When we were organising the Lingthusiasm Liveshows in Australia
last November, I knew I wanted them to be as accessible as possible.
This included accessibility for Deaf audience members. In the end, we
ended up having Auslan interpreters at the Sydney show, and live captions at the Melbourne show. Doing the same show with two different set ups provided a really nice opportunity to consider the difference between them, and the advantages and disadvantages.
Live Auslan Interpreting - Sydney show
Auslan is the most common sign language in Australia (many Australian Aboriginal communities also have signed languages as well as spoken languages). For live interpreting long events like this you need two (or more) interpreters so that they can swap out every 10-15 minutes for a break, simultaneous interpreting like this is tough work! Interpreters are great because they can convey for a deaf audience things like tone and emphasis. I also like having interpreters at events because more visibility of the local/national sign language is a good thing in my opinion.
As you can see from the photo, interpreting like this only works if there’s room on stage and the audience is able to sit close enough. We provided the interpreters with all the summary text about the show, and key vocabulary we were using on the night. Unless you’ve planned it with them in advance, it’s generally better to not drag the interpreters into what you’re doing, but just let them get on with their job.
For our Melbourne show we had a hard time booking interpreters. We gave it plenty of time, but Friday night was a busy time and apparently there’d been a festival that week that meant a lot of interpreters were really busy. This isn’t a criticism of the booking agency, who were really great to deal with - it’s just a fact that interpreters are a group of specialists who are in demand. Thankfully, there is another option, which is to have someone create live captions, essentially providing a transcript of the speech as you go. I’ve been at events where the transcriptional is in the room, they have a special keyboard that lets them type as quick as speech.
Our captionist was able to do them remotely, thanks to the magic of the internet, which made things cheaper and easier for all involved (except the State Library tech team, who were amazing at getting things set up). As you can see below, the text is large enough for the audience to read. It’s not always perfect (note that it says below “Heathrow Airport” where Gretchen said “Harry Potter” - her Canadian accent occasionally stumped the captionist, as did names and languages we haven’t briefed him on), but frankly he did a better job of transcribing live than I often manage with a recording.
The advantage of captions is that they can be of use to members of the audience who are hard of hearing, even if they don’t sign, or don’t sign the local sign language (my grandparents were in the audience in Melbourne, and it helped them greatly). Some deaf colleagues I’ve talked to actually prefer captioning because it’s a faithful representation of what is being said, rather than an interpretation (which, even in the best hands, is always a mediation of the original message). It also made it much easier for us to work up the transcription for this episode!
Accessibility requires a little more thought, and a little more planning (we started discussion about interpreters more than 6 weeks before the event, and it still came to naught in Melbourne). Accessibility is always an ongoing discussion, you learn more and you plan better next time. For example, GiantDwarf had great wheelchair access for the venue, but they’re still working on bathroom access. There are accessibility needs that I probably didn’t take into account at these events, but hope to always do better.
Thanks
to The School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University
for funding our interpreters and closed captions for these events.
Thanks also to our amazing Syndey interpreters Amanda Galea and Chevoy Sweeney and our Melbourne Live Captions arranged through Auslan Connections.
I was wondering how people with vision impairment and other users of text-to-speech deal with emoji. I decided to ask Steve Pattison, who is a Superlinguo Tweep, and vision impaired. Steve first used a word processor in 1987, and it was life-changing.
Steve said that most text-to-speech can’t handle emoji. This still appears to be the case for Windows, although it’s now better for Mac. When the in-build Mac OS text-to-speech hits an emoji it reads out the short description of it. “hundred points symbol“ isn’t as catchy as 💯, and it’s a bit awkward if you’re a sighted person who is happy to be home with 🏩, but the text is “love hotel”. But, it (mostly) does the job.
With older punctuation-based emoticons, people who use text-to-speech have learned that
“colon right bracket” means a smiley face is being used. Interestingly, my Mac OS doesn’t pick that up, so it’s actually doing better with the Unicode emoji set.
Finally, I asked Steve if there were any conventions within the text-to-speech using community he is in:
what some blind and vision impaired people do when communicating by
email with each other is actually put the word for the emoticon in
brackets for example “I’m very happy about that (smile)”.
So there you go! If you’re using emoji, don’t forget that there are accessibility barriers, although hopefully more text-to-speech software will improve as it looks like emoji become a more entrenched part of our communication.
