Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

We are used to seeing handicapped parking spots and curb cuts, but how many of us think about the accessibility of the Internet – specifically travel and tourism Web sites – to those with disabilities?

As I discussed in an earlier post (Can you see this? Let’s talk Web accessibility) I’ve become a convert to the importance of making the Web accessible to everyone, including those who cannot hear or see very well.

By the way, if you are young now but plan to live to old age, come to grips with the realization that you won’t be able to see or hear as well as you do now. Web accessibility matters to everyone, eventually.

The disabled travel, too, and there are millions of them.  Have you thought about whether your tourism-related Web site gives them the information they need to plan a trip?

I’m trying two different tools to make my own content more understandable and easier to use.

Perhaps you can find some useful ideas here for your own site….

1)  BuzzVoice.  Look at the right-hand sidebar on this blog; you’ll see a little phone-looking icon (we call it a widget) created by a company called BuzzVoice.

It uses text-to-speech software to turn my written words into spoken English, so a visually-impaired or dyslexic person can still absorb my content.  Thanks to this post about BuzzVoice by Jason Falls, I’m helping out with the software’s beta-testing.  Your feedback is, of course, most welcome down in the comments for this post.

Is something like this only for the visually-impaired? Nope; another benefit is that people who have long commutes, road trips,  workouts or who simply love audio content can “listen” to my blog posts on iPhones, iPods/MP3 players & other mobile devices (and now on the new iPad.)

To share the Sheila’s Guide talking widget on Facebook, Twitter & other social sites, just click the “Grab This” button at the bottom of the widget (you can embed it like you do a YouTube video.)  You can subscribe to the vocals as an RSS feed or as an iTunes audio feed.

The software doesn’t “translate” perfectly, of course, and it’s an electronic voice rather than my own, but still, it’s a step ahead for allowing multiple ways for readers to enjoy the site.

2)  Video captions.  A service to help you with automated video captioning is now available for all YouTube users, so I’m trying it out on a few of my own videos.

I’ve been schooled by Web accessibility expert Glenda Watson Hyatt on the importance of video captioning for the hearing-impaired (here are some captioning tips on Glenda’s blog) but until this machine transcription service, it was “too hard” and “took too much time.”

To request a machine transcription (the software for it was created by a deaf Google engineer) go to the Edit function of your selected video and look for the tab labeled “Captions.” Click that, and ask for an (English only) machine transcription if it’s not already been done.

You’ll get an .sbv file to download and edit.  I recommend opening it in WordPad for better formatting. You’ll see the words lined up with the time that they were said in the video; you’ll also see that the speech-to-text technology is….er….not terribly accurate.

No matter:  at least you have a time-synched rough draft transcript to work with, right?

Rename the “captions.sbv” file something like “Smithville downtown video transcript.sbv” and go to work – edit the file to make the text match what is actually said in the video.

It is much easier to edit a video when the speaker is clear and speaks slowly; since I tend to speak quickly when I narrate my own videos, I am a pain to edit.

When the .sbv file is ready, upload it back on the same Edit page for the video, and it will automatically be entered into the video.  Watch the captioned video all the way through to make sure everything is correct.  If there is a problem, go back to editing, remove the old file and re-upload your corrected one (it will again be automatically added to your video.)

Here is one of our Tourism Currents videos with captioning: 60 Seconds on Blogger Outreach with Zoetica Media’s Kami Huyse.

Are there SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits to adding this caption text to your videos? My very preliminary research indicates that the jury is still out on SEO benefits of YouTube’s captions, but at least now you have a transcript that you might be able to add to the video description or place into your own blog post below the video’s embed box (and that text WILL be indexed by search engine bots.)

More importantly, actual humans appreciate captions. Here is a video from the California School for the Deaf High School (here’s a direct link to it on their YouTube channel) with students explaining why they’re so excited to have more captioned video content – I dare you to watch it and not realize the power of Web accessibility:

Last week I enjoyed spending 30 minutes on Blog Talk Radio with Australian entrepreneur and coach Des Walsh.  He has a regular program called Des Walsh and Friends, with a wide variety of guests all discussing some aspect of technology and business.

The noteworthy advantage of Blog Talk Radio (or any “Internet radio” service) is that not only can you listen live, but the shows are usually archived if you can’t be there at broadcast time, plus they’re also downloadable for later listening on your iPod or other digital audio player.

It gives radio/audio the worldwide reach that it never had before, as I discussed in this post about online radio and destination marketing for the Beaumont (TX) CVB.

Des and I talked about my background in travel, how Becky McCray and I launched Tourism Currents to teach tourism professionals about social media, and why businesses need to ensure a strong Web presence as customer search and interaction preferences shift online.

I loved having a fun chat with someone halfway around the world, and the time zones worked in my favor since it was afternoon my time, but very early morning for Des.  :)

Here is our episode:  talking social media, travel and tourism with Des Walsh.

(This is cross-posted on my BootsnAll Family Travel Logue.)

While checking Twitter the other day I saw a tweet from the Beaumont (TX) CVB that they were live on a local AM radio station in town, and they invited their Twitter followers to listen in.

Since I went to high school in Beaumont, I clicked the link in their tweet out of curiosity. I’m not a big talk radio person (don’t have a commute and prefer music while working at home) and like many people today I rarely listen to AM radio.

But this was AM radio for geeks, because AM 1300 KSET also live-streams shows to the Web.

That means that not only can people in Beaumont and a few surrounding southeast Texas towns like Lumberton, Orange, Nederland and Silsbee listen in, but the entire planet can get involved!   The station also keeps an active Facebook page and they’re on Twitter.

THAT gets my attention.

Just a few days before I’d bookmarked a PRSA San Antonio blog post on our Tourism Currents Delicious page – the post was titled Why Radio Will Survive the Media Shake-Out of Our Decade – so I already had radio on the brain.

Appearing on a live-streaming radio show means that you can remind your locals of what you offer (get those folks to visit more in their own backyards – the Beaumont CVB did a great job of plugging their online events calendar on the KSET show) but you can also reach out to your “expats.”

These are people who perhaps grew up in your town but moved away, or maybe they visit regularly (years ago as children, now as snowbirds, to visit relatives for the holidays, etc.) and they already feel an affinity for you.  Our latest Tourism Currents lesson calls them part of your “online champions network” if you can get them talking about you, so reach out and bring them closer to home, through the Web. A “wired” local radio show is one way to do that.

I know that when when I travel and find crummy music options in my hotel room, I tune my laptop into my local Austin classical radio station, FM 89.5 KMFA, which also livestreams to the Web. Ahh, the familiar morning DJs and a taste of home.

Another way to share online is through embeddable widgets like the one below from the radio station (if you click the Play button, you’ll hear the current live-stream from KSET.)   Widgets can be customized any number of ways and are another method of putting your latest information on other people’s sites.  ”Embeddable” means that you find the embed/sharing code where it says Get Widget, copy it, and paste it anywhere that allows HTML code.

Smart radio station, eh?

(Update:  look at this wonderfully-crafted post by Justin McCullough called The Social Web Ties Us Together….it’s about how he as a southeast Texas guy stumbled across this post about Beaumont while he was traveling in Oregon.  It is a dynamite explanation of how information spreads across the Web in ways that we might not expect.  Thanks, Justin!)