Putting the ‘access’ into accessible teaching at GCU

By Aidan Johnson, Digital Learning Systems Developer 

COVID-19 – one year on…

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a year since we made the pivot to online learning, a fast moving and unfamiliar landscape that was being commonly referred to as ‘the new normal’. Many speculated that this was not a bad thing for course redesign, and many others agreed that it was long overdue. All of us worked immensely hard to adapt content and course structures we had successfully used in ‘the old normal’ face-to-face teaching, and as the pressure eased, we undertook a root and branch redesign that supported online learning.

Challenges

One aspect that was largely overlooked was that of digital accessibility as we all rushed to experiment with new online learning approaches and utilise a plethora of tools and technologies to support us as we did. In the frenzy to move face-to-face courses online, the issue of digital accessibility was only given consideration after learning materials and activities had been created and made available online.

Once these accessibility issues began to surface, myself and my colleagues in Academic Development and Student Learning began to identify solutions that would not only assist staff in ensuring they were meeting accessibility compliance, but also help them understand and see things from a student’s perspective or from a staff perspective.

Tools to support digital accessibility

Blackboard Ally

From the outset, here at GCU we were slightly ahead of the curve in some respects. As I previously blogged about shortly before the pandemic began, we rolled out Blackboard Ally to all students and staff at GCU. Ally is an accessibility toolkit that is deeply integrated with our VLE, GCULearn (Blackboard Ultra). Ally is extremely valuable in helping to meet the challenge around accessibility in three mains ways:

1. Ally automatically checks module level learning materials against the WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards. 
2. Ally assesses and gauges the accessibility of instructor created module content and it delivers useful guidance to assist users to improve the accessibility of their content. 
3. Ally provides students with a vast range of accessible alternative formats of the original files that have been provided by the instructor.

One year on from the successful rollout of Blackboard Ally, we have uncovered a few interesting findings from analysing the data from Ally:

• An increase in both the amount of content (+ 14%) on the VLE and also in the overall accessibility of the new and existing content (+7%).
• The vast majority of content placed on to the VLE is in the format of either PDF; document or presentation. This is important information in that it provides clear areas for focus in relation to CPD for staff in Digital Accessibility. 
• 1200 modules in the VLE in March 2021 had an Ally score of 67.1% or above, which positively rates them as green or dark green on the Ally accessibility rating scale (below).

Ally accessibility rating scale

Planet eStream & Microsoft Azure

As more lecture and tutorials moved to online webinar-based platforms such as Blackboard Collaborate and laterally Microsoft Teams, the University moved to ensure that we were compliant with accessibility legislation. The table below outlines the legislative requirements along with what is considered additional good practice over and above meeting the legislation.

Time Based Media	Needs to meet legislation	Good Practice
Recorded Video with Audio	Captions (including audio description of any images used)	Transcript
Recorded Video Only (No audio)	Descriptive transcript (text description of the visual information need to understand the content)
Recorded Audio Only (e.g. Podcast)	Transcript
Live Video with Audio	Captions/ transcript not required	Live Captions
Live Video (with No Audio track)	Captions/ transcript not required
Live Audio Only	Captions/ transcript not required	Live Text Stream

Summary of Captions and Transcripts requirements (Video and Audio)

The ability to provide captions or transcripts requires access to appropriate technology. Currently GCU has no recommended technology solution available to staff for producing captions or transcripts; whilst some options are available these sometimes present burdensome workarounds. When GCU does have a recommended solution for providing captions and/or transcripts it will then be a requirement for all staff to provide these in line with the guidance in the table above.  

Planet eStream is already used at GCU to provide a streaming service for the large multimedia files. eStream also has integration with various third-party automated captioning services. We selected Microsoft Azure’s text to speech service to power an automated speech to text captioning service and workflow with Planet eStream. This is currently being piloted at GCU as it has the potential to also offer required features to meet the accessibility legislation as it:

• Generates speech-to-text transcription for recorded video/audio
• Enables users to easily edit the transcription
• Generates an ‘.srt’ caption file for closed captioning of video
• Is generally quick and straightforward to use for all staff
• Integrates with third party paid for transcription services such as Microsoft Azure; again already in use in GCU as part of the Microsoft Teams service to maximise oversight of an integrated workflow
• Offers a cost-effective price through this integration with the Microsoft Azure
• Offers quick and simple checking and amending of transcription files for enhanced accuracy; all transcription services require to be checked for accuracy by the user which requires additional time to prepare teaching materials that meet the legislation.

How Planet eStream and Microsoft Azure works as a solution

This integrated workflow offers staff a much better solution to transcribe audio and video materials and integrate them into the VLE quickly and easily. The Planet eStream web-based subtitle editor offers a quick and easy way to check and amend transcription files for enhanced accuracy as illustrated below.

Planet eStream – Automated Captioning Workflow

The pilot is addressing the need for staff to have improved access to automated captions particularly for video and audio recording, and the need to address the time limited claim for disproportionate burden.  Current feedback to date indicates that the tool is addressing the required features:

1. Processing Speed – during the pilot the team has worked with the provider to reduce the processing and feedback time by 100%; work continues to reduce this further from the current 10-15 queuing wait.
2. Accuracy – No automated transcription service can provide 100% accuracy due to factors such as accents, dialect, audio quality, multiple people speaking at one time, audio distortion amongst other contributing factors. 
3. Transcripts – Planet eStream provides a solution to the legal requirement for captions for video and audio. It does not have the facility to provide a complete transcription of captioned resources. An additional workflow is being tested in the pilot to support users to create a transcript from the automated caption text. 
4. Upload Speed/time – The upload process speed/time is wholly dependent on the user’s home broadband connection whereby the upload speed is a lot slower than the download speed: e.g., a user with an 80mb download speed will typically have a 20/25mb upload speed. So, video and audio takes longer to upload to any service, be it YouTube or the like. To address this Planet eStream has a queuing system which lets users bulk upload video/audio and works in the background whilst it uploads and transcodes to save time. 

Future direction

Both these tools are helping to improve the learning experience for all our students, not just those with accessibility requirements. They also go a long way to helping staff not only meet legislative requirements, but understand why, all digital teaching materials need to be accessible in order to provide an inclusive learning experience for all learners.