In this episode, we discuss the current state of accessibility in the event industry and how it can be improved. We explore the concept of "disability dongles" and how they are not truly solving accessibility issues. We emphasize that accessibility should be approached by providing access in various ways, including pricing, time commitment, and ease of participation. Additionally, we delve into the limitations and challenges of AI captioning.

Our discussion also centers on the challenges of providing live transcription services and ensuring geographical accessibility in virtual events. We stress the importance of captioning and the learning curve involved in adapting these services for live streams. Moreover, we examine issues such as time zones, networking opportunities, and socioeconomic factors that can impact geographical accessibility.

Overall, our focus is on the growing importance of accessibility in the event industry and how it can be incorporated into every aspect of event planning and production. We highlight the use of captioning tools, techniques, and processes, as well as policies that prioritize accessibility. Join us for this crucial conversation, and don't forget to share, rate, and review the episode on your favorite podcast platform.

Timestamps and key takeaways

0:01:17 - Design Solutions Problem

0:08:33 - The Accessibility Challenges of Capitalism

0:11:27 - Creating Accessible Events

0:17:36 - Addressing Geographical Accessibility Issues

0:21:24 - Making Geographic Accessibility a Priority

Design Solutions Problem

"So I think back a couple years to a talk I heard by Liz Jackson at a conference, and she's a disability advocate and a design strategist. She talks about disability dongles. And what she means by that is that there are a lot of  innovations and solutions and people thinking about how to fix accessibility issues that aren't actually issues. And so the classic example that she shared and that has kind of gone around is this mind blowing device that was created by a bunch of design students. It's a motorized wheelchair. Climb stairs. And so you don't need ramps anymore. And this has fancy motors and everything to help the wheelchair user actually climb a flight of stairs without having to get out of the chair and and without having to use a ramp. Which in the abstract may seem great. But the reason it's a dongle is because it's a solution to a highly specific problem that isn't actually the problem. The problem is not how a motorized wheelchair user gets upstairs. The problem is why are there not more ramps and elevators in public spaces where mobility device users need to gain access. And so what that solution does is fail to solve for people who can't afford a motorized chair, people who have a temporary disability. People who walk with a cane or have a stroller or any number of other situations where a fancy motorized wheelchair that can climb stairs doesn't fix their problem. And so that innovation would be better served doing other things that offer more accessibility to more people."

The Accessibility Challenges of Capitalism

"Cost is a major influence. And I think what this alludes to is a broader issue where from an accessibility standpoint, capitalism disincentivizes the effort and the expenses mandated by accessibility. Right? So say you're gonna have an event for a thousand people. And let's say you're collecting registration data and you know that you have two or three attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing or could otherwise benefit from captions. Event organizers then start to look at the bottom line and say, well, is this human transcription, is a more expensive captioning service worth it? Or can I get away with a cheaper AI version of captioning? And then you're starting to calculate your decision based on money. I'm sorry, even if you only have two or three people who have a direct benefit from a particular accessibility service. That's valuable."

Creating Accessible Events

“I think that we have learned a lot in the last several years about accessibility is important and fully acknowledging that we have made these mistakes. As I mentioned earlier, I watched an attendee at an event I was producing, the chair collapse out from underneath her. And I just, I could not believe that I had not thought of that. That was the first time that it had even entered my consciousness. And we've talked about captioning a little bit and we're gonna talk about it more. We've talked about geographical accessibility. These are things that we've learned and noticed and observed and had received feedback on from attendees that are events that are informing the way that we move forward. So my hope through this is that we can share some of the things that we've learned and some of the ways that we want to change the way that we do events going forward and the ways that we are changing how we do events to help help the industry continue to make progress faster than it has been because it's starting to become really painful to watch.”

Addressing Geographical Accessibility Issues

“The second really big area where we've had a lot of learning is geographical accessibility. So, again, we talked about this in the first segment a little bit in identifying some of the problems. And we've been through this. I was like, oh, this in person event is pivoting to virtual and suddenly forty percent of the attendees are international where maybe five percent of them were before. This is great. Hey, amazing. And then the event happens and we realize, oh, there were kind of some holes. They weren't able to attend the live activities because it was the middle of the night. There was a lot of date confusion, time zone confusion around when the program actually happened. So that's a communications issue and to some extent a platform issue.”

Making Geographic Accessibility a Priority

“Can you rebroadcast in a more friendly time zone to a specific region if you have a concentration of attendees there. So that they don't have to be up in the middle of the night to be able to catch a live recording or a live screen. So these are some of the things that we've started to build into our process. The more we realize that it's important. It's about community building. It's about consideration for the effort and the ease at which we want people to be able to attend an event and to participate in an event. And it starts to get us to question what our commitment is to these broader geographical areas. This opens up this whole set of questions that are very strategic and very important to have to make sure that we're making geographic accessibility a priority if that is indeed a priority to us. Because if it isn't, then you shouldn't pat yourself on the back about it just because it's conveniently happening.”

Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated by Podium.page using AI and has been edited for clarity.

0:00:08

N: Welcome to Make it Kickass. Where we talk about designing conferences people actually wanna attend by the people who help create them. I'm Nessa Jimenez. 

I: And I'm Isaac Watson. 

N: This is something we have a lot of thoughts about, a lot of feelings about. And I would say, especially in the last two years, I think we both got more radicalized in our views. So this conversation can be really interesting. And why don't we just start this first half of the conversation diving into the state of accessibility in the industry right now. Where we think it's failing, our pet peeves, but it's more than just peeves. It's the stuff that's not working. industry needs to be better about. 

I: Yeah. I I think I think you're right. Like, these aren't just pet peeves. This isn't just us. These are things that we've noticed are wrong related to accessibility and events. And so I think that's why this is so relevant right now because there's so much work we can do to help fix this.

0:01:17

I: So I think back a couple years to a talk I heard by Liz Jackson at a conference, and she's a disability advocate and a design strategist. She talks about disability dongles. And what she means by that is that there are a lot of  innovations and solutions and people thinking about how to fix accessibility issues that aren't actually issues. And so the classic example that she shared and that has kind of gone around is this mind blowing device that was created by a bunch of design students. It's a motorized wheelchair. Climb stairs. And so you don't need ramps anymore. And this has fancy motors and everything to help the wheelchair user actually climb a flight of stairs without having to get out of the chair and and without having to use a ramp. Which in the abstract may seem great. But the reason it's a dongle is because it's a solution to a highly specific problem that isn't actually the problem. The problem is not how a motorized wheelchair user gets upstairs. The problem is why are there not more ramps and elevators in public spaces where mobility device users need to gain access. And so what that solution does is fail to solve for people who can't afford a motorized chair, people who have a temporary disability. People who walk with a cane or have a stroller or any number of other situations where a fancy motorized wheelchair that can climb stairs doesn't fix their problem. And so that innovation would be better served doing other things that offer more accessibility to more people.

0:03:23

N: So with this concept of a disabled dongle mind, why don't we talk a little bit about what accessibility actually is. What should it actually mean to us as we create events? 

I: Yeah. I I think accessibility means access. And it's not just about the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's not just about can people who are deaf or hard of hearing understand what's being said? It's about access and that access comes across in various ways. It's access to pricing and affordability. It's access to the time required for someone to attend an event, whether that's virtual or in person. It's about their ease and ability to make an effort to participate and to engage. And that takes shape through introversion and extraversion, through social discomfort, through neurodivergence. Like, there's so many different ways that we can talk about accessibility across an entire, for lack of a better word, spectrum of people, of abilities, of modalities, of economic position. Like, it is so deep and so rich, and there's so much more that can be done. 

N: And the truth of the matter is event organizers and producers just aren't thinking about this, and it needs to stop because the longer we go without changing some of these things. The longer we go without having plans in place and devising ways to provide better access to more people, the more we're gonna shoot ourselves in the foot in the process.

0:05:22

I: Yeah, I agree. And the definition of access and the definition of accessibility right now are so limited and so not creative, but that's part of the problem. Looking at the last year, where suddenly everything's going virtual and it's opening up a lot of eyes and a lot of doors to accessibility. But in the process, I think we've drawn a lot of shorthand. And so accessibility has become this shortcut term for merely adding captioning to videos, for example. And it becomes like a self congratulatory pat on the back. Oh, yeah. captioning is available. We're accessible. Captioning is good. Don't get me wrong.

0:06:11

I: Captioning also has a lot of issues in quality, in technical complexity and things like that. Also, captioning is not enough. Captioning is not the only way that your event can be accessible. We've talked about this at length before, there's been a proliferation of technologies and tools in the last couple of years, captioning in particular has been really interesting. The more prevalent the content creation comes into play on the web. So you have a lot of artificial intelligence providing captioning tools, auto transcription services, And you're seeing things like Zoom now has built in auto captioning, which is great, but it's AI based. Right? So what's the value between human captioning and AI? How well can an artificial intelligence detect different accents or dialects or for non native English speakers how thick is their accent? And how does that come through from an AI standpoint? And while captioning has become this kind of broader prevalence of live streams and live events and virtual events, there is still a very broad spectrum of quality and it's all over the map.

0:07:54

I: I mean, I've seen hard coded captions in videos that cover up slide text, and so you can't read either. And, like, that's not helpful. That's just confusing. So how does that help your accessibility? 

N: And let's be honest, AI captioning is so popular because it's just way cheaper. It's the cheapest option. So, of course, that's the one that has picked up speed. Right? But it's not great. And forget about heavy accents. Like, I'm someone that has the eternal, like, stuffy nose sound, and AI is awful at understanding the things that I say. But I think what this brings up is like, you mentioned cost.

0:08:37

Right? Cost is a major influence. And I think what this alludes to is a broader issue where from an accessibility standpoint, capitalism disincentivizes the effort and the expenses mandated by accessibility. Right? So, like, if there are say, you're gonna have an event of a thousand people. And let's say you're collecting registration data and you know that you have two or three attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing or could otherwise benefit from captions. Event organizers then start to look at the bottom line and say, well, is this human transcription, a more expensive captioning service worth it? Or can I get away with a cheaper AI version of captioning? And then you're starting to calculate your decision based on money. I'm sorry, even if you only have two or three people who have a direct benefit from a particular accessibility service. That's valuable. And I think that that's one of the problems that we need to address is that these types of services need to become standardized and planned for in advance rather than being kind of reactionary let's let's check a box or let's let's fill a need with a free tool or a cheap tool or something like that because it's better than nothing.

0:10:26

N: Now that we've aired our grievances, It feels good. Right? We're gonna take a short break, and we will be right back, and we'll talk a little bit more about our sort of accessibility journey and how we've both learned a lot and how we got to our thinking today. 

N: And welcome back. Let's jump right back into it.

0:11:02

N: So for this segment of the show, we wanna get into our kind of accessibility journey. First of all, we are not experts at all. In any of this. And we have definitely made mistakes along the way. So it would be very hypocritical for us to sit here and be like, We're the best. We're so good at access. Right. Yeah. I'm far from the person that wants to just pat myself on the back and say that we've got this.

0:11:33

I: I think that we have learned a lot in the last several years about accessibility is important and fully acknowledging that we have made these mistakes. As I mentioned earlier, I watched,  an attendee at an event I was producing, the chair collapse out from underneath her. And I just, I could not believe that I had not thought of that. That was the first time that it had even entered my consciousness. And we've talked about captioning a little bit and we're gonna talk about it more. We've talked about geographical accessibility. These are things that we've learned and noticed and observed and had received feedback on from attendees that are events that are informing the way that we move forward. So my hope through this is that we can share some of the things that we've learned and some of the ways that we want to change the way that we do events going forward and the ways that we are changing how we do events to help help the industry continue to make progress faster than it has been because it's starting to become really painful to watch. 

N: So let's get into it then. Let's walk through the lessons that we've learned and the process behind that.

0:13:02

I: So I have, years years ago, I kind of realized and bought into the idea that live events should be actions for accessibility reasons that it's beneficial to a lot of people, not just to deaf and hard of hearing, but those who maybe speak English as their second language. If all your content is presented in English, reading can often be easier to digest. There are certain people whose learning styles are different. it hits a lot of potential access issues. So captioning generally is important. And live transcription services in a live event setting, we're kind of just like, this is a thing we'll do. We know how it works. We have vendors that do this, it's good.

0:13:48

I: And the big kind of wake up call in addition to the technological advances that I mentioned previously is that when virtual events started happening, I just kind of assumed that captioning would carry over into a livestream fairly easily. I mean, we get captions in TV and film all the time. Closed captioning through broadcast television is just kind of a standard these days. And so I just kind of assumed that it would be easy. Well, turns out, it's not, and I was wrong. And I realized very quickly that the same tools that we were used to using in person do not necessarily translate in the same way as the tools that are available through live streaming. You know, how can you best offer live transcription for live streamed content?

0:14:55

I: In regards to technology, that was a big lesson for me about how many platforms have different ways of integrating different things and how there's so many ways it could go wrong. and there's so many ways that they just don't play well with other other tools that you assume they would and they just don't. So there is this process where you need to do a little bit more research. I wanna use this platform, but how does this platform handle captioning? What can it do? What can't it do? And I hope that this will become standardized. Really do. That platforms will come around and they'll stop blocking and captioning behind enterprise tiers and that they'll stop you know, I remember you asking one platform if certain accessibility features were on their roadmap and they were like, Yeah. I know if you don't like I've had people straight up say no.

0:15:58

N: Or People just kind of don't answer the question. Because it's not a priority for them and they don't wanna admit it because they know that it looks bad. Yes. And this goes back to the incentivizing issue that the anti incentive that capitalism brings into it. Right? Does it affect their bottom line? Well, not enough for them to prioritize it. And that's really disappointing.

0:16:21

I: I think that there was a big learning curve between what we were used to doing in an in person setting and what's possible or challenging or technically complicated or expensive about captioning live streams. And so, you know, we've now developed standards on what is our target for good captioning. How can we provide this through these particular platforms? We know what we need to ask of any platform that we're gonna approach for hosting the event. We know which live streaming tools we are willing to use based on the features available to us. So creating those kinds of policy standards, it's kind of baseline expectations and understanding what requirements we have and that we prioritize for the events we produce so that all of our clients can benefit from that. That's the key for me. Jumping from that to, I think–

0:17:36

I: –The second really big area where we've had a lot of learning is geographical accessibility. So, again, we talked about this in the first segment a little bit in identifying some of the problems. And we've been through this. I was like, oh, this in person event is pivoting to virtual and suddenly forty percent of the attendees are international where maybe five percent of them were before. This is great. Hey, amazing. And then the event happens and we realize, oh, there were kind of some holes. So they weren't able to attend the live activities because it was the middle of the night. There was a lot of date confusion, time zone confusion around when the program actually happened. So that's a communications issue and to some extent a platform issue. Can we just air our grievances about platforms that don't auto convert to local time zones for the scheduling? Throwing that out there. 

N: Oh, god. That is just the absolute worst

0:18:51

I: We talked about some of the other things we realized were networking opportunities are really hard for people to join, especially if you're scheduling pre-event networking. making sure you're paying attention to where your attendees are coming from. Are you collecting that data? Or are you just guessing based on email addresses or something. Like, having better data is gonna give you better information to make decisions on. Even pricing, economically, it's very different for a developer working in Lithuania to attend tech events financially than it is for somebody working in the Bay Area in Silicon Valley where the economics around employment are very different. And so how do you provide access for attendees from different socioeconomic backgrounds so that they can still contribute? because their participation is valuable.

0:20:02

I: In terms of what we've learned about geographical accessibility, The big question is, is this actually valuable to people all around the world? You have to sit down and go, okay you designed this content with who in mind? Did we really design this content for people that are from a completely different culture that we don't know about? And if so, if we do intend those people to participate, how do we make sure that what we've created is inclusive of them, and how do we market in a way that it's clear to them, that this is for them too? They are included in our group as well. Exactly. That value for us has begun to translate into our initial strategy process.

0:20:51

I: So identifying who the target audience is, where are they coming from? Who are we catering to from an attendee standpoint? What are their values? How can we provide a good experience for them? That plays out through speaker selection. Diversity and inclusion in speaker selection is critical. It absolutely makes sense to have representation in your speaker lineup for that audience segment. That's what It also carries through to you know, we started thinking about rebroadcasts for live streams.

0:21:34

I: Can you rebroadcast in a more friendly time zone to a specific region if you have a concentration of attendees there. So that they don't have to be up in the middle of the night to be able to catch a live recording or a live screen. So these are some of the things that we've started to build into our process. The more we realize that it's important. It's about community building. It's about consideration for the effort and the ease at which we want people to be able to attend an event and to participate in an event. And it starts to get us to question what our commitment is to these broader geographical areas. This opens up this whole set of questions that are very strategic and very important to have to make sure that we're making geographic accessibility a priority if that is indeed a priority to us. Because if it isn't, then you shouldn't pat yourself on the back about it just because it's conveniently happening.

0:22:43

N: I just wanted to point out the fact that even though we've talked a lot about captions and a lot about geographical accessibility, I wanna remind everybody again that the topic of accessibility is huge. And we all need to do a lot of work in opening up our definition of what access and accessibility means because we're doing it to service a lot of people. And it's impossible for us to touch on all of those things in just this one episode, but we do plan on touching on this again in the future and focusing on other aspects of this. 

I: Yes. We chose two examples for sake of brevity and two examples that we're very passionate about. But you're absolutely right.

0:23:27

I: Accessibility, like we mentioned at the beginning, is so much broader than just captions, accessibility is so much more than just where my attendees are. It is an integral part of the attendee experience. Too long, didn't listen. Event accessibility is not just about actions. And we're here to tell you that it needs to change because the more we do virtual events, the more that we want to go back to in person events, the more we need to focus on accessibility. Accessibility is about access. That access is really about your attendees' experience and how easy it is for them to participate and engage based on their own lived experience.

0:24:15

I: We are making efforts to make sure that accessibility is becoming more and more important to our clients in the work that we do from the very beginning. We have identified some ways that we do that through captioning and the tools and the techniques and the processes that are involved with that. We've talked about geographic accessibility and some of the policies and standards around representation and convenience. And things like that that we're doing, we have to build accessibility into the event planning and production process from the very beginning. 

N: Alright. And thank you for joining us for today's episode. If you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to share it with others. Please also leave a rating and review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. That's really helpful. And if you wanna learn more about us about what we do, to find full show notes transcriptions of our episodes. You can find us at our website, kickassconf.com.