not to mention working very hard not to embarrass my teenage daughter).

The efforts of the Stretch staff, teachers and students culminated in an exhibit at the Design Exchange in Toronto at the end of March. You can view the students’ video works in Stretch’s online gallery (http://stretch.atrc.utoronto.ca) — you’ll note they all have captions and video descriptions.

So, why was it so important to tackle accessible media in high schools? A lot has changed in what and how schools teach young people today. In schools, as in society at large, we’ve adopted digital technology. Computers, iPods, camcorders, cell phones—these are the protractors, pencils and crayons of yesteryear. Today’s English class is an English Media class. In some schools, every kid has an iBook, and instead of producing a year-end play, students are required to produce video dramas, which they write, direct and edit. We live in a post-literate world in which traditional linear print media is being supplanted by an electronic, non-linear, multimedia experience.

In terms of access, video and audio can be quite challenging. Most broadcast and video rentals are captioned, and broadcasters have begun to provide Descriptive Video for people with vision disabilities. Unfortunately, the web is lacking in this regard. Examples of captioning on the web are few and scattered, and video description for web-based content is practically non-existent.

If we want to make sure that media is accessible from the get-go, we can deal with the current industry and all the attitudes and barriers. There’s another way: why not work with the kids who one day will make up this industry?

To get the students started with the idea of universal design, we explored the most compelling example of real-world accessibility solutions—the curb cut. Sure, these were introduced for people using wheelchairs to make it easier for them to get onto the sidewalk. But ask a kid why curb cuts exist and you’ll get a long list. They’ll say that the curb cut is for a kid on wheels, a skateboarder, a scooter, a bike, pulling a wagon, a mom with a stroller, or even a Segway. Wheelchairs are there, but not at the top of the list. The kids don’t see these things as labels, but as function. The curb cut becomes a metaphor and a good example of how, when something is designed well, it meets the needs of many different people and situations.

Shifting from curb cuts to ways to design online and create inclusive, media-rich experiences, we explored some of the reasons to add captioning or description to video:

1. Watch TV in bed without annoying sleeping spouse.
2. Talk on phone and watch "House" at the same time.
3. Become adept at trivia e.g., What was Dorothy’s last name in "The Wizard of Oz"?
4. Never miss another spoken word.
5. Name background music.
6. Salvage video when the quality of the audio is terrible.
7. Retrieve transcript from captured closed captions.
8. Gain text exposure for second language speakers and people with learning disabilities.
9. Potential access to searchable database.
10. Access for Deaf and Hard of Hearing viewers.

Video description, as we explained to the students, is about providing critical visual information when the viewer doesn’t have visual access to television, movies or even live theatre and other events for any number of reasons. A person may be blind or have low vision, may be away from the television or doing other tasks, or may simply need or desire clarification about what is being viewed. People for whom English is a second language have commented that video descriptions help them to understand the content. With this approach, captioning and video description became easy leaps in understanding for the students.

In the Stretch project, we assisted students with adding captions and descriptions to their work. Often, the addition of captions and descriptions resulted in creative leaps for the students, too. The students used CapScribe, a software program developed by yours truly to add captioning and description to online video. (By the way, CapScribe is a free program and is available for download at the Stretch website and www.capscribe.com.)

Did the kids “get it”? I think they did. In the words of Mac Pepler, one of our students:

"How to begin? I only recently got involved in the whirlwind of activity that is the Stretch project. It began with a visit to the University of Toronto to learn about accessibility issues and what could be done for time-based multimedia. Instantly, I knew that this would not be one of those in-and-out projects. It has been a continuous roller coaster of excitement and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. For people who can’t hear or see, this concept of bridging the gap is essential. But what we discover is the universality of this bridge, how it can apply to everyone. What is it about description, what makes it intriguing? As a filmmaker at heart, description gives me yet another medium in which to convey my messages. Captions bring clarity. The concepts of universal design, the idea that something can be created so perfectly that it is accessible to everybody, and would be impossible to determine its original application, and so ingrained in our society that we could not imagine life without it."

Students like Mac who plan on becoming part of the broadcast and media industry are now armed with an understanding that media access is too important to ignore, and view captions and audio descriptions not as afterthoughts but as key parts of what we need to do.

As for me, I finally got to have the full experience of those student videos. Charles Silverman teaches accessibility and technology at Ryerson University’s School of Disability Studies. He would like to thank everyone involved with the Stretch project for all of their hard work and big dreams—hats off to you!

To view student works, please visit http://stretch.atrc.utoronto.ca. For more information about Artists as Innovators and the CulturAll Research Network, please visit http://culturall.atrc.utoronto.ca. Charles Silverman can be reached at charles@captionweb.ca.