Category: Conferences

Accessibility, Conferences, Microsoft Technologies

Captioning Options for Your Online Conference

Meagan Longoria

Many conferences have moved online this year due to the pandemic, and many attendees are expecting captions on videos (both live and recorded) to help them understand the content. Captions can help people who are hard of hearing, but they also help people who are trying to watch presentations in noisy environments and those who lack good audio setups as they are watching sessions. Conferences arguably should have been providing live captions for the in-person events they previously held. But since captions are finally becoming a wider a topic of concern, I want to discuss how captions work and what to look for when choosing how to caption content for an online conference.

There was a lot of information that I wanted to share about captions, and I wanted it to be available in one place. If you don’t have the time or desire to read this post, there is a summary at the bottom.

Note: I’m not a professional accessibility specialist. I am a former conference organizer and current speaker who has spent many hours learning about accessibility and looking into options for captioning. I’m writing about captions here to share what I’ve learned with other conference organizers and speakers.

Closed Captions, Open Captions, and Subtitles

Closed captions provide the option to turn captions on or off while watching a video. They are usually shown at the bottom of the video. Here’s an example of one of my videos on YouTube with closed captions turned on.

YouTube video with closed captions turned on and the caption text shown along the bottom. The CC button on the bottom has a red line under it indicating it is on.
YouTube video with closed captions turned on. The CC button at the bottom has a red line under it to indicate the captions are on.

The placement of the captions may vary based upon the service used and the dimensions of the screen. For instance, if I play this video full screen on my wide screen monitor, the captions cover some of the content instead of being shown below.

Open captions are always displayed with the video – there is no option to turn them off. The experience with open captions is somewhat like watching a subtitled foreign film.

But despite captions often being referred to colloquially as subtitles, there is a difference between the two. Captions are made for those who are hard of hearing or have auditory processing issues. Captions should include any essential non-speech sound in the video as well as speaker differentiation if there are multiple speakers. Subtitles are made for viewers who can hear and just need the dialogue provided in text form.

For online conferences, I would say that closed captions are preferred, so viewers can choose whether or not to show the captions.

How Closed Captions Get Created

Captions can either be created as a sort of timed transcript that gets added to a pre-recorded video, or they can be done in real time. Live captioning is sometimes called communication access real-time translation (CART).

If you are captioning a pre-recorded video, the captions get created as a companion file to your video. There are several formats for caption files, but the most common I have seen are .SRT (SubRip Subtitle), .VTT (Web Video Text Tracks). These are known as simple closed caption formats because they are human readable – showing a timestamp or sequence number and the caption in plain text format with a blank line between each caption.

Who Does the Captions

There are multiple options for creating captions. The first thing to understand is that captioning is a valuable service and it costs money and/or time.

In general, there are 3 broad options for creating captions on pre-recorded video:

  • Authors or conference organizers manually create a caption file
  • Presentation software creates a caption file using AI
  • A third-party service creates a caption file with human transcription, AI, or a combination of both

Manually creating a caption file

Some video editing applications allow authors to create caption files. For example, Camtasia provides a way to manually add captions or to upload a transcript and sync it to your video.

Alternatively, there is a VTT Creator that lets you upload your video, write your captions with the video shown so you get the timing right, and then output your .VTT file.

Another approach is to use text-to-speech software to create a transcript of everything said during the presentation and then edit that transcript into a caption file.

Services like YouTube offer auto-captioning, so if it’s an option to upload as a private video to get the caption file from there, that is a good start. But you will need to go back through and edit the captions to ensure accuracy with either of these approaches. Vimeo also offers automatic captioning, but the results will also need to be reviewed and edited for accuracy.

These are valid approaches when you don’t have other options, but they can be very time consuming and the quality may vary. This might be ok for one short video, but is probably not ideal for a conference.

If you are going to make presenters responsible for their own captions, you need to provide them with plenty of time to create the captions and suggest low-cost ways to auto-generate captions. I’ve seen estimates that it can take up to 5 hours for an inexperienced person to create captions for one hour of content. Please be aware of the time commitment you are requesting of your presenters if you put this responsibility on them.

Captions in Your Presentation Software

Depending on the platform you use, your presentation software might provide AI-driven live captioning services. This is also known as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). For example, Teams offers a live caption service. As of today (November 2020), my understanding is that Zoom, GoToMeeting, and GoToWebinar do not offer built-in live caption services. Zoom allows you to let someone type captions or integrate with a 3rd party caption service. Zoom and GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar do offer transcriptions of meeting audio after the fact using an AI service.

PowerPoint also offers live captioning via its subtitles feature. My friend Echo made a video and blog post to show the effectiveness of PowerPoint subtitles, which you can view here. There are a couple of things to note before using this PowerPoint feature:

  1. It only works while PowerPoint is in presentation mode. If you have demos or need to refer to a document or website, you will lose captions when you open the document or web browser.
  2. If you are recording a session, your subtitles will be open subtitles embedded into your video. Viewers will not be able to turn them off.
  3. The captions will only capture the audio of the presenter who is running the PowerPoint. Other speakers will not have their voice recorded and will not be included in the captions.

Google Slides also offers live captions. The same limitations noted for PowerPoint apply to Google Slides as well.

Third-Party Caption Services

There are many companies that provide captioning services for both recorded and live sessions. This can be a good route to go to ensure consistency and quality. But all services are not created equal – quality will vary. For recorded sessions, you send them video files and they give you back caption files (.VTT, .SRT, or another caption file format). They generally charge you per minute of content. Some companies offer only AI-generated captions. Others offer AI- or human-generated captions, or AI-generated captions with human review. Humans transcribing your content tends to cost more than AI, but it also tends to have a higher accuracy. But I have seen some impressively accurate AI captions. Captions on recorded content are often less expensive than live captions (CART).

Below are a few companies I have come across that offer caption services. This is NOT an endorsement. I’m listing them so you can see examples of their offerings and pricing. Most of them offer volume discount or custom pricing.

  • Otter.ai – offers AI-generated captions for both recorded and live content, bulk import/export, team vocabulary
  • 3PlayMedia – offers AI-generated and human-reviewed captions for recorded content, AI-generated captions for live content. (Their standard pricing is hidden behind a form, but it’s currently $0.60 per minute of live auto-captioning and $2.50 per minute of closed captions for recorded video.)
  • Rev – offers captions for both recorded and live content, shared glossaries and speaker names to improve accuracy.

The Described and Captioned Media Program maintains a list of captioning service vendors for your reference. If you have used a caption service for a conference and want to share your opinion to help others, feel free to leave a comment on this post.

Questions for Conference Organizers to Ask When Choosing a Captioning Vendor

For recorded or live video:

  • What is your pricing model/cost? Do you offer bulk discounts or customized pricing?
  • Where/how will captions be shown in my conference platform? (If it will overlay video content, you need to notify speakers to adjust content to make room for it. But try to avoid this issue where possible.)
  • Is there an accuracy guarantee for the captions? How is accuracy measured?
  • Can I provide a list of names and a glossary of technical terms to help improve the caption accuracy?
  • Does the captioning service support multiple speakers? Does it label speakers’ dialogue to attribute it to the right person?
  • Does the captioning service conform to DCMP or WCAG captioning standards? (Helps ensure quality and usability)
  • How does the captioning service keep my files and information secure (platform security, NDAs, etc.)?
  • What languages does the captioning service support? (Important if your sessions are not all in English)

For recorded video:

  • Does my conference platform support closed captions? (If it doesn’t, then open captions encoded into the video will be required.)
  • What file type should captions be delivered in to be added to the conference platform?
  • What is the required lead time for the captioning service to deliver the caption files?
  • How do I get videos to the caption service?

For captions on live sessions:

  • Does the live caption service integrate with my conference/webinar platform?
  • How do I get support if something goes wrong? Is there an SLA?
  • What is the expected delay from the time a word is spoken to when it appears to viewers?

Further Captioning Advice for Conference Organizers

  • Budget constraints are real, especially if you are a small conference run by volunteers that doesn’t make a profit. Low quality captions can be distracting, but no captions means you have made a decision to exclude people who need captions. Do some research on pricing from various vendors, and ask what discounts are available. You can also consider offering a special sponsorship package where a sponsor can be noted as providing captions for the conference.
  • If you are running a large conference, this should be a line item in your budget. Good captions cost money, but that isn’t an excuse to go without them.
  • If your conference includes both live and recorded sessions, you can find a vendor that does both. You’ll just want to check prices to make sure they work for you.
  • If your budget means you have to go with ASR, make sure to allow time to review and edit closed captions on recorded video.
  • Try to get a sample of the captions from your selected vendor to ensure quality beforehand. If possible for recorded videos, allow speakers to preview the captions to ensure quality. Some of them won’t, but some will. And it’s likely a few errors will have slipped through that can be caught and corrected by the speakers or the organizer team. This is especially important for deeply technical or complex topics.
  • Make sure you have plenty of lead time for recorded videos. If a speaker is a few days late delivering a video, make sure their video can still be captioned and confirm if there is an extra fee.

Final Thoughts and Recap

If you’d like more information about captions, 3PlayMedia has an Ultimate Guide to Closed Captioning with tons of good info. Feel free to share any tips or tricks you have for captioning conference sessions in the comments.

I’ve summarized the info in this post below for quick reference.

Terms to Know

  • Closed captions: captions that can be turned on and off by the viewer
  • Open captions: captions that are embedded into the video and cannot be turned off
  • CART: communication access real-time translation, a technical term for live captioning
  • ASR: automatic speech recognition, use of artificial intelligence technology to generate captions
  • .SRT and .VTT: common closed caption file formats

Choosing a Captioning Solution for Your Conference

(Click to enlarge)

Diagram summarizing decision points when choosing a captioning solution. For high budget, choose human generated/reviewed captions from a service. For low budget and moderate time, choose ASR captions. For no budget, choose ASR built into presentation/conference software. Otherwise, someone will need to manually create captions. If you can't provide captions, let viewers know in advance.
This diagram represents general trends and common decision points when choosing a captioning solution. Your specific situation may vary from what is shown here

Summary of Caption Solutions

Manual creation of caption files for recorded sessions
Cost: None
Time/Effort: High
Pros:
• Doesn’t require a third-party integration
• Supports closed captions
• Works no matter what application is shown on the screen
• Works not matter what application is used to record and edit video
Cons:
• Accuracy will vary widely
• Manual syntax errors can cause the file to be unusable

Upload to YouTube, Vimeo or another service that offers free captions
Cost: None to Low
Time/Effort: Medium
Pros:
• Supports closed captions
• Works no matter what application is shown on the screen
• Works no matter what application is used to record and edit video
Cons:
• Not available for live sessions
• Requires editing of captions to achieve acceptable accuracy
• Requires an account with the service and (at least temporary) permission to upload the video
• Accuracy will vary widely

Auto-generated captions in presentation software (e.g., PowerPoint, Google Slides)
Cost: Low
Time/Effort: Low
Pros:
• Works for live and recorded sessions
• No third-party integrations required
Cons:
• Requires that all presenters use presentation software with this feature
• Must be enabled by the presenter
• Won’t work when speaker is showing another application
• Often offers only open captions
• Accuracy may vary
• Often only captures one speaker

ASR (AI-generated) captions from captioning service
Cost: Medium
Time/Effort: Low
Pros:
• Works for live and recorded sessions
• Supports closed captions
• Works no matter what application is shown on the screen
• Works not matter what application is used to record and edit video
Cons:
• Accuracy may vary
• Requires planning to meet lead times for recorded sessions
• Poor viewer experience if delay is too large during live sessions

Human-generated or human-reviewed captions from a captioning service
Cost: High
Time/Effort: Low
Pros:
• Ensures the highest quality with the lowest effort from conference organizers and speakers
• Works for live and recorded sessions
• Works no matter what application is shown on the screen
• Works not matter what application is used to record and edit video
Cons:
• Requires planning to meet lead times for recorded sessions
• Poor viewer experience if delay is too large during live sessions

I hope you find this exploration of options for captions in online conference content helpful. Let me know in the comments if you have anything to add to this post to help other conference organizers.

Accessibility, Conferences, Microsoft Technologies, PASS Summit, Power BI

I’m Speaking at Virtual PASS Summit 2020

Meagan Longoria

PASS Summit has gone virtual this year, but that isn’t keeping PASS from delivering a good lineup of speakers and activities. I’m excited to be presenting a pre-con and two regular sessions this year. I know virtual delivery changes the interaction between audience and speaker, and I’m going to do everything I can to make my sessions more than just standard lecture and demo to keep things interesting.

Building Power BI Reports that Communicate Insights and Engage People (Pre-Con)

If you are into Power BI or data visualization, check out my pre-con session. It’s called Building Power BI Reports that Communicate Insights and Engage People. Unless we’ve had data visualization training, the way we learn to make reports is by copying reports that others have made. But that assumes other people were designing intentionally for human consumption. Another issue is that we often mimic example reports from tool vendors. That can be very helpful with the technical aspects of getting content on the page, but we often overlook the design aspects of reports that can make or break their usability and effectiveness in communicating information. My pre-con will begin with discussion on how humans interpret data visualizations and how you can use that to your advantage to make better, more consumable visualizations. We’ll take those lessons and apply them specifically to Power BI and then add on some tips and tricks. Throughout the day, there will be hands-on exercises and opportunities for group conversation. And you’ll receive some resources to take with you to help you continue to improve your report designs.

Agenda slide from my pre-con session: 1) Defining Success, 2) Message & Story, 3) Designing a Visual, 4) Refine Your Report 5) Applied Power BI 6) Power BI Tricks 7) Wrap-Up
Agenda for my PASS Summit pre-con titled Building Power BI Reports that Communicate Insights and Engage People

This session is geared toward people that have at least basic familiarity with Power BI Desktop (if you can populate a bar chart on a report page, that’s good enough). If you have never opened Power BI Desktop, we might move a little fast, but you are welcome to join us and give it a try. If you are pretty good with Power BI Desktop, but you want to improve your data visualization skills, this session could also be a good fit for you. I hope you’ll register and join my pre-con.

Implementing Data-Driven Storytelling Techniques in Power BI

Data storytelling is a popular concept, but the techniques to implement storytelling in Power BI can be a bit elusive, especially when you have data values that change as the data is refreshed. In this session, we’ll talk about what is meant by story. Then I’ll introduce you to tool-agnostic techniques for data storytelling and show you how you can use them in Power BI. We’ll also discuss the visual hierarchy within a page and how that affects your story. You can view my session description here.

Inclusive Presentation Design

I’m also delivering a professional development session for those of us that give presentations. Most speakers have good intentions and are excited to share their knowledge and perspective, but we often exclude audience members with our presentation design. Join me in this session to discuss how to design your presentation materials with appropriate content formatted to maximize learning for your whole audience. You’ll gain a better understanding of how to enhance your delivery to make an impact on those with varying abilities to see, hear, and understand your presentation. You can view my presentation description here.

Other Pre-Cons from My Brilliant Co-Workers

If you aren’t into report design, my DCAC coworkers are delivering pre-cons that may interest you.

Denny Cherry is doing a pre-con session on Microsoft Azure Platform Infrastructure.

John Morehouse is talking about Avoiding the Storms When Migrating to Azure.

I hope you’ll join one of us for a pre-con as well as our regular sessions. With PASS Summit being virtual, the lower price and removal of travel requirements may make this conference more accessible to some who haven’t been able to attend in past years. Be sure to get yourself registered and spread the word to colleagues.

Conferences, Microsoft Technologies, Power BI

Power Up: Exploring the Power BI Ecosystem, May 27-28

Meagan Longoria

Next week I’m speaking at at the Dynamic Communities Power Up event titled “Exploring the Power BI Ecosystem“. It takes place on May 27 & 28, 2020. This exciting 2-Day virtual event is designed to ensure attendees have a complete view of the Power BI product and surrounding ecosystem, provide expanded knowledge of the core components and showcase the possibilities for continued exploration and innovation.

Sessions during the event are 2.5 hours long, to really give you time to get into a topic. There are healthy 45-minute breaks between sessions to give you time to attend to personal matters. And the sessions are recorded to give you a chance to catch anything you miss. Some sessions, including mine, offer a take-home exercise to help solidify concepts discussed during the session.

I’m presenting Data Visualization and Storytelling on May 28 at 9am EST/1pm UTC. In this session, you will learn how to build eye-catching Power BI reports to support decision making. You will also see the importance and a realistic approach to data storytelling.

The following topics will be showcased through practical examples:

  • Creating beautiful reports: prioritizing your KPIs, playing with colors, grid
  • Choosing the best chart to illustrate your point
  • Introduction to the concept of Data Storytelling
  • Implementing quality checks on your report design
  • Implementing navigation in your report: bookmarks, drill-through, page-report tooltips, interactive Q&A

This training is a paid event, but it’s just $399 for the full 2 days. This training is great if you are a beginner-to-intermediate Power BI user trying to round out your skills across the many areas of the Power BI suite. You can head over to the website to register. I hope to see you there!

Accessibility, Azure, Conferences, Microsoft Technologies, SQL Saturday

I Presented with Live Captioning and Sign Language Interpreters

Meagan Longoria

I had the pleasure of presenting a full-day pre-conference session on the Friday before SQLSaturday Austin-BI last weekend. I could spend paragraphs telling you how enjoyable and friendly and inclusive the event was. But I’d like to focus on one really cool aspect of my speaking experience: I had both live captioning and sign language interpreters in my pre-con session.

First, let’s talk about the captions. While PowerPoint does have live captions/subtitles, that only works when you are using PowerPoint. When you show a demo or go to a web page, taking PowerPoint off the screen, you lose that ability. So we had a special setup provided by Shawn Weisfeld (Twitter|GitHub).

How the Live Captions Worked

A presenter uses a lavalier mic that sends audio to Epiphan Pearl. The presenter's computer sends video to Epiphan Pearl. Epiphan Pearl sends audio to a computer that sends audio to Azure and receives captions. The computer overlays the captions above the images from teh presenters laptop. That is all sent to the projector.
Technology setup at SQLSaturday Austin- BI Edition 2020 that provided live captions

The presenter connects their laptop to the Epiphan Pearl with an HDMI cable so they can send the video (picture) from the laptop. The speaker wears a lavalier microphone, which sends audio to the Pearl. The transcription green screen computer takes audio from the Pearl, sends it to Azure to be transcribed using Cognitive Services, and overlays the returned transcription text on a green screen input that is sent back to the Pearl. The projector gets the combined output of the transcription text and the presenter’s computer video output.

You can see an example of what it looked like from my presentation on Saturday in the tweet below. There are lots more pictures of it on Twitter with the #SqlSatAustinBI hashtag.

While this setup requires a bit more hardware, it worked so well! It took about 10 minutes to get it set up in the morning. As the speaker, I didn’t have to do anything but wear a mic. It transcribed everything I said regardless of what program my laptop was showing. There was very little lag. It seemed to be less than one second between when I would say something and when we would see it on the screen. While I try to speak clearly and slowly, sometimes I slip and fall back into speaking quickly. But the transcription kept up well. Some attendees said it was great to have the captions up on the screen to help them understand what I said when I occasionally spoke too quickly. The captions are placed at the top of the screen, above the image coming from my laptop, so I didn’t have to adjust my slides or anything to allow space for the captions.

The live captions were a big success. They helped not only people who had trouble hearing, but also those who spoke English as a second language and those who weren’t familiar with some of the terms I used and needed to see them spelled out.

Presenting With Sign Language Interpreters

This was my first time presenting with sign language interpreters to help communicate with my audience. Since the pre-con session lasted multiple hours, there were two interpreters in my room. They would switch places about every hour. They were kind enough to answer a few questions for me during breaks.

I asked them if it was difficult to sign all the technical terminology used and if they tried to study up on terms ahead of time. One of them told me that they don’t study the subject and they fingerspell all the technical terms. Most of my terms were spelled on my slides, and I saw the interpreter look at the slide to get the spelling. When someone asked a question about the font I was using, the interpreter asked me to spell it out, since it wasn’t written anywhere. I asked if having printed slides helped (I provided PDFs of the slides to the attendees at the beginning of the session). One of the interpreters told me no, because they were already watching the signer for questions and watching my slides and listening to me.

What I loved most about having the interpreters there was that the person using the service got to fully participate in the session. They asked questions and made comments like anyone else. And they participated in hands-on small group activities.

Check out this great photo of one of the interpreters in action during a small group activity.

5 people sit in a group at a table while a sign language interpreter sits across the table and helps the group communicate
Photo of small group activities during my Power BI pre-con with a sign language interpreter in the group. Photo by Angela Tidwell

Having ASL interpreters didn’t require any extra effort on my part. I didn’t have to practice with them beforehand or provide them with any of my conference materials. They were great professionals and were able to keep up with me through lecture, demos, small group exercises, and Q&A.

Sign language interpreters cost money. And they should – they provide a valuable service. In this case, the interpreters were provided by the State of Texas because the person using the service worked for the state government. Because this was training for their job, the person’s employer was obligated to provide this service. So we were lucky that it didn’t cost us anything.

While the SQLSaturday organizers were coordinating the ASL interpreters, they found out that there is a fund in Texas that can help with accessibility services when a person’s employer doesn’t/can’t provide them. It may not be the same in every state, but it’s definitely something to look into if you need to pay for interpreters for an event like this.

Make Your Next Event More Accessible

I have organized events, and I understand the effort that it requires. I’m so happy that Angela and Mike made the effort to make SQLSaturday Austin-BI a more inclusive event. I would like to challenge you to do the same for the next event you organize or the next presentation you give at a tech conference.

Your conference may not be able to afford the Epiphan Pearl (note: the original model we used is discontinued, but there is a new model) and the Azure costs. I’d like to see SQLSaturdays join together and purchase equipment and share across events – it would be great if PASS would help with this. Or maybe a company involved in the community could sponsor them? If we can’t do that, we could always start small with the built-in capabilities in PowerPoint and work our way up from there.

It was a great experience as a speaker and as an audience member to have the live captions. And I was so happy that someone wanted to attend my session and was making the effort to sign up and request the ASL interpreters. I hope we see more of that in the future. But we need to do our part to let people know that we welcome that and we will work to make it happen.

Conferences, Data Visualization, Microsoft Technologies, Power BI, SQL Saturday

New Power BI Report Design Pre-Con in 2020

Meagan Longoria

I’m excited to announce that I will be offering a full-day pre-con about Power BI report design in the coming year called Bookmarks, brain pixels, and bar charts: creating effective Power BI reports. For a full session description and prerequisites, please visit the session page.

Screenshot of the eventbrite page for the pre-con at SQLSaturday Austin

I built this pre-con to help people better approach report design as an interdisciplinary activity where we are communicating with humans, not just regurgitating data or putting shiny things on a page. There are many misconceptions out there about report design. Some people see it as just a “data thing” that only developers do. Many BI developers avoid it and try to focus on what they consider to be more “hardcore data” tasks. I often hear from people that they can’t make a good report because they aren’t artistic. This hands-on session will dispel those misconceptions and help you clarify your definition of a good Power BI report. You will see how you can apply some helpful user interface design and cognitive psychology concepts to improve your reports. And you’ll leave with tips, tricks, and a list of helpful resources to use in your future report design endeavours.

Your report design choices should be intentional, not haphazard or just the Power BI defaults. We’ll review guidelines to help you make good design choices and look at good and bad examples. And we’ll spend some time as a group creating a report to implement the concepts we discuss.

Basic familiarity with Power BI is helpful for attendees. If you know how to add a visual to a report page, populate it with data, and change some colors, that’s all you need. If you feel like you lack a good process for report design to ensure your reports are polished and professional, this session will share an approach you can adopt to help accomplish your design and communication goals. If you feel like your reports are luckluster or not well-received by their intended audience, join me to learn some tips to improve. If you are a more experienced report designer and you want to learn some new techniques and see the latest Power BI reporting features, you’ll find that information in this session as well.

So far, I’m scheduled to present this session at two SQLSaturdays in Q1 2020:

SQLSaturday Austin – BI – February 7, 2020. Please register on Eventbrite.

SQLSaturday Chicago – August 14, 2020. Please register on Eventbrite.

SQLSaturday pre-cons are very reasonably priced. This is a great way to get a full day of training on a low budget! I hope to see you in Austin or Chicago.

Accessibility, Conferences, Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Technologies, Power BI

I’m Speaking at Microsoft Ignite 2019

Meagan Longoria

I’m happy to be speaking at Microsoft Ignite this year. I have an unconference session and a regular session, both focused on accessibility in the Power Platform.

The regular session, Techniques for accessible report design in Microsoft Power BI, will be Wednesday, November 6 at 2:15pm. In this session I’ll discuss the features available in Power BI for making accessible reports and demonstrate techniques for making your reports easier to use. This session will be recorded, so if you can’t make it to Ignite, you can catch it online.

My unconference session, Accessibility in the Microsoft Power Platform, is a chance to have a discussion about accessibility in Power BI and PowerApps. It will be held on Thursday, November 7 at 10:45 am. Unconference sessions at Ignite include facilitor-led discussion and exercises that encourage audience participation where everyone can share their experiences and opinions. If you will be at Ignite and want to share struggles or successes in improving accessibility or raising awareness of accessibility issues, please join me.

This year at Ignite there is a reservation system for unconferences. You can RSVP while you are building your schedule on the website. Walk-ins will be accepted just before the session, assuming there is room. But please RSVP if you want to be sure to get a seat in an unconference session. Unconference sessions are not recorded, so this will be an in-person session only. But I will post materials through the Ignite website once the session is over.

If you will be at Ignite, please stop by and say hello and meet Artemis the Power BI accessibility aardvark.

Accessibility, Conferences

Tips for More Accessible Presentations

Meagan Longoria

I’m busy building presentations for some upcoming conferences, so in lieu of a full blog post, please read my twitter thread about making your presentations more accessible. All but one of these tips are applicable regardless of the software that you use to build presentation content.

Meagan’s twitter thread on accessible presentation design

Why lose the engagement of a single person in your audience because of poor design choices? Most of the design tips I list are not that difficult to implement, and many of them can be built in to your presentation template, which I hope you are customizing to fit your content (and yes, I’m aware of the struggle of using templates provided by conference organizers). See below for my thoughts on the built-in templates in presentation design software.

Tweet from Echo Rivera: “Friends don’t let friends use off-the-shelf templates”
Conferences, Data Visualization, Microsoft Technologies, PASS Summit

Join me for the PASS Data Expert Series Feb 7

Meagan Longoria

I’m honored to have one of my PASS Summit sessions chosen to be part of the PASS Data Expert Series on February 7. PASS has curated the top-rated, most impactful sessions from PASS Summit 2018 for a day of solutions and best practices to help keep you at the top of your field. There are three tracks: Analytics, Data Management, and Architecture. My session is in the Analytics track along with some other great sessions from Alberto Ferrari, Jen Underwood, Carlos Bossy, Matt How, and Richard Campbell.

The video for my session, titled “Do Your Data Visualizations Need a Makeover?”, starts at 16:00 UTC (9 AM MT). I’ll be online in the webinar for live Q&A and chat related to the session.

I hope you’ll register and chat with me about data visualizations in need of a makeover on February 7.

Conferences, Microsoft Technologies, PASS Summit, Personal

Join Me At PASS Summit 2018

Meagan Longoria

The PASS Summit 2018 schedule has been published, and I’m on it twice! On Monday, November 5, I am giving a full-day pre-con with Melissa Coates on Designing Modern Data and Analytics Solutions in Azure.  We’ll have presentations, hand-on labs, and open discussions about architecture options in Azure when building an analytics solution. If you’ve been wondering how your architecture should change when moving from on-premises solutions to PaaS solutions, when to use SSIS versus ADF V2, options for data virtualization, or what kind of data storage technology to use, we would love to have you attend our pre-con.

I also have a general session at PASS Summit: Do Your Data Visualizations Need A Makeover?. I’ll share the signs that your data visualizations aren’t providing a good experience for your users, explain the most common reasons why, and give you tips on how to fix it. Data visualization is a skill that must be learned and that we all should continue to sharpen.  We’ll have some fun discussing common mistakes and looking at examples. This session is scheduled for Wednesday, November 7 at 4:45pm.

If you are on the fence about attending PASS Summit, I highly recommend it, especially if you have never been. There are so many benefits for data professionals:

The content:

  • There are opportunities to learn from some of the top Microsoft Data Platform experts in the world.
  • Microsoft product and customer advisory teams have a large presence at the conference, so you can ask them questions and get advice.
  • The wide array of content allows you to go deeper on topics with which you are already familiar or to get an intro to a topic that is adjacent to your current knowledge that just wasn’t clicking for you by reading blog posts or books.

The networking:

  • You get to meet data professionals from all over the world. You can make new professional contacts and friends with whom you can keep in touch afterwards.
  • If you are looking for a new job, it’s a great place to make connections.
  • You can talk to the speakers whose blogs you read and conference sessions you attend! If you spot your favorite speaker at PASS Summit, it is a great place to introduce yourself or ask a question.

The fun:

  • There are lots of community events, including happy hours, game nights, and more.
  • There is always something to do for dinner, between receptions, sponsor parties, and friendly groups to tag along with.
  • SQL Karaoke is happening somewhere pretty much every night.

These benefits are most definitely real, not just over-hyped advertising. I have friends and colleagues of many years that I first met at PASS Summit. I first met Melissa Coates at PASS Summit, and now I work with her and present with her. And I got to help edit the Power BI whitepaper she wrote with Chris Webb (whom I also first met at PASS Summit – I fan-girled a little and asked for his autograph on his Power Query book the year it came out).  I got job interviews after letting colleagues at PASS Summit know that I was looking one year. I had a blast singing karaoke with a live band at an evening event last year. I could continue this list for quite a while, but I think you get the picture.

If you will be attending PASS Summit for the first time, check out the attendee orientation from Denny Cherry on October 2nd as well as the buddy program and speed networking event at the conference.

If you haven’t registered for PASS Summit yet but are planning on it, check with your local SQL/Power BI user group or a PASS virtual chapter for discount codes.

I hope to see you there.

Accessibility, Conferences

Dear Conferences, Please Stop Making Inaccessible Presentation Templates

Meagan Longoria

It’s hard to please everyone, especially when everyone means several dozen speakers and thousands of audience members at a tech conference. And especially when it comes to presentations to an international audience. So I get that it can be difficult to make a presentation template that stays on brand and promotes the best presentation of information. But I see a continuing trend that conferences optimize templates for marketing and forget that we are trying to communicate to audiences of varying skills and abilities, many of whom have paid to attend the conference to learn the information in our presentations. I’m not here just to argue aesthetics, although I definitely have opinions on that. I want people to realize that we are unintentionally excluding many of our audience members with our horribly inaccessible slide templates. Accessibility refers to the ability for everyone, regardless of disability or special needs, to access, use, and benefit from everything within their environment. Yes, in many cases use of the conference template is not required, but many speakers will still use it. So the designer of the slide template should be thoughtful about their design more than just staying on brand with colors and conference logos. Basically, we can do better. We should be designing with accessibility in mind.

I’m going to pick on a template that I’m currently working with because it is from a conference that is near and dear to my heart, and it serves as a good example of how we can (and should) improve. Concrete examples seem to have more impact than just providing guidelines. While this year’s PASS Summit template is not the worst conference presentation template I’ve seen, it leaves a lot to be desired in the areas of effectiveness and inclusiveness. I’m writing this publicly to help educate our SQL Family about making better presentations that actually work for our audience. While it is criticism, it is said with love and hope that we can improve for future conferences. The speakers and organizers of PASS Summit are good people who strive to deliver a great conference. I know we can do better.

So what’s wrong with the template?

Let’s start with the title slide.

PASSSummitTItleslide.jpg

The title text is 36pt Segoe UI Light, the subheading text is 24pt Segoe UI, and the speaker info text is 14 pt Segoe UI.

Those font sizes alone make it very hard to read from the back of even the smaller rooms at the conference.

In addition to being too small, the gray text for the speaker info doesn’t have enough contrast from the white background. We want to get a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 (but 7:1 would be better). The contrast ratio for these colors is 4.0.

While sans serif fonts are generally thought to be easier to read in presentations, it’s better to use fonts with a stroke width that is not too thin – not necessarily wider characters, but thicker lines that make up each letter. So Segoe UI Light would not be my first choice for a title font, but Segoe UI or Segoe UI Bold might be ok.

Also, the red used on the right half of the slide is VERY bright for an element that is purely decorative, to the point that it might be distracting for some people. And the reason we need to squish our title into two lines of too-small text is because that giant red shape takes up half the page. What is more important: a “pretty” red shape to make our slide look snazzy or being able to clearly read the title of the presentation?

Here is the speaker bio slide.

PASS Speaker BIO slide

This slide also suffers from the font being way too small.

  • Speaker name: 32pt (Segoe UI Light)
  • Title/Company: 20 pt (Segoe UI)
  • Social media handles: 11pt (Segoe UI)
  • Biography Point One: 14pt (Segoe UI)
  • Biography Point body text: 10.5pt (Segoe UI)

Again, there are issues with color contrast, which make the slide difficult to read – especially when shown on a projector that will probably wash out some of the color. The blue font on white background has a contrast ratio of 2.2. The red font on white background has a contrast ratio of 3.67. The dark font color on light gray background is actually ok from a color contrast perspective.

Here is a standard content slide.

PASS Speaker Content Slide

What I appreciate about this slide is that it is free from unnecessary decorative shapes/backgrounds and doesn’t use needless bullet points everywhere. And the PASS logo is small in the lower right hand corner, not taking up too much room or being super distracting. But again, font sizes are way too small and the color contrast from the background is not high enough.

The difference in heading styles is a bit distracting. While they should probably differ in size, they don’t need to also differ in capitalization and font and color and boldness. One or two properties would be fine to denote difference, and having so many differences is a bit distracting.

More important than that, if you have three layers of headings on your slide, you probably have too much text. It would have been better not to even suggest that we would need to do such a thing. Putting it in the template passively gives presenters permission or encouragement to do just that.

What’s wrong and why should you care?

Conferences need to consider that some attendees may have varying abilities to see, hear, and understand the presentations. But those attendees paid to attend the conference and shall we say… connect, share, and learn? How can they learn when they can’t read the slide? How can they connect when the speaker contact information is tiny and hard to distinguish from the background? When we use slide templates that don’t work for those attendees, we are basically saying that they don’t matter and aren’t our “real” audience. Do we really want to be just another conference that discriminates against these people and makes them feel unwelcome? No one is purposefully doing this, but our ignorance/thoughtlessness about accessibility still creates that experience for them, whether or not we meant to do so.

KeepOutSign.jpg
Don’t let your slides make attendees feel excluded when a few changes could help everyone enjoy and learn.

Attendees don’t have to have a diagnosed “official” disability to benefit from slides that present information clearly. How many of us just have aging eyes? We can all appreciate when we end up seated at the back of a large conference room and can actually read the slides. Non-native English speakers may appreciate being able to clearly and quickly read slide content as they have to take more time/effort to process information written in English. We all get distracted by our phone/laptop/tablet/watch/neighbor during conference sessions, and it’s nice to be able to refocus on the presentation by focusing on the visual content while we listen to the speaker. But we can’t do that when the speaker’s slides are distracting us from the good information or are just plain hard to read. Slide templates are just one part of the presentation, but they can help set a standard that provides a good, inclusive experience for all attendees.

And what’s going to be better marketing for a conference: slide templates that are hard to read but use the right colors and logos, or attendees that have a great experience and learn a ton and tell their friends and coworkers all about it?

How do we fix it?

There are several basic things we can do to fix our templates to make them more accessible and more engaging (and still on brand for the conference). Here is a (non-comprehensive) list that organizations that create conference slide templates could start with to create accessible templates.

  1. Use a high contrast color scheme. Ensure that all text has a contrast ratio against its background of at least 4.5:1.
  2. Use sans serif fonts that are 24 pt or larger for body text. If possible, don’t encourage anything less than 32pt font size.
  3. Don’t use text that is ALL CAPS as a regular part of the template.
  4. Avoid using color as the only indicator of importance or change.
  5. Minimize the amount of text on slides so it is only a few lines or less than 20 words.
  6. Discourage use of distracting transitions between slides.

Even better, don’t require/request use of a slide template. Just give speakers a few intro/exit slides with necessary information and let them do what is best to communicate their intended information. It would then be the speaker’s responsibility to create accessible content, but hopefully they care enough about their presentations to do that. PASS Summit requires the use of the title and speaker bio slides (and a few other conference-related slides), but it allows speakers to design their own slides for the rest of the content.

If you have tips or opinions about creating accessible presentation content for conferences, please leave them in the comments.