EASI Webinar.

December 13, 2012

 MARISOL MIRANDA: Hello, everyone. I'm Marisol Miranda from EASI. And I want to welcome you all to these, the first webinar of our 4 part series on simple multimedia using PowerPoint, [Indiscernible] and making a transcription with Express Scribe. Now I'm going to turn the mic to Norm. Hi Norm.

 NORM COOMBS: Hello. Yes, I'm here. I'm having a little trouble with post‑nasal drip which is one of my old age problems. So I may be sucking on candy. I hope that doesn't make me too mushy as I'm talking. So glad those of you who have been able to come. We'll probably have a few more drop in over the next few minutes. Of course people are welcome to get the archive.

Let me say a couple of words about EASI. As you know, we have a number of webinars and online courses. What we like to do is keep up on information, technology and accessibility. And particularly try to take the jargon out of explaining it. And also try to help that you can do things with limited technological know‑how. [Indiscernible] we also have online courses and certificate in accessible information technology. If you take five courses, you can obtain the certificate. We have a membership. And some of you are already members, individual membership. Which will give you access to all of the paid webinars and the 20 percent discount on courses. Institutional membership, anyone in an institution can enter all the webinars and take as many courses as they please. That's the end of the promo. We'll move on to the first slide now. The first slide is basically just the title which Marisol already announced. We'll be looking this week at narrated PowerPoint. Next week we'll focus on LecShare Wizard, multimedia based on PowerPoint. And then after Christmas we'll be doing one on Camtasia.

The fourth week we don't have any programs scheduled. If you have topics you want us to cover, we will. Otherwise because we have homework assignments for you on each week, you may sometimes fall behind in doing the actual assignments. We want to have time when you can come and ask for help. If you'd like you can even send us some of your multimedia presentations and we post them on the web so everybody can look at them. So that's a quick summary of what's going to happen over the next four weeks, the next four presentations. So what are we going to cover today? I'm assuming from looking at who is in the room and what I know about you, you probably all are dealing with PowerPoint. [Indiscernible] I'm going to give a little brief summary of some of the features of PowerPoint. We'll talk about what features to avoid and which ones to use in PowerPoint. How to add alternative text to an image in a PowerPoint. We'll talk about how to prepare for the narration of the presentation. Describe the process of actually recording the narration.

One of the [Indiscernible] will be an option for you as you finish the narration, you'll be asked whether you want to save the timings or not. We'll talk about why you should and why you shouldn't, when you should and when you shouldn't. Briefly we'll talk about the other piece of software we'll have you looking at which is Express Scribe. Basically what Express Scribe is a software that will let you simultaneously hit buttons to listen to a recording. You can slow it down, type what you hear in another window. We have a captionist on here who is good at doing the whole thing without all the pauses in between. Most of us aren't that good and we need places where we can pause. It helps you do all that. In your homework, you plan to use scripts where you recording. Then you're not going to need to make a transcription because the script will be your transcription. So if that's what you're going to do, you may want to skip the part of the assignment about Express Scribe. So that's where we're going today.

We'll move on to the next slide. First I'm going to give you the PowerPoint. If you click on a new slide you'll find six or eight choices for different slide layouts. Most of them will work with accessibility. We're stressing trying to keep things simple. And so want to look at the list title only, subtitle, title and content, title in two content and a few other options that are there. In the next slide you'll see what we recommend for you to do. It's not necessarily one right way to do it. But we [Indiscernible] title and subtitle. And the rest of the slides, title and content. One warning about text boxes, they often don't work with screen readers and they often don't work when you change when you go to web pages. A lot of people seem to like text boxes. Okay. What are the things you need to think about really for everyone but for accessibility in terms of each slide? The first thing is you need good contrast in your foreground and background. If there's not enough contrast it's going to make it difficult for anyone to read. In particular dealing with somebody who has visual limitations, it could make it very hard for them to read the slide. If the person's totally blind, probably doesn't care about the color on the page. Good contrast. What kind of font should you use? Most places I've read they say the ones that's easiest to see and understand is the sans serif font. Basically it means simple font that's crisp and doesn't have all kinds of doodads and curly cues. People tell me it's pretty but can be hard to read. [Indiscernible] projecting it up on the wall, you may want to be sure you're using a good script. I don't have any advice on size. Make it so it's comfortable for you. Maybe even a hair larger than that.

Someone may have a slight [Indiscernible] however, my feeling is [Indiscernible] they're going to be using screen magnification software. Change the size for their needs. So I don't think you need to make it super large or anything of that kind. Try to make sure it's very clear and can be used quickly and easily by anyone. The next point I don't know quite how to say it, I say leave [Indiscernible] if your background is pale blue and your text is black, I'm really not saying you need to have some white. I'm trying to say is you need not to have the text densely packed. [Indiscernible] background with nothing on it. Typically we used to call that white space. But if you don't have a white background, I don't know what to call it. If it's too dense it can be harder to read. They tell me that often times a person's eye needs places where it can rest. Make sure that you don't have everything too densely packed and that you have some kind of space between the text or the images that can be very useful.

Okay. Next slide is an example of poor contrast, or so I'm told. You may know what I'm totally blind and they look the same to me. I'm told that the contrast here makes this very difficult to use. We'll go to the next slide after that. You'll find in all of the Microsoft programs they have what they call themes. It usually is where they have preselected foreground and background. Some of them may not be very accessible. So using a theme is not necessarily solving your problem. The advantage to looking at the themes and when you're trying to line up foreground and background colors, some colors work better against each other than others. And so in themes, they've already selected foreground and background colors that work fairly well. If you find some that you think have good clear contrast, some of the themes have pattern backgrounds. I want to urge you to avoid that. That can make it difficult for someone say with dyslexia or something. But you can just go in and select your own foreground and your own background. You can look for something that's been done for you. You can go there and select one of the themes.

Next slide talks about images. Some people think when we talk about accessibility, we're talking about text only and that's not really where we want to go. Images can be very useful. It can make it more appealing. It also can convey information in a very special way. As the old saying, a picture worth a thousand words. May or may not be true. But you can convey some very useful information in the picture. Especially as we convey mood and other kinds of things through picture. So images are fun. If someone is coming in with a screen reader, screen reader can read a text. It can't read an image. So that means the image is useless for me except you can put a hidden label alt text on that image. Instead of just the image or graphic, it will say picture of Norm Coombs for picture of ‑‑ you put your cursor on the image. Right click on it. It's a little different in Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010. I remember in '07, you have to click on [Indiscernible] and then you look for the text box for the alternate text. Now I think it's under format picture. You'll find the text box you put in the alt text. And you type it in. Better if it can be short and some way meaningful. Click okay and that's there so if someone comes in with a screen reader, they're going to be told what that picture is about.

Moving right along. We have come to the last kind of thing on background. And that's basically as I say, keep it simple. Not only don't clutter your slide with text and images but don't pack it too tightly with information. And don't put in long, compound, complex sentences. Try to say what you say simply. I believe in this principle most everywhere when you're communicating, try to keep it clear and simple. But particularly on a PowerPoint slide because you have fairly limited space. It's not designed for you to write sentences and paragraphs particularly. [Indiscernible] within the whole concept of PowerPoint slides are about helping with that. So now we move on to narration. Slide 11 talks about how to start the narration. I assume you got your PowerPoint worked out. You're fairly happy with it. It's time to move to narration. You go to slideshow and you can click on several different [Inaudible] might be record but it's narration. We haven't done anything with PowerPoint timing so ignore that. There will be other things you can set. One of them will let you [Indiscernible] audio settings and quality of the audio, things of that kind. If you're not doing [Indiscernible] high quality music, you probably don't need to change the settings that's there.

For my purposes, the default works fairly well. But if you make a recording that comes out with problems, you can go back and try settings that work better for you. Another one of the choices will be whether you want to ‑‑ what I should have said on that slide, once you read it you should try to have a quiet place where you work has a fairly decent mic. If you're trying to select a mic, you especially might get one that tries to limit the amount of ambient sound that picks up other than your voice. Try to find a quiet room that your family, daughter, your kids, and wife or whatever know they're supposed to leave you alone, not interrupt you. Turn off your cell phone. Find a good place to work where you can talk and not have other interruptions or background noise. So now on slide talk I'm talking about not using timings because you don't have them. One of the things will be whether you want to link the audio files or not. It will normally make a separate audio file for each slide. I'll explain whether you want to or not want to, the advantages of it. That's one of the things you have to check the audio settings, as I said.

Next slide talks about why you link the files. If you choose not to link your audio files, somehow they get words into actual PowerPoint. You don't see them. How they do that, what they do, I don't know. But you don't see any files but you do have audio. So if you're giving it to someone, you don't have to give them the PowerPoint and the [Indiscernible] so that's an advantage. If you choose to link them, which I often do, there's an advantage. An individual audio file for each slide. So if you find that there's poor quality or you want to change the content of that audio in some way, you don't have to start the whole show over. You can get some audio editing software, get that WAV file, make a new WAV file. Put it back with the same name and write it over the original one. Then that becomes part of your slideshow. You're having to do it so you can do editing of bits and pieces of the audio without [Indiscernible] it depends on a lot of things. So you make those choices and click record.

When you activate record, two things happen: One PowerPoint basically goes in to PowerPoint show mode. And so you see your slides as it would be shown to someone in PowerPoint show. And at the same time it's opened up the recording so that you can start to talk. And when you're finished saying what you need to say about that one slide, stop, wait a second to make sure there's no ‑‑ I find sometimes it cuts off the last word or something. Wait a split second and press the space bar and you'll see your second slide come up. And then you say what you want to say about that slide. Wait a second, press the space bar and the third slide comes up. You just keep doing that as you go through your entire presentation. When you come to the end and you press the space bar, it [Indiscernible] out of slideshow mode, out of [Indiscernible] the new thing pops up if you want to save these comments or not. And I'll talk about that in a minute. Choose one or the other. Basically you're done. We've got a recording. You can go in and print out your PowerPoint some the show mode and move through slide to slide. And hear your audio into your slides and you've got your show.

Next couple of slides show several screenshots of what happens when you're narrating and when you finish, the choices that are there for you. Explaining that for blind people in the audience. Those of you sighted, I think it's fairly self‑evident. Okay. So question is why should you save the timings, and why should you not save the timings? If you don't save the timings, when you go to watch the show, you bring up the PowerPoint, go to slide show mode, and the first slide will appear and you'll hear the audio for the first slide. It stops. Then you manually move to the next slide, slide changes, then you'll hear the audio automatically with that slide. The third slide. Then if you say gee, I didn't quite understand what slide two, you can hit the key to back up the slide and it will back up the slide and let you hear the audio for that. So if you got material that needs careful thought and analysis, you can listen to it, go forward and backwards so that if it's content that needs to be studied, I think not saving the timing gives the user the control over it so that he or she can go forward, backward, repeat, and we would get all of the meat out of it. In contrast to the answering machine I have. I come home and [Indiscernible] keeps going from one to the other. If we want to hear the other, we got to go back. This leaves the individual total control.

For study purposes, it's what I would want to have as a student. And what I would normally provide putting up that kind of content. If on the other hand, would have put out more entertainment or something of that kind that you don't need to be alert. You don't need to concentrate and study it, then I would save the timings so that when you open the PowerPoint and go into show mode, it starts to play. And automatically moves from slide to slide and goes through. So there's no right answer whether to save or not save the timings. It depends on what you're doing and on the content, on who is using it, why they're going to use it, if you think they won't. So there's a good place to do either one. Before we go on to the final slides which talks about the assignments, let me pause and see if we have questions and comments.

 This is Betsey. If you link the files, how hard is it to share the PowerPoint? What do you have to do special?

 NORM COOMBS: Well the easiest way to do it is make a directory. Put your PowerPoint in there. When you link the files, that's where you want to put them. You want to put it in that same directory, then you have the PowerPoint and the audio in one directory. You share the directory and tell them to click on the PowerPoint.

 Norm, could you zip that directory and then attach it to an e‑mail or something like that?

 NORM COOMBS: Yup. Zipping is the obvious way to share it.

 Okay. Now if you don't link the files, can you re‑record a slide? Or do you have to record the whole show at once?

 NORM COOMBS: That's a good question. I don't know the answer. I'm trying to think. I don't know.

 I remember when I used LecShare once, the nice thing about LecShare was you could indeed record, re‑record the PowerPoint, you know, that slide until you were happy with it. So I didn't know. I can see the advantage of, like you say, you can apparently redo the file. I wonder if you have to start all over and record the whole PowerPoint.

 NORM COOMBS: I think if you didn't link them, I think you might have to. LecShare is next week. That's one of the reasons I like LecShare because it gives you a little more power and flexibility. The other thing is LecShare is designed to be played on the web. And PowerPoint basically doesn't work very well on the web. I did notice in PowerPoint 2010, I haven't had time to play with it, file types for saving it, one of them was [Indiscernible] so it looks like you can make [Indiscernible].

 Norm, what about the possibility of saving it when you're originally doing it going through it, saving is it unlinked so that you have ‑‑ so that you can edit each individual screen. And then once you're satisfied with it, then save it as and then save it again and then save it as an unlinked at that point.

 NORM COOMBS: That makes sense and I meant to try it and I didn't. Possibly if you went through the settings. I just don't know.

 I wonder if it will let you do that. Maybe. Yeah. In PowerPoint 2010, one of the big deals is that you can save that PowerPoint in a whole bunch of different types of files. Including I think even ‑‑ it might even be able to do an MP 4. But yeah, I noticed that. Maybe not. But that's kind of nice.

 NORM COOMBS: Yeah. I don't even though half the things. It's kind of mind boggling to me. Try and hit F1. Description of what those file types are. Let me go on and talk a bit about the assignments. The zip file you download. And when you unzip it, the readme file. Resources htm. So resources page, I'll be sending that out tonight or tomorrow. The zip page that I sent out to most of you earlier. But the read me helps walk through what I hope you'll get out of the assignments. But let me just cover it. Subdirectory with two PowerPoints in it. And one has savings, the time savings, and the other doesn't. And so you can see the advantage of the one we can go back and forward. And the other one we're just playing through the ‑‑ one other places where I thought of using the time one but never did it, we had a table [Indiscernible] narrated PowerPoint about our courses and things of that kind. [Indiscernible] repeat play so you just have it sitting there running all by itself, around and around through the program. So in a case like that, automatic advance slides could be very useful. So anyway, I just wanted to you to quickly see the difference between the two. Suggest make a PowerPoint and make three copies of the PowerPoint with slightly different [Indiscernible] so what I have you doing is make one where you link the files and see how that works. Just what you see how we can make a different version, how to make it work, the advantages of each. And the next screen talks about the express slide part of the homework which I mentioned at the beginning of the hour, software which I understand to be free. Although when I got it, it acted like it was a demo. After it said do you [Indiscernible] speed up and slow down [Indiscernible] try to put a little more pauses into it. You can change its pitch. How the recording works. There's a hot key to start and stop it. Foot pedal. Basically opens up two windows. One where you play the audio, and another one where you're typing. I assume once you're finished with that, you go through and spell check it. Complete it to get your final product. A lot of people like to work from script. They're doing something like [Indiscernible] reading Braille at a good speaking rate so that I don't work [Indiscernible] so it depends on how you work. [Indiscernible] to transcribe something. So what you can do to help you with next week's second part of the assignment is if you have the script and you're ready for next week. LecShare, walk through that. If you don't, you'll help yourself with next week's assignment by managing to get a transcript in advance. So we're done early. I'll hang around as long as you guys want to.

 Okay. What I have is PowerPoints with all kinds of math in it. And the first, usually the top line I have put up alt text in the graphic. But I haven't in every step of the process ‑‑ the point I want to make [Indiscernible] the recording I make does describe every step. So the audio goes through it. So now is that acceptable? I assume that's acceptable for access then. And I wonder, you want for next week a full transcript of the whole text, I guess, is that correct?

 NORM COOMBS: Well for next week, you know, if you come up with a PowerPoint that's only got five slides on it, that's fine. So if it's a long PowerPoint you're working on, you can cut off slides for the exercise. As you probably know, Betsey, I'm not a math person. [Indiscernible] I think 25 years. Using recordings for the blind in Princeton. 15 to 25 years that was in the '80s when we were trying to find ways to really make that more accessible. Some of what they did then was very exciting. It has taken a good 20 years to get some good results. But what I learned there is that verbalizing a complex math formula is far more difficult than most people think. Study where they had two math graduate students in separate rooms with a phone between them. The one with the math off the page, the other person dictated what he heard. They did it several times. They were getting accuracy rates of about 60 and 70 percent which is not very accessible. So that they found they needed to work up ‑‑ what's the word I want to say?

Anyhow, the language, strict language that would help everyone know how to state something exactly and understand it. Abraham Nemeth was one of the people that came up with this. I think it's the GH LLC web page that has a link to his whole set of, I think they call it math talk. So shorthand way of trying to state a complex math formula ways that are simple, straight forward and easy to understand. Math talk [Indiscernible] math player and designed sciences came up with. If anyone wants me to find the paper on his math language, e‑mail me and I'll to remember to bring it to ‑‑ send it to everybody in an e‑mail. So I think that's deal [Indiscernible] complex math they need to make sure that you and the listener are going to work off the same page.

 Okay. Yeah. I know what to do. I've used math player and it works real well. Yeah. And I'll learn more about ‑‑ I'm going to learn more actually just on another related thing. About blackboard and how to put math ML in there. I'm playing with it. But for now, you know, since I'm doing the PowerPoint for myself and I know how to do the problem because I'm teaching it, and since there's no student right there, I figure the audio is ‑‑ because I'm actually doing the PowerPoint to teach it and when I teach it I say the math as I would if I had a blind student in there. So it's clear. Because I think the spoken word also emphasizes for the sighted person what you're trying to teach. Okay. Okay. I think we're on the same page then. I just want to be sure. Thank you.

 NORM COOMBS: Yeah. The final answer to your question is find a [Indiscernible] pay them a lot of money [Indiscernible].

 Yeah. I think if it works for the student, we're all set.

 MARISOL MIRANDA: Norm, we have something from Rebecca. I was having some technical problems. So I apologize if you already went over this. You mentioned narrating with one audio file. So you could re‑record single slide. How do you go about re‑recording a single slide? Are the files saved individually in the directory you create? Presentation slide or mp3, et cetera. Norm, can you grab the mic? Well I think that  NORM COOMBS: I guess I got kicked out on both of my computers. I'm sorry. So you didn't hear my answer about the re‑recording of the file, am I correct?

 MARISOL MIRANDA: You're right, Norm.

 NORM COOMBS: Okay. That's a good question and I think a valuable one. When you're doing the setting of audio recording, if you select to have the file linked, individual files besides the PPT files. You're going to say where do you want to put them, I personally put them in the same directory as the PPT file. So when you're done you're going to have a bunch of WAV files for each slide. You can edit any one of those with some kind of audio software, replace it in the same directory with the same name. And the PowerPoint program [Indiscernible].

 MARISOL MIRANDA: Those are all the questions we have, Norm.

 I just wanted to thank you, Norm. Whoever did the slides, did a wonderful job on those. I was following your oral narration presentation, or your oral presentation with the slides and they were extremely well done and helpful. Thank you.

 NORM COOMBS: Thank you for your kind comments. I thank everyone for coming. I ran into trouble with both my computers. I hope there's going to be some recording on one of them. We'll put up what we have, including the transcription when we get that. And I'll send it out to the mailing list. Next week same time, same station. And we'll focus on LecShare Wizard.

 So will we get the recording with the slides? Will you send a link to the recording is that what happens?

 NORM COOMBS: We got a resources page. I'll give it to you now but I'll send it to you in e‑mail. EASI dot CC/archive/simple media‑2012/resources [Indiscernible] there will be a link of the assignments on file. There will be a link to the slides. The LecShare version of the slides. There will be a link to the recording. And when you listen to the recording, it will also be showing the slides at the same time. And then we'll have a link to the transcription.

 Thank you very much.

 MARISOL MIRANDA: Thanks, Alicia for the captions. And thank you everyone for coming in. See you next week. Thanks, Norm. Bye.

 NORM COOMBS: Thanks, Marisol. I'll be in touch with you later today or tomorrow and we'll talk about your date issue.

 MARISOL MIRANDA: Okay, Norm. Bye everyone. See you next week.