Solving problems of inclusion and equalityAs per our previous post, we’re making a big effort to improve our finance systems at eQuality Time. As part of this, we’ve changed how we look at financial statements internally.
We believe in transparency at eQuality Time, so here’s our Current Balance Sheet. Once we’ve got a few more months of good practice under our belts we’ll move a set of them to our about page.
One of the cool parts of the Comic Relief bid that we won was that they ring fenced some money for us to spend on hiring a consultant to improve our policies and procedures.
This was really good, like everybody else we assume that we’re mostly on top of everything: accounts filed on time, thorought checking of expanse claims, keeping our spending under budget; but we intend to grow, and that means we’ll have to change how we work.
So we hired a consultant (you can see the process we went through on this public github issue) and he interviewed and reviewed and did a lot of good work. He’s produced a comprehensive report that you can look at here. It’s pretty bruising in places (there are 18 actions we need to take with Very High Priority) but it’s also correct and it’s work we need to do if we want to grow and really deliver for our users.
We’re going to be doing quite a bit of work on these actions over the next little while and, hopefully, when the consultant comes back to check on us in Spring, we’ll have moved a lot futher forward.
This Friday we’ll be updating the Open Voice Factory website. There WON’T be much of a change for users, but there will be quite a lot of back end changes that make life a bit easier for us to add new features.
The alteration WON’T affect any existing aids that have been generated, but it might mean that there is some downtime that prevents new aids from being created.
Our notes for the release are here. The short summary looks like this:
This should be the first of a series of releases over the next few weeks, you can find out more about our plans by look at our roadmap.
Our trustees work hard for eQuality Time and one of Joe’s main jobs is:
So, roughtly weekly, the trustees get a briefing of what’s happening with eQuality Time. I’d like to get to the point that these were also included on the website, but that’s a future goal. For now, here’s a sample of the sort of detail that gets sent over:
Dear Trustees,
content in yellow (1) I’m planning on doing and will do if there are no objections , content in red (1) is something I need a positive yes for (1) or only a trustee can do (1), everything else I think is non-crontroversial – I’ve tried to minimise colour-use as much as possible
I’m enjoying having a job, I’ve also had some conversations with both Comic Relief and XXXX about expanding the COO role using the Comic Relief project manager money. I’ll follow that thread and get a proper proposal together for you to view.
A project we are currently workshopping…
For UK residents looking for historical information, Wikipedia is invariably the go-to resource. The English Wikipedia alone has over 2.6 billion words, covering 4.4 million articles. There are many examples of extremely rich, detailed, beautifully illustrated historical articles.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia also suffers from a systemic bias of editors. The average Wikipedian on the English Wikipedia is male, technically inclined, formally educated, aged 15–35, and likely employed as a white-collar worker or enrolled as a student rather than employed as a blue-collar worker.
This has the result that articles of local heritage are massively underdeveloped or missing. Worse, the very people who are most passionate about local heritage are often inhibited by a lack of familiarity of technology, or inexperience with Wikipedia’s approaches.
We propose the Digital Local Heroes project. We’ll provide the space, training, and expertise for groups of people to work together to improve the coverage of their local heritage sites on Wikimedia projects. Their training will includes taking and uploading photos, drafting articles, producing sources, and all the skills that enable groups to make this difference to their local community.
Once users have been trained and have gained some experience in the use of Wikipedia, they will be much more confortable contributing outside of the project, making this an extremely sustainable approach.
As a form of ‘secondary gain’, we shall be focusing on those groups that are underrepresented on the Wikipedia Project, and groups that have much to gain from being involved. The Digital Local Heroes project allows jobseekers to gain, develop and demonstrate a range of important employability skills such as research, copyright law, sourcing, non-fiction writing, teamwork, and proofreading in addition to the obvious information technology skills. Moreover the Digital Local Heroes project allows older people to stay engaged digitally, and to continue to give to the local communities in a way that gives them pride.
Our theory of change can be download here, and has been reproduced below:
We’ve been working hard on the Essex Challenge Prize, and today we’ve done a fair amount of restructing of our online information about the project.
You can read about our plan, our progress, and how we are getting on by starting with this page on the eQuality Time wiki. That will link you to all of our subprojects, Dropbox Directories, and research.
We’re trying to make more use of this sort of structure. Blog posts and tweets are all very good for showing the sucesses of an organisation, but we really want to show the steps we take, the errors we make, and show the complete narrative – and for that sort of approach you really need to be using public issues and wiki pages. We hope you like reading about it!
Recently we’ve spent a lot of time bogged down in medical device registration for The Open Voice Factory.
As part of this we developed a risk assessment around the software – looking at the potential causes of harm (i.e. “What happens if there is a fire in the house and our software fails to help someone speak to emergency services?”). These sorts of documents are valuable but also pretty bruising – half the time you are making notes about features to add and test, and the other half of the time you are saying “We’d better make sure the documentation is clear that we don’t think that is a good idea”.
I wanted to share our first attempt more broadly (it’s already public because it’s on our public project board) because I think people might be interested, and I also think they might have some ideas for risks that we’ve missed out.
Please look at it here: OVF.risk.assessment.v0.2.
One of my ambitions with The Open Voice Factory is that we also make all the software tests public and easily understood (the first bit of that is easy, the second is hard) and then we can say “These are the risks we thought of, and the tests we wrote to check them, if you think of anything we’ve missed, let us know and we will add some tests”.
If we have a convincing enought test suite, then it also becomes possible to say: “If we don’t have a test for it, then you shouldn’t rely on it”.
After a short corraspondence with the wonderful Emma Colton, who writes the equaly wonderful The Happy Hearing Aid blog she sent us this amazing piece on the trials and troubles with dealing with TV subtitles. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
A few years ago, while still at University, I was a reality TV fiend. I couldn’t get enough of it. I would watch The Only Way is Essex (TOWIE), Made In Chelsea and Geordie Shore without fail. As I’ve gotten older, and more mature (I promise!!) I gave up these programmes for more pressing matters such as… getting my degree!
This year was all about trying new things and this meant I gave into my reality TV ban. I’d joined the rest of the world by watching Love Island. I had never watched a series before but, as most of my friends raved about how good it was, I thought I’d give it a go. I even went as far as to download the ITV Hub app in case I missed an episode.
Despite succumbing to the trend, I can proudly say I do not watch it religiously. I do need some down time though and therefore I attempt to watch it on ITV Hub online or on my phone app.
If you’re a regular reader of my blogs then you will know I struggle to watch TV without subtitles. I am so used to having them on the screen (much to my family’s annoyance) due to having lived with deaf people and I feel like it is a security blanket for me in case I mishear something as I often do when my ear infections returns.
So, let me set the scene: I’m snuggled up in bed with my cuddly toy that I’ve had since I was 2 (you’re never too old for your childhood teddies), with my PJs on and a soothing mint tea. I was all set to embark on the magical world that is trash TV and went online to choose the latest Love Island episode (I had missed it when it first aired).
The adverts were running and there was no option to turn on subtitles. I assumed as it’s just the adverts (not that that’s a good enough excuse) there were no subtitles as this is standard even at the cinema. I thought I’d just wait until the programme started.
Fast forward to 3 minutes and the opening titles have come on and and there are still no subtitles. In utter panic I turn to my phone and try to watch the episode on there. The same thing happened! There was just no option but to watch the programme without subtitles.
The mobile app and the website for ITV will only let you watch a show with subtitles once the episode is at least a day old, it is not ready straightaway. How is this useful to deaf people who want to be accessing programmes on ITV Catch Up? Why should anybody have to wait for subtitles if they need it? The fact a deaf person would have to wait until an episode is older than a day to get subtitles is OUTRAGEOUS!! I’ve been told in the past that some of my blogs can come across as angry… but…I am!
The whole point of Love Island is that it is on daily for you to see what the contestants have been up to on that day. This system that ITV have means people who rely on subtitles for access will always be one day behind everyone else which ironically reflects the perception of deaf people from the hearing world anyway. Deaf people are seen as behind mainstream children with language development, behind academically (even though deafness is not a learning disability) and behind on accessing information due to a delay from interpreters relaying information which is unavoidable.
In addition when the subtitles are working, they do not always match what is being said on the TV. Lots of things were missed out which means people relying on subtitles are not gaining full access to the show like a hearing person would.
Deaf educators and people who work in the deaf charity sector are working hard in trying to bridge the gap that deaf people face in a hearing world and society yet we are letting them and the deaf community down by removing something that is so easy to solve.
CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT.
As the proverb says ‘curiosity killed the cat’ – I could not help myself but to go onto BBC iPlayer and see what they were offering the deaf community.
The BBC iplayer service has very clear categories displayed ranging from films to documentaries and ‘signed’ to ‘audio description’ – finally some accessibility!
I wanted to try these out for myself and started to watch ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ from the ‘signed’ category – waiting for the signer to appear. Nothing happened. There were subtitles, but the whole point of the category is that there is British Sign Language being used for access.
People often say to me ‘Oh have you ever thought about being one of those sign language interpreters on TV who sign the news at 5am’? Everybody is aware of these irregular timings for interpreted programmes. It is a well known ‘joke’ in the hearing world and it shouldn’t be like this. I wish there was a TV remote that allowed you to press a button to activate a BSL interpreter. Who wants to join me in developing this and going on Dragons Den?
Not all deaf people have strong reading skills and the signing aspect on the programmes will allow people to access the show in their first language. This happened on three other programmes I had clicked on in this category. Some did have the intended signer, but it was not consistent at all.
During the World Cup the subtitles were very conveniently placed covering the score…
It meant that I had to turn them off to know what was going on score-wise. Being forced to turn the subtitles off means that deaf people are not accessing the commentary. We had waited four years for this – you would have thought someone would have realised placing them in this position was pointless!
Subtitles are a constant battle for the deaf community. There have been many recent petitions on this topic from access at the cinema to many complaints from the public on Netflix and how there are words missing from their subtitles. YouTube is an example of very poor subtitling as most of the time they are done through an automatic voice recognition system that mishears the words. I recently watched something where ‘keen’ came up as ‘key’. When you are hearing, you likely wouldn’t realise that this is wrong. As a deaf person, it is likely you would not be able to realise keen was the intended word. It is confusing and stressful. That deaf person would have to have a really strong understanding of English to realise it was not the intended work.
This needs to change, we need to have subtitles on programmes that are accurate, consistent and reliable. When will this become the reality?
I have previously written about subtitles in cinemas. To read more about this, please see: When going to the CinEMMA
In May we were shortlisted in the Essex Dementia Challenge Prize.
Nine shortlisted projects were give £5,000 each to develop an idea, with the idea that the best idea will receive £100,000 to take it to market.
Our idea is: use the resources we’ve developed for The Open Voice Factory (particularly CommuniKate) to create a communication board that helps with word-choice (which causes significant problems in many people with late-stage-dementia).
Our first draft of the board has now be put together (it’s missing some symbols and we’re reviewing the language based on a very deep dive on the research), but you can check it out here.
If you’d like to follow the project more closely – we’re updating this github issue with all progress.
Check out these amazing In-case-of-emergency (ICE) cards translated by volenteers in Thailand! They are based on our CommuniKate ICE cards for people with speech disabilities, You can download them from our Github repo, where you will also find the English version to use (or to translate!) .
