This is a transcript of our A11y Office Hours, Episode 1, first broadcast on September 21, 2021.

 

Anthony: Good morning, afternoon, I am Anthony Vasquez, communication specialist with Knowbility. This is our inaugural accessibility office hours, we're going with a11y, which is short for accessibility. Do we have our PowerPoint on screen already, too?

 

Anthony: So we are celebrating this month Deaf Awareness Month. That's going to be part of our first office hours. And so today we're going to be having a short presentation by our marketing and communications director, Mariella Paulino. She will be going over a few of the tools that she uses to caption content. And I think it's going to  be just a very informative and fun tour through a few tools that someone here on staff uses, you know, almost daily to get content captioned for all purposes.

 

Now, there are just a few guidelines here as we continue here. You know, we would like to make this an accessible space, so, of course, part of that is, is just a few rules.

 

And that again here to create an accessible space, first, we want everyone to be respectful as we start with this, treat each other kindly, be kind, be polite, respectful, this covers all sorts of aspects of our presentation today from our chat, from Q&A.

 

Just a few guidelines here. Do save your questions to the end, but really do drop them in the chat. You will be able to, you know, text, type the question in the chat or you will be able to verbally ask a question, also. But we ask that you wait until Mariella is done with her presentation.

 

Now, we have today captioning provided by Texas Closed Captioning, thank you, TCC. And Zoom allows this feature in the app. If you have any questions, send it here to us in the chat or Q&A, one of us here can help you get that started if you are having trouble viewing the captions.

 

Now, of course, Knowbility would not be what it is today if it weren't for our community and even though we are 20 plus years old, we are always evolving. Right now we have different ways for you to get in touch with us and for us to get in touch with you.

 

I would say, first, follow us on our social. We're most active on Twitter and on LinkedIn. We are @knowbility, in case you need it spelled, it’s k-n-o-w-b-i-l-i-t-y. That's our Twitter. We are @knowbility Inc on LinkedIn. We have a stay in the know newsletter, all information from what activities that we are up to, to helpful articles to job openings. We have a couple. So do follow us to, the quickest way I would say right now is to go through our bit.ly/KnowbilityNews, all one, word, the K in Knowbility is capitalized, the N in news is capitalized.

 

And we also have just a quick email address that you can send us, you can send us any questions that you have, simply hello@knowbility.org, hello@knowbility.org.

 

And to get things kind of lively here, we have a quick door prize. We have all kinds of Knowbility swag. At this time we're going to be giving away a T-shirt. It's the one that you might have seen around here. On screen should have a photo of Meryl Evans, a long-time fan of Knowbility, one of our huge fans, thanks, Meryl, sporting our T-shirt which says I am blank.

 

Not the word blank, but a blank space on the T-shirt, white on purple, I believe, and it says and accessibility is my responsibility. It's like I'm an engineer, accessibility is my responsibility. You can put whatever in the blank. Someone today will be a lucky winner. Erica, take it away and hand out the door prize.

 

Erica: Absolutely. This is one of my favorite parts of the presentation, but I am very excited to give out the door prize. So I am going to put up our wheel of names to select a winner. I'm going to warn you, though, our wheel of names does move and spin. So if you do not wish to see moving content, maybe just take a quick pause here or minimize the screen. But I'm going to share.

 

Here it comes. And I'm going to make it full screen. It's a round wheel with a little arrow for selection and it's got everyone's name written in green, yellow, red or blue spaces. So I'm going to give it a click. Spinning.

 

And -- our winner is Sandra Orland. Congratulations, you win a Knowbility T-shirt. I'm going to be in touch with you after this presentation to figure out where I should send the T-shirt. So thanks to everyone who attended and got their name in the door prize wheel of names. And I'm going to hand it back over to Anthony.

 

Anthony: All righty. Well, thank you for that, Erica. And a few more quick things before we start with our presentation. A bit about Knowbility, in case you don't know. Since 1999 we have worked with hundreds of businesses, educational entities, government organizations, all on tech and beyond to train staff on accessibility. We were founded as a non-profit then in 1999.

 

Since then we've launched other community programs, AccessU, our annual conference, accessibility internet rally, which is the program that launched Knowbility, read all about it on our blog, of course, we also have commercial services for our clients who want to get that extra boost of accessibility, all sorts of companies work with us.

 

And, yeah, again, all towards one end, building an inclusive digital world for people with disabilities. And that's our mission and we thank you for supporting us, first by being here, so many other ways that you can support us, too. Part of what we are doing now is during our accessibility office hours, short presentation followed by Q&A. To try to get more engagement among everyone here.

 

We especially appreciate you guys tuning in today. I'm sure many of us are tired of Zoom events, we really do thank you for being here for this one. Our goal is to make these monthly. Provide guidance, technical answers to some of your technical questions, don't have to be technical, but all sorts of interaction that we want to foster here.

 

We really are excited to have your support. With that, I will pass it over to Mariella Paulino, she will be sharing with us, again, information on captioning content and how it can provide an accessible experience for everyone. So I'm Anthony, I'm going to pass it over to Mariella, thank you.

 

Mariella: Ooh, thank you Anthony for that incredible, incredible intro!

 I hope that you guys are ready to get this party started.

 So let's open up with just a quick intro of who I am and my Description, so I am a Hispanic woman. I am wearing a purple Blazer. I have braids in my hair. My background is a white background with the Knowbility logo. My name, my pronouns, which are she, her and hers and I am located in New York City.

 

So I am going to ask all of you in the chat, by the way, Anthony, if you could turn off your video that would be great. Or Molly if we can remove him. There we go, fantastic. So I am going to ask all of you in the chat, why should we caption our media? Why is it important to caption our media?

 

So I'm going to open it up to all of you in the chat. If you can drop in some suggestions. Don't be shy. I won't bite. So if you could drop some reasons in the chat for why it is important for us to caption our media. I will give everyone a quick minute.

 

Okay. I see. I see we have a bit of a quiet crowd today. But there are lots of reasons for why you should be captioning your media. Not only, we got it, we got some answers!  Especially needed in the education field, absolutely. We have for better cognitive, people who are deaf and individuals from other aspects, 100%.

 

Retension! 100%. When you are able to read things, it allows you to be able to pay attention better. Disabilities, environmental sounds. That is a great one. When you are in the train, a crowded space, lots of people, it can be really hard for you to understand the content on your phone if you forget your headphones. So some really, really great answers.

 

And so it is really important for us to think about captioning, not just as something that helps people with hearing disabilities, but something that helps everyone. Before we go into our discussion today, I'm going to talk, and thank you so much for everybody that dropped some of their comments in the chat. Thank you for being engaged.

 

So one of the things that we're going to talk about today is the difference between captioning. So there is open captioning and there is closed captioning. Open captioning is when the captions are burned into the video. And closed captioning is when you can turn the closed captioning on and off. So let's get started into our presentation today.

 

The next slide is how to caption your media. So we will be exploring different tools and go over them based on complexity and time. So in this page, what I have is I have a graph. And on the Y-axis, the vertical axis, I have complexity, the X-axis I have the -- exploring different tools based on how much time and how complex it is to create each kind of media.

 

So we're going to be talking about four different tools. The first tool we're going to be talking about today is Instagram. Instagram released this year a functionality on stories where you can make a quick story on Instagram and then Instagram will allow you to use AI-generated captioning tools to burn the captions into the video.

 

It is incredibly, incredibly accurate and it is one of the least complex and least time-consuming ways that you can create captioned content. After that we're going to explore another tool called Descript, which we will combine with Kapwing to create open captioned content.

 

Descript is one of the most revolutionary tools to come out in the last few years. It uses the Google live transcribing technology to create some of the most accurate captioning functionality that I have seen. And then we're going to use Kapwing, which was actually created by two ex-googlers. So what we're going to do is create the caption file in Descript and then take that caption file, known as an srt file, we are going to take that srt file and burn it into Kapwing. And then finally, the most complex and most time consuming tool that we are going to explore today is YouTube, which is just an incredible, powerful little tool. So let's get this party started.

 

So the first tool we're going to talk about, I'm going to switch tabs, each of these videos is going to be shared with you after the presentation. And in addition to the entire presentation today. So if there's something that you miss, if we move too fast, don't worry about it. You will have the video right after the presentation. So let's go over it.

 

So first tool that we have is Instagram. Let me open up the screen a bit here. So Instagram is an application that you can download on your phone, but be careful, it's quite addicting. Instagram is one of those apps that draws you in.

 

What I have on the screen is the screen to my phone, I prerecorded all of this, so I will just be able to kind of run you along. So we have the Instagram app. The first thing that you want to do is open up your application, and so once you open up your application, the top hand corner there is a + icon. You are going to click that.

 

Once you click on that + icon, you will then go to the bottom right-hand corner, you want to go to your Instagram story. Your Instagram story is the tool that you will use within Instagram. So in Instagram, you can create posts, you can create stories, reels, and lives. For captioning your videos, the captioning functionality is only available on the reels, which is what we are going to be using today.

 

Then you go into your story, And when you open your stories, you have two options. You can create a live video, so yesterday when I was making this video, it opens up, you can start recording right away.

 

But for the purpose of this presentation, I wanted to use a video that I had already created, which is fantastic. Because Instagram allows you to go over content that you have already created, which is in your gallery. This is really, really powerful because that means that you don't have to create content live to get it captioned.

 

So you open up your Instagram. It is by default on live. You don't want to do that. So you will click on that button on the left hand corner. It's just a square on the lower left corner and it will take you to your gallery. Once you are in your gallery on Instagram, you will open up the video that you want to caption.

 

Now one of the things that I want you to be mindful on Instagram, it is very limited. In the amount of time that you can actually create for the story. So Instagram only allows you to create content up to the 15 second mark. Not ideal. But still progress.

 

So once you open up your video, in this case my video is about 17 seconds. Two seconds over the limit. Which means that it will break down the video into two stories. Once I have my video open, I will then go to the top hand corner, it's the third button from the right. Looks like a happy face on a square. You click on that. Once you click on that, you will have a popup with different options. You will see at the very top, different icons that are popular for Instagram during that time. So right now we have Latina heritage month, Hispanic heritage month. So you will get those types of icons at the top and you get location, mentions, hashtag. On the third line you get captions.

 

And then you will click on that icon. Click on captions and then immediately Instagram will use artificial intelligence captioning to caption your content, bam! Right there! In real-time. And so it will transcribe everything that is being said in the video.

 

Now, as you can see, and as you can imagine, AI technology is nothing compared to human transcription in terms that there will still be errors in your transcription. And you will be responsible for making sure that you are providing accurate transcriptioning services within that Instagram file that you are creating.

 

The way that you do that is in the video, that you have created, you will now have the words that will come up on the video and what you want to do is you want to just click on that transcript file and then once you do so, you will be able to read through that transcript file and edit.

 

For example, here Instagram mistyped my name, it has two L's, not one. What I will do, I will scroll down to the transcript file, see where there are errors and fix those. So not only did it mistype my name, but it also mistyped Knowbility. So I will go into that transcript file and -- this is great, the 15 second limit is a double edged sword

 

because during this entire process for a five minute video can be really, really time consuming. So we are able to create those small ones can be useful. I fix those errors and then once I'm done, I click on the top right-hand corner where it says done. Fix those errors. Read through my transcript. Listen to the transcript, make sure that the audio matches the transcript. And then when I am done reading through that entire file, making sure that it is accurate, I click done.

 

Now one of the really cool things that you want to be, you really want to be mindful about this is  color contrast. You don't want to have a black or dark background and dark text because it will be really hard for your reader to be able to read through what you are saying. So one of the really cool things that Instagram did is it allows you to change the color of your text so you click on that button at the very top in the center, once you click done for your transcript file, that color button will show up.

 

And then you click on it until you find the color you want. I wanted to have purple because Knowbility! So there you have your captioned file in purple, in front of your video, burned in. This is open captioned. This means that the video now has the captioning functionality with the right color, I'm able to read it and it works.

 

Then the cool thing is that you want to make sure that the font is in the right location. You don't want it to be right on top of the person speaking. You want maybe the person's lips to be visible. So what I do is that you can actually zoom out and zoom in on the text by using two fingers to either zoom in or zoom out on the text in a way that is visually appealing given everything that you have on your video. So there we have it. That is the very first tool that I'm going to talk about today and that is how you create captioned content on Instagram.

 

All right. And then we are going to go to our second tool, so the second tool, the second set of tools that we're going to talk about today is Descript and Kapwing. So as I mentioned, Descript uses AI technology from Google live transcribe to provide closed captioning functionality. What we need to be able to create this type of file is we need the closed caption file and we need a method to burn that closed caption file into the video.

 

Now, this is how Descript works. You will open up your Descript application. And you will click on new. So in the upper right-hand corner there is a button with a + icon that is for you to create a new project. So you will give your project a name and then you will click create project.

 

Once you do that, Descript asks you to drag and drop your files. So if you have a video file on your computer or something from your phone, you transfer it over to your computer. The thing that I love about Descript is that it is desktop heavy so you are able to do all of this on your desktop without having to be on your phone like hunched over trying to kind of fix things. I prefer, highly prefer doing captioning on my computer because it allows me to do more.

 

So we transfer the captioning file over to the Descript via drag and drop. And then Descript will transcribe the file. That's a really cool thing about Descript is that it is able to identify how many different voices there are in your file. If you have three speakers, Descript will identify that there are three different speakers and ask you to label each of these three different speakers.

 

For this video, there was only my voice, so it was correctly able to identify that it was just one person. And so I am able to add my name into that file, click on done. And then this is speed up and so after I do that, the script will listen to the file and transcribe it. And this is exactly what happened here. So, Descript listened to that file, captioned it for me, and I am able to see the captions up on the screen.

 

Now, just like Instagram, Descript is also artificial intelligence. It is not 100% accurate. So there will be things in your file that you have to listen to the file and fix those errors yourself. So, for example, here I see that it mistyped Knowbility, which has a K, Know bility. And so I am able to just highlight over that word and then fix that word.

 

And I do that for the rest of the file. So I am able to pause, play, pause, play, and just edit things, make sure that the proper nouns are there. And just fix things as I listen to them.

 

This is really, really useful if you have a five minute video or 10 minute video, a 10 minute video, a one hour video, what have you. One of my favorite things about Descript is that it allows you to edit your video file as if you were editing a Word document. Which is fantastic!

 

Because, let's say here, I say, hello, my name is Mariella Paulino from Knowbility. I don't want it to say hello my name is Mariella from Knowbility, I want it to go hello, today I'm going to show you how you can create captioned content. Just click play.

 

And so I am able to just delete that. By clicking delete and it will remove that whole thing, so when I play the video, it gives the, it deletes that entire line of video content which is just a spectacular piece of technology, it is one of the reasons why I love Descript so much. It is able to delete filler words like oh, um, those kind of things.

 

            Then if there's a section in your video content, yaa-baa-baa-baa-baa-baa, baa-baa-baa-baa-baa, yapping, you can delete all of that, make your video smooth, which is a fantastic thing. Let me mute it.

 

Now, once you are done with your caption file on  Descript, what you want to do is on the upper right-hand corner there is a button that says share. You want to be able to download two different files from your Descript. You want to download the captioned file, which is your srt file and your video file, which is your mp4 file. This is very important. You want to download both pieces of content. Because as I just explained, there are times when you will delete pieces of your video content

 

and so you want to make sure that the video file is updated. And so that it matches with the captioned file. So once we are done with your captions, you go to share, and you will download the video file, which is the mp4, you will click on that right hand button at the corner that says export. You will give your file a name. So we have our mp4 file, which is our video file and then we save that.

 

We go back to share and the upper corner export, and then caption, that was caption, yes? Then you want to download your srt file, which is the captioned file. After we are done downloading the mp4 and the srt file and exporting them, I like to save them on my desktop, it just makes the process of finding these files easier. Then after I'm done with those two files I will go into Kapwing.

 

And Kapwing! So you go to Kapwing, you will see on Kapwing your work space. Your work space is where you have all of the videos that you are working on. So you will click on the new content button within your work space. And you click on the new content. Now, Kapwing, just like Descript is drag and drop. Where it says click to upload, take that mp4 file that you were working on in Descript and drag it into Kapwing.

 

You now have your mp4 file in Kapwing. Now, what we want to do is we want to add our subtitles. So at the top in the center, there is a subtitles button. You want to click on that, that will take you to the section within Kapwing where you can add your srt file.

 

So at the very bottom of that Kapwing page, there is an upload srt file, which is the captioned file that we were just working on. Remember on Descript we had the srt caption and the mp4? You will then take the srt file to this upload srt button, you will click on it, and then you will drag and drop or you can look through your documents and make sure that upload the correct srt file. You click on open. And boom, you've got your caption file with your, oh, boy. My mouse just froze. whoops. And you want to just add that file in there.

 

Now some of the really cool things, one of the really, really cool things about Kapwing is that you have the text option. This is on the left hand corner. The text option allows you to edit how the srt file is going to look on your video. So you can do outline, which is when you have the text, you have a line around the text makes it stand out.

 

You are able to do a full wrap, which is when you have a full background color and then the text. You can also change the opacity of the background. You can play around with this until you find something that you want. You can change the text size, change the font family, the text color and just really make the video fit what you want. In this case, I wanted it to be a full background in purple with white text.

 

So that allows me to read what is being said. You want to make sure that there is readability within your text and it's not blocking anything else.

 

Once you are done with that, you click on done, then your closed caption file is going to show, your open captioned file is going to show in your video. Then the really cool thing about Kapwing is that you can edit one file video and you can also change the Dimensions.

 

So in the right-hand corner there's a button that says output size, you can change it to a one by one dimension for Instagram, you can change it to nine by 16 for story or TikTok, change to 16 by 9 for YouTube, you can change this one piece of content that now has the open captions burned into multiple pieces of content.

 

Once you are done with all of that , you click on the upper right-hand corner which says export video. And you will be able to download that file, which is now accessible and now has the captions burned in. You can download it into your computers and into your phone, go on Hootsuite, buffer, just post it on whatever platform you want to use. So after you're done, you download it and there it is in your computer.

 

Then, the very last tool I am going to be talking about today for our accessibility office hour is going to be YouTube. So if you are going to create captioned content on YouTube, you need a YouTube account.

 

So once you have a YouTube account, what you want to do is you want to upload content into your YouTube. But don't worry. If there's content that you are in the process of creating, you don't have to make it public. You can make your content on YouTube private until you are ready to share it with the world.

 

Now, in our YouTube library, we have a few pieces of content that we have already created. So what we're going to do is you go into your YouTube studio, it's like your YouTube library, and then on the left hand corner you will have a list of buttons. These buttons include dashboard, content, playlist, comment and subtitles. We want to go to the subtitles button. Again, this is on the left hand corner of your video's play list library.

 

So we are going to click on subtitles and once we click on subtitles, that will take us to every video that we have created and the captions for that video file.

 

The really cool thing about YouTube is that when you upload a video, YouTube will often, very, very often, the majority of the time, create an auto captioned file for that video. Which is fantastic because that means you can just go into that AI-generated file and then edit the videos after these videos have been created and uploaded.

 

So you will go to subtitles and this is the same video that I have been working on for Descript, Kapwing, and Instagram. So I have uploaded that video into my YouTube library. I click on it. When I click on that video it will take me directly into my video subtitles page. What I want to do is I want to go to the right-hand corner, so I see that for the specific video there are no captions.

 

So what I want to do is I want to click on that button that is right underneath the subtitles tab and I click on add. Once I click on that add button, it will take me to a new page where I have the option to upload a file. Now you can upload a file if you use a tool like Rev.com, which allows you to caption content for $1.25 a minute.

 

You can upload that file, and so the really cool thing about captioning your file using Rev is that they have the option to provide a transcript file or a captioned file. The transcript file is just a paragraph type of style. It's just a transcript of the file.

 

The captioned file allows you to have the time stamp for your video. Ideally, I like to go with the time stamped captioned version because it is much easier to, to import that content in here.

 

So, I take that video and then I will click on type manually. This tends to be the option if you don't have a budget for captioning, if you don't have the tools or resources to be able to send your file over to Rev or you don't have Descript, if you have to manually type the file.

 

So you will type that file manually, and then you click on type manually, but if you have a video that is one hour long, fear not. We've got you.

 

So on the upper corner, there's a button here that says edit as text. Now, if you have a video that is one hour and you are going to take the time to actually transcribe that video by hand, what you are going to do is listen to that video, type, listen, type, listen, type, then take that bulk of text and paste it into this section labeled edit as text.

 

So you click on edit as text, and you paste that content in here. Once you do so, one of the really cool things about YouTube is that YouTube will automate where specific words are said. So it will take that transcript file that you have created and then time this file in comparison to the video file. So it will do all of this automatically. It is a beautiful system. I very rarely have had problems with this because it's just really, really good at timing and identifying where the words are in your video.

 

So once you have done that, you click on publish and that, which is on the right-hand corner, and then YouTube will automatically generate the timing for that file. And that is pretty much it. Once you are done with that file, what do you want to do is, so it usually takes a bit of time, anywhere from five to 30 minutes, depending on the length of your video. What you want to do is once you are done with that YouTube file, you can go back into the subtitles section of YouTube and download the srt file to maybe go into Kapwing, to create smaller pieces of content for Instagram, for Twitter. For other pieces of social media beyond YouTube. And that is it! We are perfectly on time.

 

So now, those are the four tools that I talked about. We talked about Instagram, which is the easiest, fastest, least complex method that you can use. Then we have Descript, which you can use to have Descript listen to the file, caption the file and have the srt file which you can then burn to create open captioned content. And then we also talked about YouTube, which not only provides the captioning functionality, but also allows you to download an srt file which you can then paste into Kapwing to cut and edit your video content.

 

Now, I am going to encourage all of you to go ahead and leave any feedback that you have on all of the tools that we've talked about today on the presentation, remember, don't worry, if you feel like this is a lot of information and you weren't able to capture every single tool we talked about, we will be sending this presentation after we look it over, edit it and we will be sending you all of this information along with each of the tools and how you can get them.

 

And so I am going to be dropping or if somebody can drop the feedback survey into the chat. And now, we are going to open up the stage for any questions you may have. Anthony, I have not looked at the chat, but if you have collected any questions, I will be available to answer them. And that is it for the captioning day workshop.

 

Hi, Anthony. You are muted. There we go.

 

Anthony: All righty. Very nice presentation there. So there was one question of anonymous attendee, free tools? I understand, think that Descript does charge a fee, as you pay to use it. But do they have any like maybe you can do two hours before they charge you? What's your experience with Descript's fees?

 

Mariella: Descript gives you three hours free. So that decreased a bit from the last time I checked. So it’s three hours per month for free. But the one tool that I highly encourage everyone to check out is Rev which is one dollar and a quarter per minute and it provides accurate human transcribed captioning, so you can take your srt file or your transcript file to be able to create that functionality. That $1.25 does add up. So you want to make sure that you have a budget set aside for captioning your videos.

 

Anthony: What about Kapwing?

 

Mariella: Kapwing, it is also a paid tool. But the cool thing is it is a paid tool if you want to remove the water mark. So you are able to create free video content on Kapwing up to I think it's after 15 minutes, like when your video passes that 15 minute mark, then they start charging you. But if you have like a quick one minute video, a quick five minute, a quick 30 second, it is free. But you have to allow for that watermark to show up that says kind of Kapwing in the lower right-hand corner.

 

Again, just fantastic little tool. And then Kapwing also has that auto captioning functionality, but compared to other tools like Descript, I don't think it's as accurate. So that's the only reason why I don't recommend it.

 

But the auto captioning functionality is available on Kapwing and I highly encourage that you use that, if you are doing like a 30 second, a quick one minute, because those are really easy to fix. When you go into that five minute, 10 minute, it's, there's just so many errors. And that is it. Any other questions from our audience today?

 

I see Mark also shared with us that IBM Watson has a free transcription service but it's a little bit of a technical solution, not for the faint of heart. I know, I feel like transcribing and captioning is, has come a long way from, from just a few years ago. Captioning content up to I want to say up to the last two years was a challenge. And so I am very, very happy that in the last few years we are seeing tools like major players like Instagram creating auto captioning. It's only 15 seconds and those 15 seconds if you are doing a longer video, do add up. But it is a great, great place to start.

 

So, so I think Anthony's internet may have dropped, so I'm going to go ahead and close up. If you enjoyed today's presentation, we encourage all of you to stay connected. Make sure that you follow us on the newsletter, which you can sign up at bit.ly/KnowbilityNews, the K in Knowbility is capital and the N in news is also capital.

 

We encourage you to follow us on social media @knowbility. We are most present on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. So make sure that you are following us on those platforms. We are constantly sharing news, events, facts, things that are happening in the accessibility community.

 

And you will be hearing about lots of other events that we have planned for the next few months. And if there is anything we can do to facilitate an experience today, if you have ideas for collaboration, if you have events that are happening within your organization that you want to share with us, email us @hello@knowbility.org. Hey, Anthony, you're back. I'm just closing up with the stay connected and the very last thing is,  follow us for episode 2. So do you want to talk a little bit about October, October feedback, Anthony? You are muted.

 

Anthony: Right, yes. Sorry about that. Knocked myself out of the meeting. So thanks again to everyone for coming for our first office hours. Our next one will be in October. October is national disability employment month. And we are currently organizing a really neat event, panel discussion on this really important topic and, for people with disability in the United States and around the world who are severely under-employed and unemployed and though should be every month, October is disability employment month and we're going to have a really good event around that, stay tuned for that information soon.

 

Mariella: Then the very last thing, we want to encourage all of you to visit us at the learning center, our learning center is in the process of being finalized. We are putting the final, final details there. But our learning center includes other really fantastic workshops like this one that we have created from our accessibility technical team, just some really fantastic workshops, we talk about everything from screen readers to captioning to highly technical courses that you can benefit from and they are all online, you can do them at your own pace.

 

I encourage all of you to start checking them out, seeing what's out there. You will be seeing a lot more content over the next few weeks as our technical team puts the final touches on that together.

 

Then the very last thing that I'm going to drop for you today is going to be our AccessU conference. It is an annual conference that's been going for almost two decades. And whether you are a digital accessibility professional, wherever you are in your accessibility journey, whether you are a tech professional or user experience designer, educator, a parent, there is something for you at AccessU.

 

You will get to learn and connect with assistive technology professionals all over the world. It is a global community of people that are passionate about accessibility, about inclusion, about creating a future that is worthy of us. Because, remember, if we don't create the future we want, we must enjoy the future we get.

 

And the people that attend AccessU are the people that are creating that future, at the cutting edge of technology. Just it's an amazing event, so I encourage all of you to go ahead and get your tickets for that now. We have early bird special going on, so get your tickets early. Just lots of really good stuff there. And with that said, we are done for today's presentation. Do we have any last minute thoughts, comments, suggestions, tomatoes, potatoes, things that we need to add?  Anthony?

 

Anthony: I think we're good. Thanks again everyone for joining us, thank you, Mariella, for introducing us to all of these new tools that can caption our content from very short Instagram videos to YouTube. And I'm getting some questions here in the chat about the recording, we will be working on that getting that, you know, getting the captions going and packaging it for all of y'all. So just stay tuned if you registered for this event through eventbrite we have your information and we will reach out to you. I'm done here, on my end. Anyone else want to chime in on anything else, Mariella?

 

Mariella: I don't think so. I know people are like when is the next accessibility hours because you loved this one so much. We are working on putting the panel together for that. Sign up for our newsletter. We will be sending out more details on that, probably tomorrow. And we will be working on the presentation to send this out to all of you ASAP.

 

And that is it for today. We're going to be hanging out for a little bit and closing the room in the next few minutes. Thank you, so much, Anthony I love working with you.

 

Anthony: Thank you.

 

Mariella: That is it for today. Whoo! First accessibility office hour! Finished! All right. We are.