Sakai Virtual Conference: Accessibility Report Card
2020 Sakai Virtual Conference Home Page
For this next installment of the “Tales of the Reluctant Blind” blog, I thought I would summarize my experience at last month’s Sakai Virtual Conference, with a look at some of the ways the conference was organized to be as accessible as possible.
Since Sakai is the premiere open source LMS used by education, I thought it might be fun to present the information in a kind of “report card” format where I can comment on different aspects of the conference while assigning a (somewhat arbitrary) letter grade. Now before you start reading too much into my grading methodology, let me just say that the whole point of this exercise is to demonstrate what worked well, and other places where there is maybe some room for improvement, to underscore that accessibility is not a one and done type proposition, and the hope is that lessons learned will be applied to future iterations of the event.
Well, according to one of the conference organizers, Wilma Hodges, Director of Training & eLearning Initiatives for Longsight, Inc. this idea of continuous improvement is nothing new to the Sakai community, and in fact, this group wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I’ve run the Sakai Virtual Conference for 7 years now,” Hodges explained, “and each time I tweak things a bit based on feedback from attendees and my own experience at the event. Many of the choices for this year's event were based on tried-and-true techniques that have been successful in the past, with a few new things thrown in to keep things fresh.”
To conduct this review I spoke with Hodges and several other people involved with organizing the event, and solicited some additional comments and perspective from a few of the presenters and conference attendees to provide for a more holistic look at the 2020 Sakai Virtual Conference.
I’ve got my scoring rubric and red ink pen handy, so let’s see exactly how well they did this time around…
Planning & Prep
I already went into great detail about planning and prep for the Sakai Virtual Conference in my November 9 blog, “Tale of a Reluctant Web Conferencing Solution User” so I won’t bother to cover it again here.
But if you haven’t seen it, check out the blog to learn about all the lengths that the conference organizers went to for planning and preparing for a successful event.
Planning & Prep Grade: A
Conference site Organization
As a screen reader user, I was naturally concerned about whether I would be able to effectively navigate through the conference’s virtual environment, but I would soon learn that I had nothing to worry about.
The site was organized in an easy to understand, and equally intuitive to navigate layout that made it a snap to locate and access the conference schedule and session details. Design features like the collapsible menus and embedded Zoom links worked flawlessly with my assistive technology, which is always a huge relief when you’re dealing with so many other unknowns.
“We have always run the conference out of a Sakai site,” explained Hodges. “This was done for convenience (since I have easy access to a Sakai server), familiarity (most of our attendees are Sakai users), and the ability to showcase features of Sakai within the site itself. I have used the Lessons tool each year to provide the conference navigation and present all of the session information and links in a centralized and easy to navigate location. My background is in technical writing and communication, so it is very important to me that information is easy to find. Also, I know from having attended many conferences (both online and in person) locating the session you want to attend, and making your way to the room where it is being presented are the main goals of every attendee. I created the conference site with those goals in mind. Over the years, I have set up Lessons using different page layouts and configurations to demonstrate some of the new or current capabilities of the tool. This year, I decided to go with collapsible sections for each time slot, and I used custom CSS styling to dress things up a bit. This was done for ease of use (i.e. having everything on one page), and to model a good use of the collapsible section feature as potential inspiration for attendees' own Lesson page designs in the future.”
Conference Site Organization Grade: A
Conference schedule
Throughout the day, there were natural ten-minute breaks built-into the schedule. As someone who relies on assistive technology, this extra time really helped to minimize the stress of having to constantly log out of Zoom and navigate back to the conference site to find information about my next session, which would be like the equivalent of having only a few minutes to use my cane to rush from one side of an unfamiliar, sprawling conference center to the other, which let me tell you, as a blind person who has attended dozens of conferences over my 15+ year professional career, is about as stressful as it gets.
Another member of the conference planning committee, Josh Wilson, Vice President of Longsight, Inc. summed up the group’s thinking about the conference schedule this way.
“The length of presentations and timing between sessions has been honed over several years of experimentation. We've tried different breakout session lengths in the past, anywhere from 20 minutes up to an hour, and we've found that 30 minutes seems to hit the sweet spot. It's enough time to present an in-depth topic with some Q&A, but it is short enough to allow for schedule variety and avoid Zoom fatigue. Likewise, we've tried different amounts of time between sessions, but 10 minutes seems to be the best balance between keeping things moving and giving folks time to transition. Any shorter, and people start to feel rushed jumping from one session to another, particularly if they are presenting or moderating two sessions in a row. Any longer, and people tend to wander off and get caught up in other things that take their attention away from the event.”
Overall, I felt the conference schedule would pass the Goldilocks’ test, not too little, not too much, just right. That being said, it was a fast paced, super packed agenda with the only other scheduled break being the half hour adjournment for lunch, which luckily for me, was timed perfectly since by that point, my middle-aged bladder had been slowly filling up with my 3+ cups of morning coffee. My only criticism (if you want to even call it that) would be to maybe consider including additional morning and afternoon breaks. Nothing crazy, just an extra ten minutes or so for folks to unplug and give their eyes (or ears) a rest, do some stretching exercises, and yes, go potty (there, I said it.) When it comes to considering accommodations for the disability community, it’s important to keep in mind that individuals with certain types of disabilities require more frequent bathroom breaks, so it’s always a good policy to build a little extra time/flexibility into your scheduled agenda to be sensitive of this population’s needs.
Conference Schedule Grade: A-
Integration With External Tools
The Sakai Virtual Conference used Zoom meeting rooms for the different sessions. For the most part, this all worked seamlessly, clicking on the “join session” links embedded under the respective session descriptions on the conference site automatically launched the Zoom application and placed you into the appropriate meeting room. Besides some internet connectivity issues (which had nothing to do with the conference’s virtual platform, just something that tends to happen when you share a house with two kids soaking up bandwidth as they participate in remote learning) the only other drawback was the whole having to log off of Zoom and navigate back to the conference site after every session, but again, at least there was extra time budgeted for this
I’ll throw the other tools like the online escape rooms, Simulive recordings and Otter AI Auto-captioning software in here as well (see below for my comments) since they were technically external tools which required a certain amount of integration with the conference site.
Integration With External Tools Grade: B+
Online Escape Rooms
This year’s Sakai Virtual Conference included some online escape room challenges as a cool, fun team-building activity. While there was an effort to make at least some of the Escape Room options accessible for individuals with disabilities, the reliance on the screenshare feature in Zoom unfortunately made much of the functionality null and void for screen reader users like myself. Nonetheless, the overall experience was a positive one, and I was still able to get a lot out of the activity by listening to the various audio clues and following along with the other participants in my escape room challenge. At some point, I’d actually like to try accessing the Escape Room challenges directly from the vendor’s website to determine if things work any better with my assistive technology.
“One of the most important elements of a successful virtual event is creating a sense of community,” said Hodges. She went on to explain, “Virtual events, by their very nature, are not the same as in-person conferences. Therefore, it is even more critical to incorporate informal, fun, team-building activities so that attendees have an opportunity to interact with one another. Each year, I typically include one or more team-building activities at some point throughout the day. In past years, we've done things like virtual karaoke, guided meditations, yoga breaks, and creating/voting for best attendee pages in our "Rogues Gallery." I try not to repeat the same activity too many years in a row, so that it doesn't get boring. This year, I thought it would be fun to incorporate an online escape room activity. I searched online and found several companies that host online escape events, although many of those were a bit pricey. Then, I found ThePanicRoom.net which had several offerings for a much more reasonable price. I was pleased to see that they included accessibility information on the description page for each mystery, such as stating which games were suitable for deaf or hard of hearing players or players with color blindness. When I selected the set of online escape games to purchase for the conference, I made sure to include their most accessible mysteries in the bundle.”
Online Escape Room Grade: B
“Pedagogy & Privacy” Keynote
During the conference’s keynote presentation, Laura Gibbs, a long-time online instructor at the University of Oklahoma teaching general education humanities courses, and Sakai’s own Chuck Severance covered a wide range of fascinating topics related to “pedagogy and privacy” implications to consider when it comes to using LMS to deliver instruction in this age of COVID.
While this presentation wasn’t necessarily supposed to have an accessibility slant to it, as a (former college student) with a disability, I ended up being surprised by how much I could relate to some of the alternate learning strategies being discussed.
Check out the below excerpt from one of Chuck and Laura’s exchanges where they delve into the philosophical debate among educators about synchronous vs. asynchronous learning, and how, in their opinion, these technologies have actually made it easier for certain types of students to thrive in these changed learning environments.
Chuck Severance: “So, in my own teaching, there are things that I was sort of forced to start doing, well, not forced, but it became easier to, the easy path, changed how I teach my on-campus classes. And I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep it, but I want to keep, after COVID’s gone and we can be together, I want to change how I teach. And I don’t know if I’ll get away with it, but we’ll see. Now let me tell you what I’m thinking of doing. So, what I realized is giving lectures, in the time, when we’re same place, same time, which now all of a sudden is precious and not available, but when we’re same place, same time, I don’t want to give PowerPoint slides anymore. And that seems like everyone would say ‘Well. don’t do PowerPoint’ but a lot of my stuff is still PowerPoint because there’s lots of content, and I think there’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint. But, I find that when I do the same place, same time in the future, it is really much more like coaching…I’m finding that same place, same time stuff, the synchronous stuff, is the high value stuff. And the reason I think I’m not going to be able to do it in the future is that it lasts about 45 minutes per week, I don’t have two or three hours of coaching per week, I have 45 minutes of coaching, and then two to three hours of recorded lectures. I’m curious if there’s techniques that you yourself have adopted during COVID that are going to change how you teach after COVID?”
Laura Gibbs: “Well, and see that’s why I’m the wrong person to ask because I switched to online about twenty years ago because the classroom was a strange, frustrating place for me. You know, I’ve always taught Gen Ed type classes where there’s this huge mix of people in the classes. People who are totally eager, totally ready to go. Bookworms like me. And students who were just in there because it’s a required class, that they’re engineering majors, or business majors, or some other kind of major that would not normally bring them to my classes. And so for me, I taught asynchronously all this time and I understand for the people who feel like, you know, synchronous is where you really connect with your students and that’s what makes it precious and valuable. I would say ANY way you connect with your students is precious and valuable, and there are all kinds of ways to connect with your students that are not about face to face in the classroom. And I think all along there have been students for whom the classroom is a hard place to get to, right, either because they have work conflicts, or family conflicts, or who knows what’s going on in their lives. And now with the COVID, everybody has got a reason why it’s hard to come to campus, but I hope in the future we’ll think about all of the things we’ve learned trying to do both synchronous AND valuable, asynchronous stuff to realize that when we offer students asynchronous education, we are not selling them the short end of the stick, the asynchronous learning can be just as powerful, just as connected, just as personal as synchronous learning. So, if everybody hasn’t learned that yet in COVID, I hope that they will before this is all over.”
Of course, when Laura referenced “that all along there have been students whom the classroom is a hard place to get to” I immediately thought of individuals with disabilities. I have always argued that technology can serve as a leveling force in terms of providing better access for individuals with disabilities, so it was refreshing to hear about how folks in education are leveraging Learning Management Systems like Sakai to ensure that every interaction between instructor and student is both precious and valuable.
Current Michigan State University student Brent Severance echoed these sentiments, using his own experiences to illustrate how participating in a virtual learning environment has it’s pros and cons.
“To be honest online learning due to COVID has been a double-edged sword for me,” he said. “I have a physical disability known as cerebral palsy. At times, especially during the winter, I would struggle to get to in-person classes because walking long distances in the snow can be challenging. However, because now I feel like I don’t really get to meet my classmates or instructors outside of a virtual space, college can feel really strange and isolating at times. The longer the pandemic goes on, and the more we get used to this new normal, my hope is that we will continue to find new and better ways to use technology to connect and collaborate with one another.”
To see more of the keynote presentation, click here to access the full recording of Chuck and Laura’s session.
Finally, the other super cool thing about the keynote presentation that I wanted to mention, is that Dr. Chuck used a Simulive type presentation to pre-record and playback his and Laura’s conversation. “To create the Simulive recording, I used a Zoom cloud recording and Final Cut Pro to make it look more like a TV show and add the little running commentary,” explained Chuck, before adding, “I really liked the format and want to experiment more with the technology.”
Always the tech-savvy educator looking to push the envelope and try something new, it turns out that there were also a couple of very practical reasons behind Chuck’s decision to go with the Simulive format. The first being that Chuck wanted to be able to free himself up during the presentation to monitor and respond in real-time to messages coming in through the Zoom chat. And then there was the little issue of Laura not being available to participate in the live session due to a prior scheduling conflict, she was actually at a dentist appointment during the time of their keynote, but the conference attendees were none the wiser because of the use of the Simulive recording.
I can’t stop thinking about how this same technology could be a real game changer for individuals with disabilities, people like me who rely on assistive technology and often times get intimidated by the prospect of having to do a live presentation, especially if there is a lot of information you need to cover or there are specific time limits. How great would it be to pre-record your entire presentation so all you have to do is simply playback the recording? You could use as many takes as you need, or chunk up and splice together segments so that you don’t have to try and get everything perfect in one take. There are so many possibilities involving this new technology that I am excited to explore.
“Pedagogy & Privacy” Keynote Presentation Grade: A
Otter AI Auto-captioning Tool
The final Sakai Virtual Conference accessibility element that I wanted to touch on was a super cool, helpful tool called Otter AI which allowed for real-time captioning to be added to the Zoom presentations. No transcription software is perfect, but as far as creating an accurate, real-time transcription of a presentation’s audio, Otter AI is pretty darn good.
If you are interested in checking out a more in-depth analysis of exactly how well this technology works, for the follow-on post to this blog I downloaded the transcript from my “A11Y Experiment” Lightning Talk and have included a marked-up version of the transcript along with the actual commentary and a link to the video of my presentation.
I asked Hodges to explain what went into their decision to include Otter AI Auto-Captioning for the 2020 Sakai Virtual Conference, and here’s what she said.
“This was a new item for this year's conference. I've started using Otter AI over the past year to help with note-taking for meetings, and I thought it would be a nice accessibility enhancement to provide live auto-transcription for sessions at the virtual conference,” said Hodges. “I thought it might also be beneficial for folks to see it in action if they are unfamiliar with Otter, since attendees might be interested in using it at their institutions. Given the Otter integration with Zoom and the ubiquitous use of Zoom during the pandemic, it could be particularly helpful right now.”
Otter AI Auto-Captioning Tool Grade: A-
So, overall, how would I grade the 2020 Sakai Virtual Conference?
Beginning to end, top to bottom, It was apparent that everyone involved with the Sakai Virtual Conference went above and beyond to ensure that this year’s event kept with the Sakai community’s commitment to accessibility. And while I used this blog to highlight many examples of things that the conference did to ensure the event was as accessible as possible, this summary was by no means meant to be an exhaustive list (I realize, for example, that I didn’t even talk about Tiffany Stull and Jen Bethmann’s pre-conference workshop titled, “Let’s Create Inclusive Course Content”).
because this Accessibility Report Card was already getting to be too long!)
I guess I would sum it up by saying, when it comes to accessibility considerations, the 2020 Sakai Virtual Conference definitely gets an A+ for effort!