EASI Webinar

January 3, 2013

 NORM COOMBS: Good morning, everyone. And thank you for coming back. We usually don't like to split a course during vacation but it seemed to work out like this. Some of you are sticking to it and back again. Sorry I stood you up a few weeks ago with the cold or flu or whatever I have. It's getting better but slowly. So I'll proceed and hope things go well. Just one second and I'll move. So we're back to giving our usual promo which you've all heard before. We give webinars, some of them free. Some of them like this carry a fee with them. We give online courses. We have seven of them. Five of them, if you complete five, you get the certificate and accessible information from EASI, university sub in Maine. We also have a membership and several of you here are members. And so for member, you get access to all of the fee‑based webinars. You'll get 20 percent off on the courses. And we have an archive of 50 or 60 webinars and you'll have access to those as well.

Okay. Now I've locked the mic which should make it a little business easier for me. So we have a series of four webinars. Three actually and one for troubleshooting. And we've done one and this is the second one in the series. I'm doing the first two. Marisol is doing the next one. So today I'm going to talk about taking PowerPoint slides and running them through the LecShare pro wizard and that will let us do a number of things with it. So what we'll cover is first, what is LecShare pro? We'll look at how does it work. We'll go on and look at how to make accessible web pages out of PowerPoint presentations. How to add audio and captions to it. How to change all of that into a captioned movie. So that's basically the agenda for today.

So what you need to get started is an accessible PowerPoint presentation and we're not going to talk about how to make it accessible here. But you know, if you have animations on it or transitions, a lot of those things don't work well online and a lot of them don't work well with screen readers and other things. So fairly simple clean PowerPoint presentation is basic. You can use images and things of that, that's fine. So you are going to have that to start with. This presentation assumes you do. We also assume that you have the LecShare Pro presentation downloaded. The LecShare Pro has a small fee. I don't know what it is. But you can run it as a trial. All of its features work in a trial mode but they splash some ugly watermark on the slides. LecShare light will let you make accessible web pages from PowerPoint. It won't let you add audio or video or those kinds of things. What we're going to do is start off ‑‑ actually we're going to divide the presentation into three parts. The first part is to use LecShare ‑‑ you could use LecShare light or you can use LecShare Pro to link accessible web pages. Convert PowerPoint into accessible web pages. That's a long way from multimedia. But it's the basic feature in LecShare Pro. So it will be worth it for its own sake. It's a good tool and appreciate knowing about it. But it will become the building block for the adding of audio and captions.

Excuse my coughing. I can turn off the mic. Suck harder on the cough drop. Glass of water will do it. So that's what you need to get started. You also need a quiet room, a reasonably good microphone. Doesn't have to be super high quality if you're doing voice. But you do need to be able to have it that it picks up pretty clearly. I hope my voice does better than I think it might. So that's what you need to get started. It's all pretty straight forward. So as I said before, we're going to use LecShare to just produce sequence of accessible web pages. What you have here when you open LecShare, a PowerPoint, it pulls the PowerPoint in. It might be a little slower than you think it should be because it's checking your PowerPoint for any errors and marking it so it can help you fix them. But it pulls it in and you have what's referred to as a slide tray. In the slide tray there are little pictures of your slides. Some people think that they changed your slides. No, they haven't. It's just a little picture. It's not as good as it ought to but it will be fine. You have a picture of the slide tray and you'll see a number of little images of the slides along there.

So this screen shot shows that the title was missing and the wizard's going to walk you through how to deal with it. So the wizard has it marked. So it puts you on the first slide where there's a problem. And it will open up in edit field. You click the thing that you want to fix the title. Open up the edit field, type in the title, click okay. And then it will show it's okay. So you don't have to know anything about web pages to put the title in. It does it all. So there's another one in the tray where the alt text for the image is missing. And it shows you that it's missing. You can click on that you want to put in a description, type it in, click okay and that's taken care of. So what we have here is another image adding an alt text, screen shot of another alt text being added to the ‑‑ and it will walk you through a whole host of mistakes once you fix them, and then when you're done you can see that all of the pictures in the slide tray are okay. So we've got PowerPoint all ready to go. And we want to change it to accessible web pages. So you click on export. And export gives you a whole bunch of edit fields you can put in metadata, title, description, copyright page, a number of other things. There's a whole bunch of metadating input. You don't have to do ‑‑ especially if you want to do something more professional, you can put those in. Then you go to a site called Web HTML. You want to turn this into a an HTML web page. Put your space bar on that and check it. Once you check it a new item pops up called options. Most of them you don't need to do, they're pretty straight forward.

The one I mostly concern myself with is I can have it link table of contents for a series of slides or not. I find the table of contents only confuses me as a screen reading user. Other people might like them. So I uncheck it and then I click on okay. Then I click on export again. It then says where do you want to put the output and so it gives you your computer. You click on the drive you want. Directory, subdirectories. You locate where you want to put it. The system is set up that it prefers you put it in an empty folder. I don't know why but that's the way it is. You don't have to, though. And I usually put the output in the same folder where I had my PowerPoints. So I click on that and it says, there's already something here, do you want to proceed anyhow, and I say yes. So you either put it in a new folder, and then it chugs away for a few seconds and then tells you it's done. So you click on that it's done and you can either save some of what you've done to your original PowerPoint or not. And it drops you out of LecShare. Now let me find myself here. I already talked about the options you filled out. This screen talks about the output file. So what you'll find when you're finished is a folder entitled HTML. That's where the output went. So if you know what directory you put it in, find HTML. You click on that and open it, you'll find the index HTM page and that's where you'd start showing your accessible web pages. There's another folder usually for CSS, another for images. That's all housekeeping. You don't need to know much about. Another one called web undermined data. If you go and look in there, you're going to see a whole other ‑‑ HTM file one context, HTM, et cetera, et cetera.

Look at all of the individual files that are put out. So if you are going to show it on the web, you upload the whole directory under what you want. Put your pointer, either link from somebody or to a page you have up there to that index page. I'm going to walk through showing you the accessible web page. What we've been looking at here in the webinar and all of the webinars, our accessible web pages, PowerPoint presentations that we did using LecShare. So now we're going to talk about adding audio and captions to your presentation. So we take our original PowerPoint. We open up in LecShare. We don't have the repair version, you need to make the repairs. Everything that you do before, you need to work in the PowerPoint. The tray so you get an accessible presentation. I'm suggesting for this presentation that you have notes in your PowerPoint and that the notes will have the script for what you're going to say. Now I don't need to go through them. You don't have to do it that way. I find it simplest for our explanations.

So you already have notes on each PowerPoint slide which we didn't talk about before. This time you do. So you got your PowerPoint in there. You got the notes there. So now you click on audio settings. I find the settings there are usually fine and I don't need to change them. If in practice you find they're not what you need, then you can go in and change the quality of the audio to fix it up to what you need it to be. Then you click on audio record. So this is the screen shot showing the first steps in adding audio to your presentation. We're going to get a new menu bar up there with buttons for accessibility for audio. Check both of those. There's a place for notes, for recording, stop, play, all of those kinds of things. So then our PowerPoints in there. You can go through and check the features that you think you're going to need. And at that point you're pretty much ready to start your recording.

Okay. You hear me now? I guess you do. Because I hear myself in the other computer. Okay. Let me check and see what's on the screen. Just a second. Okay so screen shot shows where the play and record buttons are located. You make your recording. Slide two, come back and make your recording and work your way through all of your slides. And down we come down getting ready to ‑‑ Okay. I skipped two or three pages because I'd already discussed them. You make your recordings, move them, slide to slide, then you're ready to export. This time we're then going to export to the web HTML. So there's some metadata you can fill in. You come down to the point of clicking on web/HTML and it gives you an options button. This time make sure that notes are checked and audio is checked. Then you click on okay. And then go back and export the rest of the way. You walk through finding where you want to put it and then when you've got that located, you click on it. Then it chugs away, it outputs your files. Okay. So you got an output file HTML like we had before. You may notice that there's another directory there called audio. You don't need to worry about it. But it shows that you do have your audio. And so let's say you go and click on index for the index file, and it comes up as an accessible web page. But on it there's a play button. Then a fast forward and various audio type things. So that that audio here doesn't play automatically. It lets the user have control of it. You can play the audio. If you didn't hear it fully or correctly, you can play it again. Then you can move to the next slide. Play the audio for that slide. If you decide you didn't understand something, back up to the slide before. So it lets the user walk through each slide forward, backward, on it as long as he wants, play the audio as many times as he or she wants. So I like it as a study tool for people who are going to want to listen to the audio more than once. I find often times you'll say things rather concisely in a situation like this, maybe more concisely than you would in a classroom. But the student has the ability to go back and play it and replay it.

So this is a multi‑media presentation. The notes are on the slides so that if the notes are word for word, which you recorded, you have a caption for the deaf students. So they'll see the slides. They won't hear the audio but they'll see the script for the audio and walk their way through it. I'm going to pause for a second here and see if you have some questions.

 So we made a PowerPoint and we made a manual one when we had to go through. And we made an automatic one. So now when we start with our PowerPoint, we start with a manual one, right?

 NORM COOMBS: Yes. And I'd recommend you not have a narrated one at all. Start a clean PowerPoint.

 Yeah. Because you're going to use the narration in LecShare and convert it. Okay. Thanks.

 NORM COOMBS: Other comments or questions? Okay. I don't know if you ever want to do what I'm describing here but there is another way that you can make an audio than the way we did it. So you got your PowerPoint ‑‑ no, I didn't. Can you read it to me? Chris, could you repeat it, please. Okay. You have some control over that. It is saved as WAV but you can choose to have it compressed. I think you can get several compressions. I always would pick MP3. Sorry I missed that. So what I'm looking at here is another way to add audio to your presentation. Now if you had done a narrated PowerPoint and then in such a way that you have individual wav files for each one, you can use that. Or if you just wanted music background behind your slides to make it sound pretty, whatever, what you can do is click on audio and then you click on import audio. So instead of giving the menu with record, play, stop and all of that, it has you looking at your hard form audio that you want to record. When you do that, it's going to ask you do you want to do it for one slide or all the slides, I've always just done it for one slide. Then that's completed. Then you click on move to the next slide. Do the thing over again. So you can import a piece of audio to go with each slide in the presentation. So if you have somehow, somewhere because of some reason or other, audio that you already want to use on the slides, you can import those one for each slide. Just as before we recorded something for each slide, you record something for each slide. Otherwise it's all the same.

 What's the format of the audio that you need to have to do that? You can't use an MP3 file, can you? It's got to be a wav?

 NORM COOMBS: That's a good question and I don't have a good answer. I had the impression you can use an MP3. But when I tried, I had a problem and I never struggled with it to find out. But it looked like you could use an MP3. I'm sorry, I should have ‑‑ it's been a long time since I did that. No, actually I'm sure I imported MP3 of Beethoven's Symphony. So we're going to talk about creating a movie with LecShare. So again we're concluding that you have the PowerPoint. You make sure that your PowerPoint is accessible. You either import audio for each slide or you record audio for each slide as we did before. You have the text or script for each slide's audio in your notes.

Now instead of -- well you go to export but you do not check HTML. There are a couple of movie formats, but I've only clicked on QuickTime. So click on QuickTime. ‑‑ okay, thanks, Todd. So you select QuickTime instead of Web HTML, one of the video options. Click that you have the audio, that you want clean notes. And when you export from there, then what you're going to find is a ‑‑ don't have it in my notes, a folder called mov, I think it is. Under that you probably have a couple of folders. One would be the file name dot mov dot html. If you play that, it will see your movie. And the other is something or other mov dot mp4 or something, I don't remember now. But two different versions of the television program. And that's worked pretty well. I've used both of those versions. And lastly, what you can do if you want ‑‑ I don't think they're closed. I don't know. It does stream captions with each slide. I don't know that. Anybody know that? Anyhow, we just went through three different ways of using LecShare Pro. You could go through like we did for the first one, but not go to export. You could add the audio like we did before and not go to export. When you go to export you can check both HTML and QuickTime and end up spitting out three different versions of what you've done all in one simple process. I don't get any pay for pushing LecShare. I find that it's invaluable for me in the work that I'm doing so I'm eager to share with other people. So we're done a little early. Let me drink a little bit of water. I'll be glad to answer what I can.

 What's the MP4 file look like? It's not going to be ‑‑ it's going to be a streaming movie, right?

 NORM COOMBS: That's my understanding of it, yeah. And obviously I don't know what it looks like.

 I didn't mean it like that. I mean computer wise. So that file, actually the mov or dot html would be the more accessible one.

 NORM COOMBS: I think so. I should have checked. One version when it comes up, you have to click the play button for it to go. Another one when you click on it, it just comes up and starts.

 Yeah, I went through this once using the HTML, you know, getting the second option I think we talked about. It worked pretty well. So this is all interesting. It's kind of fun. I don't know how it will apply for my math stuff. But it will be interesting to play with.

 NORM COOMBS: I would think you'd want the individual slides so the user could go forward and backward. Just a second, I'll be right back. Thanks for standing by. One problem in life leads to another. So I was drinking enough water to help my throat and of course that led to another problem. Other comments, questions? As it's scheduled now, next week on the tenth Marisol will be taking about Camtasia and probably focusing on captioning as much as anything but she'll be talking about other features. On the 13th, Marisol and I will be here so if you have questions on the material we've covered, we'll be happy to work on it. Or show us some things you've produced, we'd be happy to look at it too. So that's the remaining schedule. So if you still have looking at LecShare Pro between now and then, you'll have a chance to come back and ask questions. I don't know if I'm going to die before the cold dies or it's going to die before I do. By the way, I don't think I said hello to you, Len. But I did notice you got in here. Thank you.

 Good morning, Norm. I slipped in there right when you started. I figured you were already on a roll.

 NORM COOMBS: Well I don't know if I should have gone to a doctor or not. Every time I've gone to a doctor with a cold, they've sent me home with Robitussin and told me to go to bed. I don't need to pay a doctor for that.

 We want you to feel good.

 NORM COOMBS: You guys are nice and patient with me as I was coughing and sputtering and guzzling my water. Thank you for being patient. You're welcome, Justin.

 Thanks, Norm.

 NORM COOMBS: When I send you the link later today, the link will take you through the recording and the slides and if you wanted, I could send you the actual PowerPoint. But what I will have up there is the web version. So next Tuesday, Marisol should be here talking about Camtasia.

 Thanks, Norm. Take care of yourself.

 Norm, when do we meet next? Is it the 10th? Today is the 3rd. That's next Thursday.

 NORM COOMBS: You got it. You got it. Yes, next Thursday, the 10th of January and at the same time. Thanks, Patrice. Thanks, again, Gina. Glad to have you with us.

 Thanks, Norm. We'll see you next week.

 NORM COOMBS: Yeah. My plan is not to be coughing anymore by then.