Project ADEPT - a WSD Workshop

Editor: When I first learned about online education, I thought it would be a real boon to people with hearing loss, because I expected virtually all of the content to be text or graphics, which it was for a long time. But then videos became an important component, and very few of them were captioned. That's improving, but I hadn't been aware of attempts to provide a comprehensive solution that includes the lecturer, her slides, captioning, and an interpreter all in one video stream. The folks at UALR have produced such a package. Here's how they did it!

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Karen Northrup from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) presented a workshop on Project ADEPT (Accessible Distance Education for Postsecondary Training). Her presentation described the development of a tool that provides equivalent access to online lectures for students with hearing loss. The tool incorporates both captioning and an interpreter, so it serves both OHL and Deaf students.

The beauty of the ADEPT system is that it shows the instructor, PowerPoint slides, captioning, and the interpreter all on a single screen. Captioning and the interpreter can be individually selected or deselected.

The program began in July 2003 when Disabled Student Services (DSS) was looking for ways to make online coursework more accessible to hard of hearing and deaf students. Convinced that universal design and fully accessible media benefits all students, the developers were determined to incorporate these concepts.

The original filming process left considerable room for improvement. The faculty member and interpreter were filmed simultaneously, and video with faculty member only was posted to the website. The audio was later transcribed and captioned, the interpreter added, and the resulting accessible video posted five to seven days after the original video. The result was that the hard of hearing and deaf students were always about a week behind their hearing colleagues.

In addition to the delay in posting the accessible video, this method had other glitches. One was that a faculty decision to change the filming time resulted in a mad scramble to book an interpreter for the new time; another was the inability to ensure that the interpreter signed within the somewhat limited signing space that the method required.

So the developers considered other methods and decided that they would have to spend a little money to do it right. They applied for and received $34,000 from the fund to enhance online education at UALR. This allowed them to set up a studio and hire a half-time employee.

The new process is as follows:
1. The faculty member's lecture is recorded on digital video.
2. ADEPT staff films the interpreter at their studio.
3. ADEPT staff transcribes the audio and adds captions to the video.
4. The completed, accessible video is posted to the web.

Experience with this program has resulted in the following suggestions for others considering a similar program:
1. You cannot retrofit accommodations to existing video, because it has already been compressed. The video components must be freshly prepared and integrated, and the resulting video compressed.
2. Use video sparingly in your coursework. The goal will be to use the accessible video for the course for several years, so record only the meat of the course. Do NOT videotape anything that will change. Instead post it to the web as text, or in some other manner.

The ADEPT program currently supports only two classes a semester. The primary constraint to adding classes is the cost of labor to prepare the components and assemble the finished video. Each hour of accessible video requires about ten hours of staff time to prepare.

Future goals for this project include decreasing the production time or investigating other methods of production, increasing the number of accessible video produced, marketing the program to the campus community, and completing the handbook.