Latest / The Soap Box Podcast / Why your online course isn't as accessible as you think, with Dr Catrina Mitchum

Transcript

Why your online course isn't as accessible as you think, with Dr Catrina Mitchum · The Soap Box Podcast

• 1:16
  SPEAKER_03: Picture a university in the day before e-readers and audiobooks.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: A student is sitting with a textbook and a tape recorder, reading the whole thing out loud onto cassette, so a blind professor in the sociology department can decide whether he wants to use it with his class.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: That student is my guest today, and it's a pretty good summary of how she thinks about accessibility.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_03: Somebody couldn't get to the thing that they needed, which wasn't fair, so she did something about it.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome back to series four of the Soapbox Podcast, the politics and marketing podcast for business owners with a social conscience.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_03: This is our first guest conversation after the summer break, and I couldn't have picked a better one to come back with.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: I'm talking to Dr.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: Katrina Mitchin, an experienced junkie who loves travelling, reading, and the ocean.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_03: She's also a learning designer who helps businesses create courses, like they give a shit about current outcomes.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_03: And she's come to talk to us about her soapbox.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: I'll be honest.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: I spent a good chunk of this conversation with my eyebrows somewhat up near my hairline, which if I ever get the time to turn this into a video podcast, you would have been able to see.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: Some course platforms don't even give you a box for alt text for crying out loud.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_03: We dive into all of that and something about Canva that you need to know if you're creating PDFs there.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_03: We talk about the number of US adults with a disability and why that is a business reason to worry about accessibility if being a decent human wasn't reason enough.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_03: We also cover the low effort first steps for when you're short on time or capacity, why gamification won't rescue a course that isn't working, and how to ask for feedback without drowning in it.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: I'm really excited to hear Katrina get on her soapbox and to hear what you guys have to say about it.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_03: So without further ado, grab a notebook and a pen and a cup of coffee and listen to Katrina get on her soapbox.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_03: Katrina, it is so nice to have you on the Soapbox podcast.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: I'm very excited that you are the first person back after our summer hiatus.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: I am so happy to be here.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: I'm very, very, very excited for our conversation.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: But before we jump into what your soapbox is, can you, for people who do not know you or haven't heard about you, can you give them a little bit of a rundown as to who you are, kind of what you do?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: I refer to myself as a recovering academic.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm a learning specialist.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I came out of a lot of years of higher education and teaching adults online.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so now what I do is help business owners create learning experiences like they actually care about whether or not people get what they came for out of those courses, programs, memberships, whatever the learning experience happens to be.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_03: That's very cool.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: I like the idea of yeah, for people who actually care.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_03: People who are just chucking out 37 different digital products at once.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: Cool.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_03: When people come on the Soapbox podcast, unsurprisingly, we ask them what their soapbox is, the thing that they can't stop talking about at parties or at work, depending on how many parties they actually go to.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: So, Katrina, what is your soapbox?
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I have a million of them, but I'm gonna keep it to just accessibility in courses because I all of the work that I do, like I don't necessarily talk about it in terms of accessibility, but that's the umbrella that it all falls under.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because if your programs are not accessible beyond just captions, like we're talking beyond all text and captions, then you're putting up barriers to people actually being able to do the thing that they came to you for.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: People buy learning experiences, whether that's an online business or higher education, they buy them because they want to change something.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: And when you make something that's not accessible from the get-go, they're not going to be able to do it.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that is very true.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: And how did this become your particular soapbooks?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: I was just talking about this with someone the other day, and really it's it's kind of a lifelong thing, right?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like for me, it started because people that I cared about had accessibility issues, right?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: My youngest sister needed hearing aids when she was very young.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: My sister-in-law is deaf, and I was a reader for a blind professor in the sociology department in my undergrad.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm about to age myself with this story, but I, you know, back back then they didn't have audio textbooks, and they didn't have textbooks like as e-readers, and so I read textbooks on a cassette tape first, so he could decide whether or not he wanted to adopt that textbook, and then you know, just seeing other people struggle was enough for me to be like, well, that's not fair.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, why are we doing it?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then when I got into teaching, I saw it even more firsthand.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm a big believer in being proactive in creating things that are accessible instead of reactive.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: We can't we can't imagine every possible scenario that somebody comes to us with, but the more proactive we can be, the more we'll be able to help the people that come to us.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, no, that's so true.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_03: I I am of the generation before e-readers and of cassette tapes and going into a library and looking through a yeah, looking through the uh-huh.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, a little bit.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_03: So how do you feel that the because this is something that's obviously really, really important to you.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_03: What do you feel the state of it is in the online business world right now?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's pretty abysmal.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's getting better, at least in my little pocket of the world.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it's hard to tell if that's because I already gravitate to people who care.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that a lot of people, like when you know better, you do better.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm seeing that like in my smaller circles.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: But a lot of the platforms that we use aren't setting us up to be able to just have basic level accessibility.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: So things like I just did a whole like 16 platform review on YouTube, my YouTube channel.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that I found is number one, the platforms themselves are not accessible.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: I have a tool that I use, and even just things like color contrast, heading levels, like those things were a problem on the designer side.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're someone that that uses a screen reader and you're trying to design your course in that platform, it's gonna be really hard.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: But then when I was trying to set it up to, you know, because I was walking people through, and this is why it's crap and all that kind of stuff.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I was putting in images, it wouldn't let there was no space to add an alt text on any of the images.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, some of them did.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: The ones that I already knew that the founders were like coming from a good place, but most of them did not.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's already setting you up to not be able to like you have to know, oh, I should write a caption under that if there's space.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: So, like if you're in a course and you have the, you know, like the thumbnail image, you can't put alt text on that at all.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's no place to put a caption to explain, you know, what it is.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that's that really made me angry because I feel like the tools that we use do so much guiding of what we are capable of, and it's just setting people up for failure to not be able to create things that are accessible.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, for because we're an audio podcast, nobody saw my eyebrows shoot up through the when you tell me there was no alt text base.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I am by no means an accessibility expert, but like that it's to me, that's bonkers.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: That's just yeah, absolutely crazy.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_03: And you're right about it guiding people.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_03: So many of the courses that I know of or have come across, some really, really great courses are designed and built by people who are not program design experts or are not design experts.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_03: And you're right, they go like they go with their expertise to this platform and they rely very much on that platform to to show them what they should do.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_03: So if the if the option is needed there, then they I mean they assume that they're ticking all the boxes if this is not a conversation that they're part of.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's great.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: I'm angry now too.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_03: Also, I'm gonna make sure that we put your send you channel review that 16-tool review.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_03: We'll pop the link to it in the show notes because that sounds really useful.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: So are there are there platforms that do it well?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_03: Are we obviously you did the review, so you are comfortable naming and shaming.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, absolutely comfortable naming and shaming.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: Not really.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I will say the tool that I use to check all of these things had an outage when I was recording my last two.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: No, last three.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I was lazy and didn't go back because I just didn't have the I didn't have the capacity.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: That that series nearly killed me.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: But the other 13.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no, and it was so bad that I I have started creating my own course platform.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's how it's how angry I am.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's how things get done because women get cross.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, something doesn't exist.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we're like, fine, we'll build it anyway.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_03: But that's a whole other conversation.
• 11:50
  unknown: Okay.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, honestly, I don't want investors because I don't want somebody telling me what to do.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's true.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because I don't think enough people value accessibility.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so yeah, I'm hoping that this has the things that that that I wasn't seeing.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah just because yeah.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: So no, there there isn't a perfect one out there, unfortunately.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_03: So the so the landscape right now, in terms of course accessibility, is pants, which is quite a British phrase I've come to understand, but still it is, but I but I know what you mean.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's fine.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's pretty awful.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_03: So apart from, so you mentioned old text and captions and things, and in terms of screen readers and things like that, what are the other what are the things that we should be considering as people who are putting courses out there or designing them or working with people?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_03: What should we be thinking about when we're doing this?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I I talk about accessibility in in two different levels, right?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like base level.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that's just so people can actually get the information.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: So things like the alt text and captions and not just not just the auto captions, they have come leaps and bounds in the last five or six years, which is amazing, but they still make mistakes.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so just doing a quick glance to make sure that what it is is is readable and understandable, right?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: Because one wrong word in a sentence, like if it didn't hear you correctly, especially because so many of them are biased towards certain accents and in certain languages, making sure that it's actually what you said.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: So someone that can't hear you could still follow along.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other one that I like to harp on in terms of courses is if you have audio a transcript.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then lastly is the PDF, because PDFs are very popular in courses, they're also popular as you know, other digital products and 3Ds and all that kind of stuff.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: When you create a PDF, and if you're designing it first in something like Canva, sometimes, typically, wherever you place the thing on the page, like chronologically, that is sometimes what the read order ends up being.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so what that means is if I put something on the top of page one and then scroll all the way down and put something on the bottom of page two, when I export it, it's going to read the top of page one, then the bottom of page two, and then wherever I chronologically put it next.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: It is insane.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now they may have fixed it, right?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: Canva just did a whole bunch of new updates.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't tested that in the last couple of months.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I would hope, because I have been talking about that particular issue for a little while, and I just tell people to stay away from PDFs.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: But that makes the read order all out of whack, and that absolutely means somebody can't follow along.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: But PDFs, if unless you know what you're doing, PDFs that have especially tables or graphics or you know, charts, those kinds of things, they're they are notoriously difficult to make accessible, and so you are better off just making it a good old-fashioned document.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_04: I can't get my head around that.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_03: Like the the the most insane thing.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: I have Adobe Creative Cloud, and so I'm able to go in and actually check the read order on things.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I started it because I teach an accessibility module for an academic nonprofit twice a year.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so part of doing that is, you know, they submit things to me and I actually check them to see if they're accessible.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, how is this happening?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so I asked, and they were like, Oh, I built it in Canva and just exported it.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, oh yeah.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: That makes sense.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_05: Oh my word.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_03: Apart from the fact that Canva need to sit down and have a word with themselves, because that is just insane.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: This is gonna sound like a really facetious question.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_03: Because I like to think that everybody who listens to my podcast automatically knows that things like this are really important.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: But also I'm a realist, and I know that that's not always the case.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: So in the nicest way possible, why should we, as online business owners who are putting courses out, why should we care about this part of our business?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I mean, if you're a decent human being, you should just care about other human beings.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: But that aside, in the United States, 27.3 or 5% of adults have a disability.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so that is almost a third of the US market that you're not reaching.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of online business owners end up in that space, at least in the United States, because of a disability or chronic illness or something that makes being in the 3D business space more difficult.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so you're my guess would be the percentage of people that are doing business online are a higher percentage of what the actual disability percentage in the population is.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: So that that would be the more practical.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you don't care about other people, I know you care about your bottom line.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so you're may you're setting you're setting all of these people up that that do buy from you or that want to buy from you to not actually get what they need out of the course of program.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it is cheaper to keep people in your ecosystem as opposed to get new leads.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my goodness, the amount of times I've said that to people.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_03: That's very nice.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_03: So affects bottom line proportion of your market.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_03: Like I think probably a lot of people would be surprised at that stat that like it's it's 27.5 or something percent of the population.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and the Canadian one, I I don't ask me why I know those two, probably just because a lot of the folks that work with are in the US and Canada, but theirs isn't too far off.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's around like 24 to 25%, something like that.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I would imagine like And it could be anything.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: It can be any disability.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: It can be, you know, the ones that we think about when we think online accessibility, like hearing and and visual impairments, but it also could be motor impairments.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so they're still using a keyboard to navigate through your course.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: It could be any kind of neurodivergence, which one we haven't talked about yet is plain language.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's, you know, not using jargon just because your industry uses certain words to make communication easier doesn't mean you should be throwing that around with someone that is new to the topic.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Or writing convoluted, long bullshit sentence.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that's someone with an advanced degree in English, okay?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like, let's just make it so people can understand because that's the whole point of writing.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: So know your audience.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: And when your audience is someone that's coming to learn from you, you don't need to impress them with how smart you are.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_04: No, it's very true.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: What about the the objection that it's that it's too hard?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_03: That maybe so maybe I'm a person has limited executive and is or has caring responsibilities or stuff and I'm putting out this course because I want to serve my audience, but also I need to, like I'm building my business for like being able to live reasons.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I come to you and I say dealing with this extra layer of things to do is too costly or too difficult.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_04: What would you say to someone in that position?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oh well, I will give you the nice answer because you're nice.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: It depends on how you come to me.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: Your hypothetical situation sounds like a nice person that cares.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: So my suggestion is always small steps make a really big difference.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And if you have not done any accessibility in your course, like if you're just now thinking about it, the the first very good, the very good first step is thinking about how you're delivering the content and getting making sure that it is both visual and auditory.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so what I mean by that is if you're recording videos for your course, it's okay to just pull the transcript instead of having it be captions on the video.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: If it's audio, same thing, pull the transcript.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: If it's not exactly like do a skim, right?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: I always do because all of the AI tools want to spell my name wrong.
• 21:34
  unknown: Yeah.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: But making sure that you have those two as options and then putting a disclaimer.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's okay to say, hey, I pull this transcript because I want you to be able to get this information in a way that makes it accessible to you.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't checked this.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: But here it is.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: If you have suggestions or you find an error, like you can let people report those things to you.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's okay.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: But what I do is I will take a transcript, and this is actually an excellent use of AI, have it remove the timestamps.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's cool.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: It see it can see those easily.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: You can even have it remove the timestamps and put it in paragraph format without changing your words, and it won't.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like it won't change any of your words, and it will just make it an easier read, even if some of the words it misheard.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: But to me, that would be the very first low lift dep.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then next time you can go through and add your images and add alt text to them.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: If you're if you cannot take the time to add the alt text, don't add the image.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: Fair enough.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Especially if it pertains to like if it's providing more information.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: If it's decorative, that's one thing, but that that's probably a whole other podcast, me talking about how decorative images shouldn't just be decorative images.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Whole other podcast.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: But unless it's going to be providing more information, then you don't have to include it.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_03: Which I think is an interesting question for me in as the barrier of entry to creating these things lowered.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: And the range of tools that we have has grown.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_03: And also our knowledge of learning styles and how people consume content has moved on from well, in some spaces, has moved on from putting out like 105 videos that you just have to make your with your way through.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_03: Has that more interactive nature of content made accessibility more difficult for some people?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: Like in some ways, would it have been easier just to have those videos and have the transcripts?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: I would argue no, because just having information doesn't mean you're actually learning anything.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: We uh we don't learn through osmosis.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: You can't like open somebody's head and just pour information in.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: So unless they're engaging with it or applying it, they weren't learning it anyway.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I would call it, I would call that an accessibility issue.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't I don't think that we're better off accessibility-wise with that.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: It can make things a little bit harder in some ways, right?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because people are like, oh, but I want to have like these interactive cards that they flip over, like all of these things.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's more accessible to keep it simple and just have really targeted ways for people to apply things that don't need 80 million flashing lights or gamification.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: If it's already shit, it's just gonna be gamified shit.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: So please make sure that your course has good foundations before you start thinking about gamifying any aspect of it.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_03: We'll let that open a whole new door.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: Talk to me about gamification.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: That feels like a tangent, but if you say so, we like tangents.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, there's this idea that so, like most things that come out of higher education, there was a journalist somewhere who grabbed a kernel that they liked, like they cherry-picked an idea and then ran with it and it became popular.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like the 10,000 hours concepts, right?
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of my favorites to point to.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: But gamification is the same way, just because you add points or a badge to something doesn't mean people are gonna engage with it more or that they're going to actually learn something from the type of engagement that you're encouraging by just saying, Oh, you get a badge if you comment on three people's things.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, great, but what if what if my comments are that sounds fantastic, Brian?
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's crappy comment.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: There's nobody gets anything out of a comment like that.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: Brian feels good, maybe, but nobody's told him what to repeat out of the thing.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like, this is a learning situation.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: If what Brian did was amazing, somebody needs to say what was amazing about it so he can replicate it.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's fair.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so yeah, so when no gamification for gamification's sake, uh keeping things simple, making sure that you have strong foundations that you can then build on if you want to get fancy, but only if the being fancy is also accessible.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_04: Where do you stand on AI?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: We've touched on it briefly, and how it can be used to make some of these things easier.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: I definitely recommend it for any audio that you've done because it is very easy now to get those things into a readable state.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: You can also have it help you write the alt text.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, and I'm gonna preface this with always check.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Always check the AI's work.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: That should go without saying, but I'm gonna say it anyway.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it can help with those things.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: It can help point out places where you're using jargon or making assumptions.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you can tell it to act like someone that is act like someone that is learning, insert whatever it is that you're teaching and tell me where the holes are.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: You can so you can have it help you figure out gaps or places where you need to make the language simpler.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: I have yet to find that it's not great at designing activities yet, and I have tried.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: I have given it all kinds of labels.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: I've even given it like my things to be like, here, this is my brain.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Can you use this to create a good activity?
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: And kind of like a junior level instructional designer, maybe.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: So those those to me are the are the big places that AI can help.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_03: And then is the like is the gold standard to get someone working as an accessibility consultant or helping you on your design?
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and talk to me about there.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there are there are folks that help with both.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's that's me, that's what I do.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then there are people that help with just the accessibility portion of things, and they'll go into to deeper dives and usually have a lot more specific suggestions if you have some real like big accessibility issues.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then I know a few people who have a disability who visually impaired and one person with a hearing impairment, and they will go through your whole course.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: And if anybody is going to be excellent at finding the accessibility holes, at least with those two particular disabilities, it's going to be that group of people.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: That makes sense.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_03: Can we touch on something you talked about earlier and getting feedback from people?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_03: So you, when you talked about dropping the transcript and making that disclaimer and saying, if you see problems or you see gaps, kind of let me know.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_03: How do you because it can be quite vulnerable to do that as a person who's putting something out into the world and then inviting feedback from people who use it?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's something that's incredibly important, like in all kind of parts of business, even if you're not living out course, even if you're putting out kind of one-to-one services or all those kind of things.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_03: But it can also be quite a vulnerable place to put yourself in.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_03: How would you say the best way to invite that feedback is while also taking care of your nervous system and an understanding of your capacity?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: That was a very long convoluted word, but I hope that makes sense.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's okay.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's a good question.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because you can drown in feedback and also you can drown in accessibility.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like those are two things that are forever, you know?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: So my first suggestion with getting feedback is one to run a beta test.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: This is specifically for courses.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you run a beta test, that means don't give it away for free.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: Just give it away at a lower cost because you want them invested, right?
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: But that discount comes at a trade of they're going to be giving you feedback and they should be.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: And if you frame the whole thing around, hey, this is the first time I'm doing this, come play.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: People tend to be nicer in that situation because they understand this is the first time something is running.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: Also, make sure that the feedback mechanisms are structured.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: So you wouldn't just say, what can be improved?
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: You would say, in module two, I had an activity where I asked you to do this.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: How did it go in like frame the way that you thought it was gonna go?
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: How did it actually go for you?
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're looking for things to be constructive.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: You can even give people things like sentence starters.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: If I had a magic wand, I would change and then let them finish the sentence.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so having the structure, and then the third thing is don't look at it when it comes in.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like every piece of feedback, like just don't wait until you finish that beta round or until the round is finished, or do it quarterly if you're planning to have it be something that's constantly rolling.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Pick a day quarterly where you go through and look at the feedback.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: Do not turn on the notifications, because that is the thing that's gonna drive you crazy.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: I love.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: And because the feedback from an one individual is always important, but the most important feedback to implement is going to be the things that come up repeatedly.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: So you're gonna want to look at the feedback for patterns.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: If everybody, or even if half of the people said, okay, well, on that module two question, I couldn't actually answer it.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: Then you know that's something that you need to go in and change.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: Or if everybody says that audio in module five, I have no idea what you said.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like you're gonna have to go back and re-record that because nobody could hear you properly, or whatever the scenario is.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: Use the, and that's why I say to wait.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: Wait because otherwise you'll you your nervous system won't be able to handle it, but also you won't have enough data to be able to make prioritized decisions about what can what needs to change and what doesn't, because you won't be able to change everything, and that's okay.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: You just do it the next time.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: Iteration is my favorite word to describe how to approach both building a course and making a course accessible, because every time you just make it a little bit better every time.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: I taught English 101 and 102 courses, writing courses at the college level for 14 years across multiple institutions, but it's basically the same core class.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: I did not teach the same course two semesters in a row because I was always changing something.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I was teaching some places we were doing like six semesters a year.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: And iteration just makes it better and keeps it adaptive to and flexible for the people that are coming to you, right?
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Three years from now, the people that find this course might be a little different than the people that took your beta course.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're constantly thinking about it as okay, every three months or every six months, I'm gonna go in and I'm going to gather all the feedback and make adjustments, small tweaks, then you'll constantly, you won't have to keep creating 37 different products.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: You can just continue improving and adapting the one really good one you have.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_03: And I'll always find where do you draw the line between preference and accessibility?
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that one's hard because a lot of people will demand that their preference is an accessibility issue.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: Specifically when we talk about learning styles, because that was one where a journalist plucked an idea.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: But since that original study came out, it hasn't been replicated.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, it was found that there was no difference, and let's say you like you like videos, like audio and visual together is how you think your learning style is.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: There was for someone like you, there was no difference in test scores after watching a video versus reading something.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: Your preference might be video and it might feel like you're engaging better, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're remembering the information better.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what learning is about.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: So but when we make things accessible for the people that need it, it becomes better for everybody.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: So you can still have your preference of video if I need to show and tell people things.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it is hard to make that distinction, but if you focus on the things that we know are about accessibility, which the things we've already talked about, but also breaking things down into smaller pieces, right?
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: That makes things accessible for people with executive functioning issues, that is literally going to help everybody else.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know that I answered your question in that quick you were hoping, but no, no, you did.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_03: I think just because if you put yourself in the position of inviting that feedback, yeah, then it feels like as a nice person, there is an onus on you to then do something with that feedback.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_03: And as we said earlier, that you can you can drown in that, there's there's lots to do, you can overthink things, you can lack capacity, all those kind of things.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_03: So being able to have some kind of idea, how you work out kind of what is what is the preference, and actually if you had unlimited resources and an unlimited capacity and unlimited ways of doing things, then sure.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_03: And what is an accessibility issue there is actually stopping someone from engaging kind of with with the material you're putting out that could that could be helping them or be of interest to them.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: So I think sometimes having Yeah, sometimes having kind of almost like a reality check if you're inviting that much feedback, I think probably be quite important.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_03: So tell me a little bit about what you do, a little bit more about what you do for people now and how they can how they can get in touch with you and find out more about that.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I I help people design the courses.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't necessarily help you build something.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't, my only done for you is an audit where accessibility is like an entire third of my checklist that I do.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I help with, you know, designing things from a space where it will feel easier for you to implement the design and make sure that the things that are going to help someone finish or get through your course are part of it.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we start with we start with goals and work from there.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it's I'm not gonna bore you with like the instructional design theory and all user experience theory and all that that good fun stuff, but it really is about creating a plan that thinks about the the person that you're trying to teach and also making it easier for you to actually create something that is going to be worthwhile because I can't tell you how many times I have to.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I've had a single client come to me and we didn't cut something.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them it's lots of some things.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: Lots and lots of them.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because people that come to me care and they feel like adding more things is adding value, but more it doesn't necessarily mean more value, valuable.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I take everybody through the same process, and what that looks like just depends on how much of me you need.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I have a membership, I do, I'm doing a live group thing in the fall, and I do one-on-one.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really how much, how, how much do you need a swift kick with kindness from yours truly versus how much you just need like a temperature check every so often?
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how I let people work through the same system, same theories, underscoring it.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: Just really depending on what you need, because who am I to say when when you need your hand held versus when you can manage it on your own?
• 40:37
  unknown: Yeah.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_03: No, that makes sense.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and fits with yeah, and fits with pretty much everything that we've been talking about today.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: So break it.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_03: Let me have those things work out.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_03: I knew that you would practice what he preached.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_03: Cool.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so if people want to come and find you, where is the best place for them to do that?
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: I have been spending most of my time on threads.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: Excellent.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_03: We like threads.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's the crazy, yeah, slightly odd stepchild of social media right now, I feel.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_03: Mm-hmm.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm finding my people over there, that's for sure.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_03: Cool.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so we will pop your threads handle in the show notes as well, along with yeah, your tool review, which I'm gonna go and watch right now because it sounds like it's gonna be spicy.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, but wait till you get to the last one or the second of the last one.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: You can tell when I was starting to get real frustrated because the videos started to get shorter.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, I don't really care if you did anything well.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: This is crap.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_02: That's very funny.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_02: You're like, I'm willing to give everybody the benefit of the and by the end, you're like, no, you're all terrible.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_02: Stop it.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's all doubt.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's all doubt.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's fair from what you've said.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_03: Cool.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_03: This is an absolute pleasure.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_03: Katrina, thank you so much for talking to everybody and opening our eyes to some of the things that we should be thinking about that maybe we're not, and giving us a a nice gentle kick at the butt.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks so much for having me.