Access Technology for Audio Description & Captioning: Supporting an Accessible Arts Programme

uh good afternoon everyone uh thank you for joining us for uh this webinar um which is um access technology uh for audio description and captioning and my name is Paul rickton I'm executive director of arts and disability Ireland arts and disability Ireland for those of you who don't know is the national development and resource Organization for arts and disability in the Republic of Ireland we say we Champion the creativity of artists with disabilities and promote inclusive experiences for audiences with disabilities and that we do in partnership with the art sector primarily here in in Ireland um so today's uh webinar is about access technology for audio description and captioning I suppose one thing I do need to say the outset that we have three um uh organizations or companies who sell equipment and they you know in in their field they they are leaders in their field but thereby not the only ones who provide the these services or variations of these services but what we wanted to try and do we're always getting questions at ADI about what equipment should we buy who should we talk to what should we look for and we thought actually a starting point would be to to start to get some of the people who uh who who sell the equipment into this conversation so you uh as attendees could get to hear what they have to say and talked to them and ask questions about what it is that they do but being mindful that there are others and there are more access services and if for example anybody on this webinar today has an idea for another service you'd like us to feature in the future and maybe have on a future webinar uh we'd be delighted to receive feedback from you but with that I am going to hand over to my colleague Adrian Caldwell who is arts and disability Ireland's access and training officer to kind of introduce our speakers and to MC our afternoon uh Adrian over to you thanks very much Paul Rick and so hi everybody thank you for attending today's webinar as part mentioned my name is Adrian Caldwell and I am the access and training officer with arts and disability Ireland just a couple of quick things this session is being recorded and interpreting is being provided by Bridge interpreting we have also captioning available from my clear text I'm just going to pop into the chat and an external link to access the captioning transcript and so that should be in the chat now so just to start things off I'm going to give a very brief introduction to each speaker and then hand it over to them each speaker will be will present for about 15 minutes each and then I will let uh each student know when they are coming up to time I'll give about a two minute warning so if everyone's okay to go we'll get started so our first speaker for today is Tim Brown who is the managing director of Apple sound limited Tim has over four Decades of experience in professional sound system rental and Commercial installation and today Tim will be speaking about audio description technology and an Arts context so Tim I'll just Spotlight you I'll hand it over to you thanks Adrian very much good afternoon um so what I'm going to do is is run through a brief set of slides and have a chat really about audio description technology um and if I can do that now for you aging can confirm yeah you've got ice cream Okay so what we're going to do is really um audio description we're going to cover sort of generally theaters galleries museums and the like um and what I'm going to do is briefly just give an overview of what's needed the current technology is available and an indication of cost uh just to give you something to work with so in a system um these are the main components you're going to need obviously a describer a microphone for describer a transmission system of some kind and receivers for the audience members for a describer if you don't already have access to them that's something that obviously ADI can help you with once you've got your describer a few things that we suggest you consider you consider ask the describer about their own preferences how they like to work in your Venue if they are indeed familiar with your Venue um where do they want to be seated where is it practical how are they going to see and of course hear the performance and uh depending on where they're going to be seated will you need to provide them with show relay so they can hear the performance sound they might have a preference for head-one microphone or indeed a handheld microphone these are the kind of things just chat through the practicalities of what they're going to do and deliver um one thing if you describe is going to be positioned in the audience space uh be mindful that the describer's voice might well be overheard by audience members and you can decide whether or not you'll need to take any action to sort of mitigate that the next part of your system would be some form of transmission the describer the microphone is normally connected to by cable to the transmitter and you'll need to consider the distance from the describer to the listening audience members um there's obviously a transmission range factor to consider so that you can plan uh the most appropriate solution you may need to reposition things if necessary then we need to think of our audience members so they're going to have a receiver of some kind and then they're going to need a headphone to listen to it there's a choice of headphones to make um anything from a simple earpiece um that sits on an ear over ear headphones that allow the Ambient sound to be heard as well and then a range of semi-closed or completely enclosed headphones so the ears are completely enclosed and you'll hear exclusively then the audio description so at that point you might want to think about the audience members experience for the performance do they need to primarily hear the audio description will the Ambient sound be enough for them to hear the performance it's worth doing a test in space if you if you can do in advance you might want to consider potentially putting the performance sound into enclosed headphones as well so that the audience member can hear both live sound and the description and there's ways of controlling that current Technologies uh there's really only three general ones at the moment infrared been around for a long time uses LED panels to emit infrared light to the receivers um it's less common um less commonly used for audio description particularly then we have radio frequency technology where we've got a radio transmitter to broadcast to the receivers and then obviously um the next and relatively newcomer to the scene is audio over Wi-Fi and that's where technology uses the existing venues Wi-Fi network to broadcast audio uh typically to members smartphones for personal listening so the first option we've got I'm going to talk about a product called uh listen talk so this is product related it's really if you think of a traditional tour guide system that you'd be familiar with at a tourist attraction or a museum and this is really reworking applying some uh improvements in new technologies to allow it to be used for multi a multitude of other purposes like audio description um so for bigger venues above 500 seats you might need to just do a range test to make sure everything's fine for your particular venue so it's small very configurable um key thing is usage technology so you don't need to worry about Wireless interference to other things or into it which means it's easier to just walk in and use it to venue the um receive a choice you've got and for the listeners on the right hand side of the screen there one with the display one without focusing on the one without um so that's extremely simple nice plain package um you've only got a push button for on off and then a volume up and a volume down button that's it so uh perfect for for this type of application you'll need some form of charging for it or Transportation cases uh various options are available the system can be used in a completely portable sense um very easy to configure but there is a Windows configuration configuration software available if you if you wish to use that the other system is listen Wi-Fi so listen Wi-Fi here this is where we use um the venue's Wi-Fi network if it's existing to transmit the audio to the listeners it's very simple to use um the component parts we've got an audio source which in this case is the describer uh there would be a an audio input device of some kind that will then be connected to the listen Wi-Fi server and then that provides the link and puts the audio into the Wi-Fi network Now The Listener will either use a smartphone or other device um you know a laptop or a tablet for example that's got an audio output so they can hear it then they run a free to download app and then listen using their own choice of headphones so if they're using a smartphone device they can download an app they need to do this either at the venue or before coming so it's something you need to be wary of once they've done that it's free to use Etc uh doesn't require internet access it just uses a uh your Wi-Fi network in bigger venues it can be used for other things as well not just audio description so it could be used for assisted listening and for many other places where there's audio you want to distribute to listeners but you don't want to use loudspeakers in the spaces so it could be a gallery or a museum or if you wanted for example if you had a theater situation front of house you could have audio there and separate audio when you move into the venue one difference with listened Wi-Fi is great you can use an app but that's not necessarily friendly for everybody um so they've introduced a dedicated receiver so here very similar to the receivers I've spoken to about uh earlier on a nice simple device does have a display but that can be disabled um so then it would work in the same way as the tour guide style system very basic and it would just have volume up volume down on off but it could the same device can then be used for other purposes where you want to get audio into different spaces and that's really where uh listen Wi-Fi starts to come into its own right one before the end so here we've got some sort of a visual scenario the very different spaces but if you can imagine a multi-purpose venue you might have a gallery space or a museum you may have some a separate venue where you know you've got a lecture going on you might have a bar area front of house for example where you might have show reels running Advanced adverts of upcoming shows that kind of thing um and then on the bottom right we've got a sort of main foyer area so here let's with listen Wi-Fi um if you want you know if you have multiple spaces you can deliver uh the the audio via the listen wi-fi system direct to people's smart devices all the provided receiver and either The Listener can choose what audio they want to listen to either using the app which you can which you have complete control over what's on the display so you could choose the room that you're in for example or particular content um that you can see um and that would then bring the audio to you as a listener uh same on the device the display can be used to up down select uh audio in different spaces or different content within different spaces so you could have a multiple screen scenario as you can see in the bottom one of the more interesting opportunities for using listen Wi-Fi is to get local location based sound and provide automation to the audio experience so in in one uh potential uh scenario you could issue um a dedicated receiver to a particular listener who wants to put here audio description content you could issue to them the receiver at front of house and when they're in that area using this particular technology and one of the accessories that comes becomes available um that audio would be automatically triggered for front of house so in my hero welcome announcement for example how to use the system as they move around the venue but then as the person moves from space to space the audio can be automatically triggered to deliver the appropriate audio to them within the space that they are located so they don't have to do anything as far as being a listener they can just put the receiver onto them or carry on a neckline yard plug in their audio choice of headphones and off they go so from Pronto house you might go through to the bar area and the audio would then transfer to Bar sound for example if there was a screen on for example or a pop-up performer in that area but then if you went into a gallery space as you go into the gallery a trigger would then select the appropriate audio for you making the assumption that you're wanting to hear the audio description track at the moment as you enter that space you would then get an audio described audio feed for that particular area and so on but it allows you to do it deliver that audio for audio description for General sound so you can use it as an alternative to loudspeakers and it can be provided in different languages for example or if it was for adults and children you could have different audio channels appropriate to The Listener so it opens up a whole sort of world of possibilities such as an overall venue solution for delivering sound that provides the sort of the right audio in the right place at the right time that's specific to the particular listener a couple of other things just to note just to think about the sort of the management of having kit so you choose the appropriate Hardware solution for your Venue obviously somebody like us can help advise you with that um and a few things just to remember you you need a way of managing a front of house handing out the devices if there is a device to hand out uh most importantly how you're going to get those devices back um there'll be some cleaning and sanitizing uh required um and recharging if the devices are rechargeable they'll need recharging before issue the next time so that's sort of the the general pointers at the moment um so to recap um it's a tour guide style system radio transmission can be completely portable um or it can be used in a main venue and then we've got audio over Wi-Fi which can do smartphone technology or a dedicated audio receiver so those are the the two main um sort of delivery mechanisms for for audio description that we provide um and that brings me to the end so I've managed to do it within 15 minutes which is an achievement for me um and if there were any questions they're going to come at the end as far as I am aware Adrian yes thanks very much Tim and yeah almost 15 minutes on the dot so thanks very much for that if you can start sharing like a fresh stop stop share yeah great there we go thank you so much Tim no problem we'll move on to um our next speaker if that's okay so again thanks to him uh and just to remind everyone that contact information and links um on all speakers will be circulated to attendees afterwards so our next speaker is Roger Beaumont who is the owner of digital four which is the market leader in systems that deliver prepared or Live tech support for audiences and today Roger will be speaking about prepared text for theater and Live Events so I'll just Spotlight Roger and if you're happy to go and you can take it away thanks Roger well I shall do my best to uh follow that okay so Roger uh I own a company called Digital four but I've been involved in the supply of captioning for uh uh Cloud audience of deaf deaf and the hard of hearing for about 20 years in a number of guises um I was part of the original in the UK I think all the Sea of voice project which was Arts Council funded uh and I supplied originally 50 caption units and a software application via charity which some of you may have heard of called stage text and we created a series of captioning hubs where we placed LED displays single color amber LED displays in groups around the UK we then trained captioners to on the software that we wrote with Stage text in order to import text into that software and then display it in theaters in what is called verbatim captioning okay now without getting too dry we'll do a couple of definitions but verbatim captioning is essentially the process of converting kind of every spoken word in a show into formatted text and then displaying it in the venue in a way that is fully accessible to deaf deaf and hard of Port hearing audience members so every word that is spoken that will get will go on the screen and every sound effect will be described as will music uh be described and in order to make this work well you effectively have to have a live captioner not exclusively and we'll come on to that a bit later but um certainly when we started 20 years ago we had a trade captioner who would import the text put all the character names in make descriptions of music and sound effects and would then export that onto an LED display uh and it would synchronize the output as the actor spoke and the industry standard that we created was three lines of text on a display and the bottom line would synchronize with the ACT to speaking so were anybody foolish enough to ask me to play Prospero it would go I have done nothing but in care of the the my dear one thee my daughter who are ignorance of what they are Etc and it's the bottom line that synchronizes with the actor and that's how we started about 20 years ago with Stage tax uh when I supplied the screens and I met Peter Pullen the founder of stage text of Mervin his partner who introduced captioning into the UK from the states and so I've had a long association with Stage text Charity originally as a supplier than in their foolishness they asked me to be their technical director and I was their technical director for four or five years I was still running um Digital four but we subcontracted so if you like technical direction to Stage text so that's the kind of brief little bit of history of it and Stage that's very much being an Open Access organizations so what do I mean by Open Access well generally open access is where one of our client audience can sit hopefully anywhere on a theater and that access is made available to them normally on LED displays but we'll come a lot to different types of display Technologies because we use them anymore now but open access is important because it's you can sit anywhere in the theater and gain access to captioning be that on LED display be that on projector however that's delivered and one of the important things about Open Access is that our clients do not need to declare in order to take advantage of the access okay now in the UK there's probably about 12 million people that have some kind of hearing loss there's probably 80 to 100 000 people that have BSL as a language if you like so there's a lot of people with lots of degrees of hearing loss who can take advantage of captioning from profoundly deaf people to older gentlemen like myself who are maybe losing their upper register so if I go and see one of the shows that I'm captioning I am likely to look at the caption Unit 10 12 times during the performance because of things that I'll miss particularly for me in the upper register so I think it's it's important to remember that captioning offers a service to a massively wide range of people with some kind of hearing impediment or hearing loss if you like you know it's easy to imagine that we think people being deaf and we think of everybody being profoundly deaf and that's you know not the case and not the case in Access and it's just kind of important to remember that so we can deliver Open Access in a variety of ways we can take our text we can put it on LED displays we can take our text we can output it via projector we should take our text and we can put it onto LCD displays okay we now have a wide range of LED displays of different sizes so that we can deal with Studio theaters mid-size theaters large theaters we can output Open Access onto video walls using our software so there's lots of things we can do in terms of open access now there's also then closed access and what we mean by closed access is that that is captioning access that is delivered on a personal device now commonly that would be something like an iPad or an Android tablet okay where a bit like uh audio description it can be delivered locally via the theater's Wi-Fi from uh wirelessly from our captioning laptop and the text will be delivered again in that format of three lines of text scrolling up onto a personal display device a tablet which may be provided by the venue which is my favorite right but there we go it can also though be we also have an app apps on Apple and and Android uh that you can download on a personal device to wirelessly receive captions and we can also now output to Smart caption glasses so I was also heavily involved in a project called caption queue when I was at stage text which was the precursor of the automatic output to Smart caption glasses at the National Theater that was undertaken we undertook digital for under took that work it was grant that he did from a Nestor fund uh and we were doing two things we are exploring automatic output and output onto smart caption glasses but mainly actually automatic output so that live captioning could become more ubiquitous because a lot of all this sadly is uh about money if you win for the best practice you need a live captioner a trained live captioner so by the time you pay them maybe 600 pounds now 650 pounds possibly to prepare an output file for you and then you hire in screens it can be that a show for single show could now cost you about a thousand pounds but the the difficulty is if you're a trained captioner and it's your living and you're charging 600 pounds to make a show and you'll say doing I don't know 50 shows a year I mean you're going to make 30 000 pounds if you physically could do that number of shows which I imagine would be quite stressful and and not possible so I've played much things in life quality access is not necessarily uh cheap to deliver so we have open access on display everyone can see closed access onto devices and lots and lots of different devices now as I said personal devices tablets smart caption glasses projectors uh LED displays video walls yeah and so the smart bit in a way is um what's happening in the software and that's where things are now getting quite exciting uh we've moved on uh we now can do multi-stream output so presently I've been doing a lot of projects recently where from a single laptop we're creating text bilingually so we're having one output screen say in English and one output stream in Welsh and from a single device we can simultaneously output captions or subtitles uh on one screen in English and the other screen in Welsh similarly we could do that to a personal display device and give our clients a choice of what language that they wish to receive the captions in okay without taking the Thunder of the audio describers because we now offer multi-stream output it's also possible to if you like pre-record MP3 say of audio description and we can have those as part of an output Stream So quite recently I did a tour in the UK have a wonderful show called The Village Idiot which was made as part of a ransom the Moon project rants on the Moon being theater made by a group of theaters in the UK specifically to be inclusive of people of disability so we had deaf actors and BSL in the middle of it but on this show we had one output stream of captions one output streams of pre-recorded audio description from the single source so that every show was captioned and every show had audio description from one operator and that operator was trained specifically to operate so there's lots of lots of exciting things uh going on not least in in my view that with Stage decks we did were fantastically successful in my opinion in making sure that if you like every regional theater um was offering some access at some shows and and that was brilliant and wonderful and it's still the case we're still working with the RSC still working with the Nationals still working with National Theater of Scotland and again and in Ireland and in Northern Ireland uh at regional theater and about but what we're managing to do now is to make smaller screens cheaper licenses and offer if you like in-house training facilities for theaters and smaller companies and smaller venues to create the captioner the in-house captioners if you like train themselves use our software with cheaper licenses and smaller displays and we're breaking through that barrier that sort of upward catalyzation of regional theater and above really successfully so this year um we're gonna we've got a project at the Edinburgh Festival where we're using mini caption units we're lodging four sets of communities with the head of refrige having a download Pages for companies to download the software themselves online training with some support from me on site and we're going to see if we can beat last year we managed to do over 200 shows at Edinburgh Festival this year we're going to try to do something like 600 and that's just a brilliant step forward because it means that we're working with the new companies the young companies who will be the future of captioning and and and the future of access long after I'm gone and they're dead and buried so it's it's really exciting the the other thing I will mention if I've got any time left is I've been largely talking about the date and captioning but there is also creative captioning which is incredibly important so the stage Dex model is if you like a bit of a parasitic model people make the shows and then we caption it creative captioning is where we were involved at the start of the production process and with the designers with the theater makers with the ensemble uh and that is becoming more and more uh important and more and more and done and more and more but again that's kind of dependent on us training people in-house so that so that captioning creative captioning becomes part of the creative process of the show so we did again a lovely show lovely version of March to do about nothing where because we were working with the designer we kind of built a video War into the set and we had other units around and we were able to chase the captions around the set and integrate it as a full and proper part of the performance just just as very excitingly I've been working with uh companies where we're integrating the BSL into the performance as opposed to it sitting on the outside of the stage so it's just a delight to work within BSL interpreters and captioning it at the same time and hopefully audio describes at the same time so we make some shows which are fully accessible not part of the creative process as well as maintaining the the service where we if you like post-production uh access um I'm sure I've forgotten lots of stuff and I'm sure that I haven't worked hard enough at selling you stuff but it's a very exciting time in cashning you know a a a very exciting time in Access with everything kind of breaking down we're now busy access we're now working with companies who make Refugee theater where we're outputting in Syrian and English uh Syrian or monster in English on the other I've got a Korean show again with with uh with with refugees coming up next week I've been doing loads of work since the invasion of Ukraine doing captioning or is it subtitling is it access but does it matter if it's supporting performance or audience and at the same time keeping the conventions of of our base audiences of deaf deaf and in the hard of hearing so I think that must be close to 15 minutes I haven't really been keeping check but very close very excited husband no cigar as they say but I'm sure there's lots of questions that I'd be delighted to ah I'll take one minute just to I've elbowed my way into audio description in our software now my clear text who are doing this a great job have to say thank you very much they can output to a thing called stream tech or streamcast which means they're basically outputting onto a web page or an event live text now you know we can now open those events in our software so if you were in a theater doing a post show discussion and you wanted that to post show discussion to be live subtitled you could employ my clear text as to create a remote event oh remote event output onto that event send them a zoom audio they can Tip Tap your way into the web page we can open that in our software and it will go to be displayed on any of the display technologies that that attach to our software so the 15 minutes questions thanks so much Roger we'll leave them you will leave questions to the end if that's okay but thanks okay thank you just remove the spotlight and thanks very much again Roger okay so our final speaker for today will be Oren McAllister from navilance and Oren is the client engagement officer at nabilens and is tasked with developing new relationships and sustaining established Partnerships with organizations and users of navilands around the world so I'm going to hand over to oroni to explain what Navi lens is I'll just Spotlight you so I'll hand over to you now wonderful good to go okay well um thank you Roger and Tim for putting extra pressure on me today now I was feeling quite calm and ready for uh speaking away and uh now I feel that there is definitely a lot of pressure now to uh to live up to that that prior um explanation from both of you about about your products and your your services um so anyway uh yes as uh Adrian has said my name is Oren McAllister I I work in Navi lens and I'd like to just tell you a little bit about our technology just to give you a sort of a brief overview and a little bit of uh history of where we've come from uh where we are now and where we're hopefully going in the future um so just to give a brief overview what is Navi lens um many people may not have heard of it yet but for sure most of you pass it on a regular basis um but let me explain a little bit more about that uh initially uh or later sorry and initially tell you that Navi lands is an Innovative technology and which helps people who are blind or partially sighted to access information and navigate in unfamiliar uh situations unfamiliar surroundings so the idea for an ambulance came about from um a realization by our CEO that blind and visually impaired people are not autonomous in unfamiliar situations but traditional signage that is available to everyone per se is not actually accessible to them so Navi lens is actually the product of a startup company called new Systems Technology um is my very fancy Spanish um it was a company that originally worked a lot with large organizations helping them to resolve uh logistical problems so they would they would help them to uh just discover the problems and then also help them to solve those particular problems but our CEO from personal experience he always felt that he wanted to do something that benefited people a little bit more that actually had um more of a soul to it and that's when this idea came about about trying to help people who are blind or visually impaired um so the company decided that what they wanted to do was to try and find some way of helping people to access that same information not claiming to replace traditional signage but basically to be there to complement it and to help visually impaired people how get their independence back so to do this our navilance created a 2d colorful code which can be programmed to contain the same information as the signage and which is mobile application then reads to the users allowing them to be more independent in their daily lives now when the first uh when this problem was first addressed the original thought was well okay why don't we just use QR codes QR codes have become a staple now in everyday life in particular over the last few years I know that prior to to the pandemic I I had some awareness of of QR codes but um I think now we are definitely most of us anyway are very very familiar with with the power that they have but for someone who is visually impaired the QR codes don't work very well the issue with the QR code is that you need to know where the code is you need to be able to then frame the code and then you need to access the link to that information that is contained within the code so I know that I struggle myself accessing that information sometimes finding it uh that the little tab that you need to click on uh inside the camera so if I can have issues with that then we can understand that it can be extremely even more difficult for anyone who is site impaired so they realize then that without the ability to use the QR code they needed to develop a new type of code a code that could be uh could be read more easily that code that could be a little bit more powerful so a partnership is formed with the University of Alicante to try to create a new type of scannable code that could be read from further away and could be automatically detected by the camera of the mobile device so after five years of intense research and development the navi lens code was created so how does it work so by simply placing the navigance code in a particular location all the user needs to do is simply move the mobile device around and the application the Netherlands app will automatically detect any valid codes in the vicinity and once detected the app will then direct uh direct you to the code and then on arrival you will have automatic access to the information allocated to that code so that our codes are different because the codes can be detected at over 12 times the distance of a QR code they can also be detected at extreme angles So within a 160 degree range uh there's lightning fast detection and 0.03 seconds uh it's readable in all light conditions and it also provides the information in 36 different languages so the code was created the first thing to do in 2017 so six years ago the code was was finally created was to test out the code does it work in real life it worked in the labs it worked in in the trials but we needed to take it out so the first big test was that a Trade Fair in Madrid uh this was a Trade Fair run by the National Association of the blind here in Spain called onthe and uh it's one of their their biggest events of the year and basically all they had to do or all they did was place an ambulance code next to the names of each of the companies that had a stand at the Trade Fair and just even by placing those codes with the name of that company it completely changed that experience for all of the attendees who were blind or partially sighted I created a whole new experience uh many of the attendees were in shock that they were able to detect this information without having to rely on assistance to without relying on help to get people to provide that information for them there was also some way finding place in and around the Trade Fair as well so enabled people to be able to maneuver their way around without again that additional assistance uh the feedback was amazing there was a lot of positive feedback because people who generally were so dependent on others found this new level of Independence again that they they could do some things by themselves again So based on that feedback uh navilance then decided to approach um transportation Transportation was the initial hurdle that nebulance focused on um it's one of the most significant barriers for people who are blind or visually impaired and especially in order to go about their daily um activity go to work visit family so that wasn't actually the first step so one of our first pilot projects was in Barcelona on the bus system there and basically just by simply adding the navi lens code to the bus stop it not only made the bus stop visible to visually impaired people but also provided directional instructions on how to arrive to that bus stop safely and then on arrival you would automatically receive the real-time information for the next buses and their destination so the transport Authority in Barcelona was so impressed and received such great feedback from all of the trials that they did that they've now put Navi lens codes on all of their bus stops throughout the entire city of Barcelona as well as all of the Metro as well so naturally this created a bit of a buzz here in Spain um and the rest of Spain followed suit so Mercia Valencia Saragosa Alicante and now more recently Madrid Madrid are putting navilance codes on all 5 500 of their uh bus stops so again providing uh information as to where the bus stop is how to get there and then on arrival the real-time information of that bus stop they are doing so in uh the space of eight weeks so there is a quick turnaround on these on some of these projects so it definitely keeps us on our on our toes they're also working on Madrid on the Metro System there as well so they've currently completed line eight which links the airport to the center of Madrid where they have created a full implementation of navilance providing wayfinding assistance within the stations including tactile paving I and also assistance on helping to access information points and how to get assistance if and when uh is required so from Spain it has gradually started to grow to grow so we have been working in various cities around the world and one of the most recent um implementations that has uh restarted because this did start before the pandemic uh has been in New York city where the state of New York have been able to uh guarantee two million dollars of uh federal funds in order to amplify naviland's use across the city of New York and the state so this is all a starting process this is a big project but we are moving out into many many other locations Singapore Australia um Dubai Paris Los Angeles so the the list is endless and we continue to grow exponentially so although transport was incredibly important to us we also knew that the codes could work in in various other ways and this leads us on to the year 2020 when kello decided that they wanted to um to celebrate World sight Day by creating accessible packaging so they spoke to the rnib in the UK they wanted to put tactile um packaging but also Braille Packaging rail on their packaging and the rnab did point out to them that you know 30 of people can read Braille um with an aging population more and more um of our older Generations then this affects me personally and probably some of you also um my my parents have have sight problems um so learning Braille in your 70s and 80s is not an easy task so the RNA be put uh Kellogg's in contact with navilance and this is when our first project started with their first fully accessible packaging by placing Navi lens and having Braille in the packaging on Coco Pops so the feedback again on that was amazing there were a lot of people who were overwhelmed by this idea that they could go and even if it was on just only just one product they were still able to find that product unaided in a supermarket in an intimidating scenario so Kellogg's has since based on that have now placed Navi lens codes on all of their products um and they will be moving into some of their other sister products as well um so not only are we working with Kellogg's but a number of other organizations as well such as Proctor and Gamble's Brands uh panten aerial uh Lenore um oh dear I'm gonna forget things now but there are a variety of of products and there will be more products coming out again this year and besties for anyone who's familiar with uh Frozen Foods uh we also worked on a campaign with Coca-Cola at Christmas and we um are working on a number of global brands also and are in conversations with quite a number uh who are very interested in making their products more accessible so not only have we seen product uh accessibility and transport but we're also now seeing a wide variety of interest and uses of navilance in many locations such as universities schools offices uh line of vision impaired associations even now with Parks music festivals Museums Art Galleries Health Centers campsites uh theater is a particular interest of my own because I love theater and it would be a very personal um and enjoyable experience for me to be able to work with uh within that industry and I was part of my role I communicate directly with many of our users of our technology people who are blind or visually impaired whose lives have been changed by using Navi lens this is a critical element of our continued development to ensure that we achieve the highest level of customer satisfaction and do not rest on our Laurels and we feel that we what we have that we don't feel what we have is enough we strive to improve and better the experience to suit all levels of sight loss one of the additional focuses so the the most important thing to us are the people that use our applications so the the blind the visually impaired people who um who rely on our technology and as such we always have a very Baseline Rule and that is that any users of our application should never ever ever pay to use or access these codes that would be on the responsibility of the the companies themselves but this is vital for us because we we understand that so many people uh with any kind of disability is living within certain uh restrictive means and we want to ensure that at the end of the day that they have access to this uh without any need to pay for that so downloading the applications are free and use of the applications is free we also want to ensure that when people scan the codes that they never need to provide any personal or private information privacy is of the utmost importance to us at Navi lens and we never ask any of our users to provide any personal details there is one case where we do but that is only in order to provide them with an additional service um and this leads me on to my next point in that is vitally important for us to allow people to be able to access our codes and to be able to use them on a personal level and as such we provide free access to navilance codes through our application so just by downloading the navilance app you can access these free codes and they come in a variety of sizes that people can print off um and that they can use at home to to uh for one of a better word to Navi lens yeah I'm afraid we have turned it into a verb um so we we allow them to to Navi lands parts of their home um so people use them on such objects such as luggage putting it on spices with the Netherlands codes can be that small on uh tea coffee sugar Frozen produce um as many people who are blind or visually impaired know when you freeze something it tends to lose its smell so um it it is very handy to be able to put these codes uh on any any product any item even on your your Roomba I'm not sure what what it's called in Ireland I think it's a robotic vacuum cleaner which can sometimes run out of power while it's out and about um just by putting an Avi lens code on that means that you can find it if it runs out of battery charge uh the remote control one particular user uh tells me that she loves to put one of these codes onto her remote control because her husband never puts it back in the correct place so there are so many different uses for these codes for labeling clothing but basically any uses that anybody can find in order to help access information on and things that people use on a day-to-day basis um I will run right through this very quickly so and then you can also sign up to access 1000 of these free codes so basically you can navigate anywhere um two more things one of the other things is that we do provide free Navy lens kits um these kits can be used by schools associations and also by medical and health centers where these are pre-programmed codes any of these locations can use these codes print them out and use them to indicate common areas and common objects in and around their facilities um and then one last thing before I'm kicked off uh which I'm sure you wouldn't do that Adrian but we just want to say that inclusivity is incredibly important to us so a lower main focus is to assist blind and visually impaired people it is crucial that everyone can use our technology as such we have two applications so we have Navi lens which provides audible information for people with sight loss and then we have navilance go which is the sister app which functions for everyone else navalen's goal can be used to provide information for people with low vision so providing larger text cognitive difficulties to simplified um easy to read text and also uh pictograms also for Deaf users so you can upload sign language videos to these codes um and can also help people with Mobility Problems by creating accessible routes uh also for children content for kids so suitable content and educational content for children and again the it can also help with language barriers so the the information can be provided automatically translated into up to 36 uh different languages um I'm going to stop talking now and answer any questions that you may have at the at the end all right thank you so much for your time that's great thanks so much Aaron I'll just remove this spotlights and okay thanks very much Oren and thanks again to all our speakers today just a reminder that the session is being recorded and will be available on the Arts and disability website so if there's anything that you want to watch back it will be available to do so and we will be posting all the relevant contact information for each speaker and we have some time there for a Q and A just with uh each of the each of today's speakers so if you want to put that in the Q a function that would be grace and park did you want to say something yeah just by way of a little bit of context to add in there for on um the first time I saw Nabi lens being used was um with the deluxman down in Cork uh and this just in terms of our colleagues from Galleries and museums it might be an additional context that people find useful so essentially um uh Ty Crowley who's one of the curators down at the Delux Manning at UCC in Cork he uh trained with ADI as an audio describer a few years ago and essentially last summer for an actual exhibition called fashion show at the luxman they created a series of written texts which when when in when you sorry written text and he then also created some audio descriptions which she which were audio files and depending on where the and which codes were positioned by the artworks at the exhibition fashion show as you worked your way around the gallery uh you were given uh if they were short pieces of text they were it was a synthesized Voice through the navi lens app and if it was uh his audio description you got this gorgeous cork accent delivering uh all the visuals uh uh all of the the different exhibits so just to I suppose just by way of context to explain that you know the system as Oren said started on really big scale from a transport point of view but has now got adopted in loads of different ways and is very very flexible um and and therefore for something like audio description whether it is pre-recorded audio tracks or uh pieces of text uh you know that are synthesized you can or or both you know you can have a quite a rich experience in terms of moving through uh the gallery space with audio description and I just wanted to add that in as an example and also uh you know just to give a bit of a shout out to uh uh to to the deluxe man who have used the the system uh so back to you Adrian and support um the spotlight again so just I have a question here for Oren if that's okay um add you to the spotlight so um I'm just going to read this out so if I understand Navi lens correctly people need an app to people need an app by navilance for it to work most smoothly however if we use Navi lenses but Gallery visitors don't have the app does the code work in the same way as a QR code where visitors are still directed to the content or will visitors be prompted to download the app for it to work I'm just thinking in situations where visitors might not want to download an app in that moment to access the contents yes okay so of course naturally with it being such a new a new type of technology I mean QR codes have been around for 29 years um so they've actually been around for quite some time so I think it was a natural progression for smartphones to automatic because they were being used everywhere particularly um during the pandemic although I think the the camera the phone cameras could could detect them before then uh so that was a natural progression it is something that we're trying to work on but that will come with more awareness where we will be able to be recognized directly through the phone camera itself so for the moment the application is required in order to access that specific information that is being linked to those codes now we have in the meantime come up with a little bit of a cheat as you can imagine which is a dual app clip so this is an app clip which isn't in effect a QR code that we're now using uh with most of our Navi lens codes to enable anybody who is not familiar with navilance to be able to access that information now with Navi lens go what the QR code when scanned along with the navylance code will do it will actually open up Navi lens go without having to download the application so you can actually access that information without necessarily having to download the application itself but because of the the needs from within the Navy lens app so providing audible information uh providing the 360 wayfinding uh providing all of the additional facilities um you would need the application for the moment until we can we can convince Apple and Google and all of these different companies to to make navylance codes accessible directly through the camera um it would be required um so yes it's just a little bit more complicated with the navilance application itself you would be required to to download that and I I understand that not everyone does want to download it but this is also a conversation I've had with other companies who are also developing systems where they can actually for example at a university um that is that has its own University go application and they don't want their students downloading uh millions of other applications so what they've actually developed is a way that they can jump out of the University application jump into Naval and scan the code and jump back in again I'm making it very very basic I'm sure there's a lot of technical detail there but it's basically a system of having the application but not necessarily having to open it every time that using it in that way so we are constantly working on these things we do want to improve this experience but for the time being we do have that ability to at least access the application navalins go without downloading it but also being able to access the downloadable version of Navi lens okay great thanks Aaron um just gonna remove this spotlight and this might be a question for for Park um is there funding available to purchase access access Access Equipment God I thought you knew all the answers to that question yes there is and in fact we yourself and myself have been talking to various people about this uh uh so hold on a second yeah so essentially uh yes both capacity building funding that the Arts Council provide does allow for the purchase of of small to medium-sized kind of capital devices and equipment and also the department of uh culture um also have their own new funding scheme which only opened uh last week which will allow which is a pilot uh access funding that's going to run for the next uh three years I think it is called stream e uh so uh yeah there there is funding available and uh you know one of I suppose one of the tricky areas about getting funding is that some funding schemes do require uh three quotes and actually sometimes getting three quotes very [Music] um for every piece of equipment you want to buy and in such specialist areas are a unique areas sometimes can be a bit tricky and I'm just going to put in a link to the information on the cultural capital scheme stream e in the chats if anyone else has any other questions please put them into the Q a can I ask a question actually a bold question let's talk about money Lads uh how much and I think we can just go around on the three of you uh you know uh Tim you spoke first kind of what just in terms of you know in very general and I don't want to hold you to quotes it it's more to get a general sense in terms of from you know uh portable uh radio transmission receiving uh set up through to a Wi-Fi setup for audio description um Maybe I suspect that the one that you showed where you can have multiple functionality within a a whole venue is probably quite bespoke but what sort of uh costs are you talking about yeah sure um unfortunately I was there but they were actually in my slideshow but whilst I've been creating it I'd hidden them so um they didn't show I thought I was officially impaired and couldn't see I'm sorry no you weren't no you weren't uh so my error um if uh if I can I can do that and I don't know whether if Adrian can share that can you see my screen there yeah you can see your screen right so this is what I was going to show so very quickly um entry level um one describer three receivers completely portable so recharge it put it in the Zippy page and off you go uh so that's the way to start uh 1 641 pounds uh for that um next uh this is just a second example of a system if you have a cased system the 16 charging slots describe a kit and then receivers for 15 listeners with headphones um and there's 5202 and obviously these are pound sterling um Wi-Fi entry level um is a two channel server so this presumes you have an existing Wi-Fi network that you can connect this to uh all you will need and in many cases it is plug and play um is just to plug this in 209 pounds that then will deliver the content to the app available on Android and iPhones and then if you want to have receivers you can just purchase receivers much in the same way as the listen talk system and provide receivers a front of house for visitors so that's the sort of two um two systems and some examples to give you some of the costs right okay that's great and Roger uh over to you because you you've spoken about small screens and uh you know right up to to the types of screens that we would use in the Abbey and I'm just curious about your small you know about the range in terms of cost of screens and packages because a lot of our venues uh very similar to the regional and and smaller venues that you spoke of you know are anything from yes we have some venues that are over 2 000 seats but the majority of our venues I I'm I'm being very general here are more likely to be 400 to 100 seats uh so kind of what sort of is the range of let's say set up for you know that 400 seater venue maybe down to the 100 seater okay well you can sort of divide this up into I don't know hardware and software really and and then open and closed captioning um so we go with uh closed captioning first so you can output onto an Android tablet and that could be something like I don't know the RSC of just buying some tablets from us uh they're having seven eight inch and 10 inch tablets and they're probably about 190 pound each to 250 pound each uh they're also buying some smart caption glasses I can tell you what they are they are the red the RRP or the SRP on those is a thousand and five pounds a pair right and that's just uh we're a trade supplier of those glasses and make a small margin on those at that so that's kind of closed captioning with uh Open Access um as I said we make different size screens with with the LEDs with two and a half mil four mil and five mil pitch they will range from 3 000 to about six and a half thousand uh is in Our intention in the next six months to introduce other range which are kind of robust second screen LED displays and they will range from about again the smallest probably about 2 000 up to well they could go into an opera house so that's just depending on the LEDs but but starting it two up we license the software and if you're a large venue it's 995 for the first year and then 395 onwards if you're a small venue it's 395 for the first year 195 onwards and for which you get the consultation software upgrades remote support uh blah blah but bearing in mind and this is true of everything that we are nothing without the P the captioners with no without captioners we have no content so you've either got to train your own captioners or pay captioners and similarly with audio describers you know without the content we are nothing basically um so that is a very real cost that needs to be thought about uh then you need laptops an

2023-08-02 15:50

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