Welcome to the EZ Universal Design series. I'm
Suzanne Delahanty. As the alternative media and
assistive technology specialist, I want to share
some of my favorite universal design secrets in my
easy universal design series. I'm going to demo
some great ways to quickly make your courses more
accessible and equitable for everyone.
Periodically, I'll be introducing you all to some
of the best tools you can easily implement right
now.
Today, I'll be sharing a new tool with you, called
Ava, which allows you to add free live captioning to your Zoom
meetings for free. How would you like to do that?
Well, let me show you how easy it is with this
free live captioning tool. Ava allows you to
instantly add live streaming captions to any live
video meeting. And it will also let you save your
spoken words as a text file when you're done. This
simple tool helps not only deaf or hard of hearing
students, but also help students who are ESL, ADHD,
dyslexic, as well as students with writing or
mobility issues. When taking notes, it takes less
than one minute to get up and running and add
captions to your streaming Zoom videos. Let me
demonstrate how easy it is to get up and running
using AVA. So I am actually in a zoom meeting,
I've already launched it, and I'm going to share
my screen and show you AVA. I'm going to go
ahead and click on my desktop and here I am on the
AVA homepage. It is very, very simple to get to.
It is simply AVA.ME ;then you should see all of
this right here. I'm going to go ahead and
move my Zoom toolbar. What you see is
basically this green bar on the top and all you
need to do to actually start using AVA is click
on the "get started button" or "caption now". I'm
going to go ahead and log in on my main login page
here, which I've already logged into. You can log
in as a guest, or you can create an account with
your school e-mail. It is entirely free either way.
I'm going to go ahead and start my captions now.
But as you can see, there is a a toolbar area
where you can set your visibility. Most people
like dark mode for visibility, but you can also
change the font size, which is very, very helpful.
All of those settings are hiding in here.
I'm going to go ahead and start captions now. And
what you can see is it will immediately start
captioning for me. I also have a font size which I
can change on the fly, or actually change languages,
or my input of my audio. That's all very simple,
easy access on the left hand side. And you can collapse
this as you see fit. As you can see, it is
following all my words. Now, how do you get the
captioning on your Zoom window? What you need
to do is just go to the little button here. As you
can see, my microphone is on. It is recording me
automatically. If you go to this window on the
web and you can actually turn this off if you need
to have a break or pause. Then you can come
back here. If you have something you'd like to
CC caption onto, you can click here {on CC} and it will open
up a separate window while it's transcribing in
the background, that you can put in front of your
Zoom presentation or your whiteboard. So I do need
to log in here and say "start captioning". What
it will do is show me captions in a very nice
floating closed-captioning bar. The size of
this font in the background are set by the
original settings that you set up in the
transcription box in the window we just looked at.
I'm going to go ahead and show you that I can
resize it so that it matches your screen or your
Zoom window. You can actually add people to the
conversation to join in, and you can pause it as
well on this closed captioning box. So, this is how it
works. If I wanted to bring up my
whiteboard, for instance, or annotate, you can
also have that at the same time. So, it's a very
useful tool. What's really cool: when
you're all done speaking, whether it be an hour or
three hours, it's completely free and unlimited
for as long as you'd like to speak. It's about
85% accurate and you can edit it
with this keyboard tool if you'd like to go in and
type. You can also make corrections on the fly
by just clicking on this, so you can Hyper focus on
a word and just typing over it, correcting it
yourself on the fly. Once you hit the "close"
button, whether it be here, on the "scribe" window
or on the captioning window, it automatically asks
you if you'd like to save the transcript. I'm
going to say "save transcribe", & it automatically
names it by the date; I'm going to put it on my
desktop by default. I'm going to save, and I'll
show you what that looks like. I'm going to go
ahead and minimize all this. It is still
working, by the way, as you wait to open your
transcript; but here is the transcript. All
cleaned up and everything is there. And you
actually go in there and you can see that there's
some typos there. So it will hint to you to fix text
with the red highlights. But it is an excellent
tool for transcribing things for videos.
Students can use this as a study tool on their
end too. But, I think every instructor should know
about this because it's a great tool to get you
started with captioning for free and very easily.
I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any
questions at all, feel free to reach out to me. My
email will be on the last slide here, and you can
always call me when our campus is back up and
running. Thank you. And look for my next video on
another accessible universal design technique that
I want to share with you. Bye!