Fall 97
Winter 98

Part One by Lisa Voisin

The Women’s Internet Conference in Ottawa this past October played host to women from as far away as Sweden.

No big deal, right?

What if I said one of the participants gave her presentation from Victoria, BC?

What if I said she was hearing impaired?

Is there really such a thing as completely inclusive Internet technology? Back in September I was asked to arrange an interactive session on Women with Disabilities using Internet Relay Chat (IRC). “No problem,” I thought, “IRC’s a cinch.” The presenter, Tanis Doe, and I began our email correspondence shortly thereafter. Tanis began the process of creating a video presentation which we could play live at the conference. The plan was to give all the session participants an opportunity to meet her in IRC and discuss the issues she presented.

The beauty of IRC is that it provides synchronous communication between people, works on just about any computer, and is free to anyone who desires to use it. I had no idea until after previewing her video that Tanis had a hearing impairment and that IRC really would be a particularly suitable environment for her, since most group conferencing software packages have delays (which would render sign language incomprehensible) and are tetchy at best.

A week or so after correspondence began, an old friend offered to make the video available live on the Internet via his server, making it possible for women around the world and across the country to participate. I was even more excited about the opportunity to introduce women to IRC and the idea of empowering them to communicate quickly and somewhat easily with each other.

The video by Tanis included sign language which, unfortunately, became condensed during the compressing process, making this part of her presentation unavailable to the hearing impaired. To remedy that, a “text only” script of her presentation was to be made available through the Conference web site. Furthermore, a RealAudio (sound only) version of Tanis’s presentation would be available to anyone who could not read or who did not have a very fast Internet connection.

Before the Conference, my team and I agreed which IRC servers we would use and what to name the channels we would be on (a channel is simply a space you can join or create for yourself in IRC. Think of it as a meeting room). To be honest, the rest of the planning for the IRC session was last minute - a reactive response to the reality of the layout of the presentation room at the Citadel Hotel and our desire for an lively interactive kind of presentation. Prior to the conference, I had just assumed the volunteer notetaker would just type in audience questions and then we would wait for Tanis to respond.

Bad idea. I began to realize that nothing would be MORE boring than waiting for someone else to type in what you just said and THEN waiting for a response. At that rate, being a participant would be as much fun as taking a trip to the dentist!

After a sleepless night (Jo and Scarlet can attest to this), it occurred to me that we really needed to use the Communications room - a room with 12 computers set up specifically for live Internet access. This would give women direct access to Tanis and the ability to ask her their questions, themselves.

The session itself, "“NetWorking Women with Disabilities", went rather smoothly. We started with everyone sitting in rows facing the front of the room. All the computers in the Communications room sat in IRC while the first speaker, Pat Israel, gave her portion of presentation, "Expanding Networks", live at the conference.

We had set logs to keep track of the IRC session which was to follow Pat, so the magic fingers of our notetaker, Sheryl Hamilton, took advantage of this to type the entire portion of Pat’s presentation into IRC, thereby allowing Tanis and the other women in IRC to be included in the entire session. Behind Pat, a large screen showed everyone in the room what Sheryl was typing, providing a closed captioning service for any hearing impaired participants.

After Pat spoke and answered questions, we proceeded to show everyone Tanis’s video and let everyone in IRC know where they, too, could view it.

Then the fun began! Women took to IRC as naturally as they would take to email. Once it’s set up, IRC is fairly simple to use: type in your message and press . Those who had volunteered to help me with this project stood nearby to offer help to anyone who needed it. Few did. The only help anyone seemed to want was for me to slow the session down a little because everyone had so much to say! It seemed to be the so called “quiet ones” who got the most involved.

Is IRC a completely inclusive application? No. But in our little corner of the world and in our little session of the conference, it made a big difference.

Part 2 by Tanis Doe

The important thing, I tell myself, is that it got done.

Not that the quality is “unimportant” but the fact that it finally got done, sent, presented and seen outweighs the difficulties in producing it. Those are my immediate thoughts on the production of this multimedia presentation about the Internet and access for disabled women. I am going to review some of the issues around creating it, the actual presentation and some ideas on allies.

Creating

Like most people who present in public I like to have something written out ahead of time. So before I had even decided if I could attend the Internet conference in Ottawa, I drafted some content. When it was finally decided that the trip was not feasible (due to time conflicts as a mother and another pre-scheduled trip to California for a different conference) I already had a rough draft ready. Before I even began the process of video taping my presentation I put the text into a basic HTML layout by copying an accessible Web site. How is this done? I went to a WEBABLE site — very popular disability-related site that is browsable for people using a screen reader and copied the page in SOURCE. Once I opened it in a simple text format, I simply replaced all of its main text with my text and replaced its links with mine. With this done I proceeded to my friend Turtle’s house with the printed version and a highlighter pen ready to video tape the presentation.

I originally wanted to just use me signing the text with a few Power Point slides inserted to the video. When I mentioned Power Point my friend said, we could do virtually the same thing with MacroMedia Director as well as editing the video digitally. Of course this was the ultimate tech-candy for me. After approximately 25 minutes of videotaping me signing, making mistakes, re-doing the script and finally just giving up, we fed the videotaped signing images into the computer so it would be digitalized. After a few minutes of doing this the computer crashed. Froze. Stopped working. We re-booted and tried again. Three days later the problem had not been solved and we were running out of time. The computer had run out of memory.

Within the week my friend bought a new hard drive (second internal) and we were up and running again. He convinced me he was planning to buy a new one anyway. It took us about seven hours total to edit 11 minutes of video tape, including putting in other slides and text. When all the techie stuff had been done, including some screen captures of my web site and few other sample web sites and we had done some demonstrations on video, done the title pages and transitions, we were ready to output. The computer to videotape transfer didn’t work. After failed attempts to produce something using a Zip drive, a CD Rom burner and a new cable, my friend got a new video board and a video was born.

When we saw the video for the first time on a TV, the day we had to courier it, we were both embarrassed. The quality on TV was far worse than it had been on the two by two inch preview box on the computer. The lighting was bad, the signing was jerky and the transitions almost nauseating. “Just send it,” I screamed. “We cannot go back to the computer to fix it.” The streamed version from the Internet was worse. Although the sound seemed to be fine, all my deaf friends would have been lost because each 8th frame of signing was compressed. I told myself, defensively, “well, it got done.” And in time for the conference.

The Presentation

I was amazed at the speed of the simultaneous typing of Pat Israel’s “Networking Women with Disabilities” presentation that was done online while the IRC participants waited for the chat to begin. I think the practical demonstration of the power of the Internet and live chat has more importance than the content of our discussion. It is so powerful to show women what can be done with the technology so they can go home and do it.

I want to point out the importance of collaboration and allies. For me, if it had not been for my friend, Turtle, and his friends, and friends of his friends, this video would not have happened. If it had not been for Lisa and Dave and Jo and Scarlet, it would not have ever been seen by the public. One of the internet’s greatest powers is the ability to connect people. My friendship with Turtle, who is a non disabled man who can sign and knows computers inside and out, helped make this presentation possible. His skills, his computer and his willingness to spend time doing this work made all the difference to me. Through email collaboration, and not one single snail mail or phone call or fax, I was able to coordinate with Lisa, Dave and Womenspace. I think that is amazing. I think it’s important that we don’t isolate ourselves. We need to use our technology to reach out to people and connect and share resources. The presentation could have been given live with far less technical effort and collaboration — and it would have been too easy. We learned more from doing it this way, and now I know more people than I did before. I have more knowledge and Turtle has more memory!

Email me at: ud944@freenet.victoria.bc.ca
URL:www3.bc.sympatico.ca/inclusion/workshop.html

WebABLE!
www.webable.com/webable/index.html

Accessibility Design Tips
www.webable.com/aboutsite.html

| Top | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 6 |
Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Home |