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Re: Accessible Webinar / Meeting products?

for

From: Mike Bicknell
Date: Dec 17, 2014 1:19PM

A couple of years ago I tested Accessible Events, but found it didn¹t work
for Macs. I¹m curious if that has changed.

WSSB uses Microsoft Lync which is now included in Office 365 and free to
Education. A few years ago, the Lync accessibility team came down to our
campus for a week to make notes, ask questions, and to videotape. You can
use a refreshable braille display with Lync. We use it to teach our
distance learning math classes and it works fine. We even had a student
download the Lync iPhone app and use it while in Hawaii on vacation. We
are also beginning to use Lync for web meetings with professionals. The
person who started the meeting can also record sessions and manage the
videos themselves. The scheduler integrates with Outlook if that is a
benefit.

One problem Lync has is that there is no live captioning component as with
Adobe Connect. One way to resolve this is to use a third party captioning
company, who sets up a web page for the streaming captions. The third
party captions typically need lots of cleanup, so for archived videos I
don¹t prefer to keep the captions that are embedded in Adobe Connect
anyway. With any third party captioner you will get the transcript which
can be edited along with the video and create separate caption files from
that text.

Another difficulty with Lync for some presenters can be the complexity of
the settings and preferences, though these are mercifully hidden from view.

My apologies for the length. I hope this helps.

Mike

‹

Mike Bicknell
Digital Learning, Research, and Development Coordinator
Chief Information Officer
Washington State School for the Blind
360-696-6321, ext. 133
http://www.wssb.wa.gov





On 12/17/14, 11:10 AM, "Tim Harshbarger"
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>What about "Accessible Event" by SeroTek?
>
>http://www.serotek.com/accessibleevent
>
>
>It has been some time since I used it but when I did, it seemed to work
>well using a screen reader--and the presentation materials in the browser
>window seemed accessible. I gather it can integrate with other online
>conferencing products, but I don't know much more about it other than
>from the few times I did use it.
>
>