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...in which I don't go up mountains

Category: UX Design

Google Chrome Canary Logo

How to get Live Captions for Anything with Google Chrome Canary

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Sometimes I wish I could caption literally anything. But at least since the move to home working, I’ve been wishing I could get live captions for online meetings and training sessions. I think transcripts are probably a bit too intrusive without consent, along the lines of making recordings, but live captions would often be so useful.

So I am very happy today, because I have finally found a way to get live captions that I think will work for anything with sound that plays in the browser on the computer. It was developed for Android first and so it involves installing a new version of Google Chrome called Canary, that is still in beta testing.

Here are the instructions:

  1. Download and install Google Chrome Canary from here:
    https://www.google.com/chrome/canary/
    Screenshot: Download Chrome Canary

    Downloading Chrome Canary: really liking the all-yellow version of the Chrome logo. I just know great things are ahead…


     
  2. Visit this URL in the Canary browser where you can change the settings:
    chrome://flags/#enable-accessibility-live-captions
     
  3. Enable live captions
     
  4. Relaunch the browser
     
  5. Switch on the Live Captions setting in the browser options (enter this URL to search for it: chrome://settings/?search=captions )
    Screenshot: Switch on the Live Captions setting in the browser

    Search for Captions and switch on the Live Captions setting in the browser


     
  6. You should be able to see captions whenever there are spoken words now. I can confirm that this works with Collaborate live sessions and video playback, as well as Teams meetings in the web browser (although the Teams Desktop App has better caption and transcript options of its own).

     

Testing out the Live Captions

The first chance I got to try this was in our morning Teams meeting…

So, here they are working in a Teams meeting in the browser:

Screenshot: Live Captions in Teams

Live Captions in Teams (Web Browser Version): Good to see them, though again, not perfect – if you have access to the desktop app, click the three vertical dots for better captioning options in Teams meetings. I look a bit goofy in the corner because I’m excited to see this working for the first time!

Here they are, working in a Collaborate video playback:

Screenshot: Live Captions added to video playback in Collaborate

Live Captions added to video playback in Collaborate: They aren’t always right, but they definitely are there!

Here they are working in a Collaborate live webinar:

Screenshot: Live Captions in Collaborate

Screenshot of Live Captions working in Collaborate: looks fantastic, very useful!
Is that Teams notification annoying anyone else?

And here they are working in YouTube:
(Which also has its own captions, but I’m including it as a demo)

Screenshot of captions in YouTube

Screenshot of captions in YouTube – in this case, very accurate too!
Also, lovely guided meditation, courtesy of The Honest Guys

So, I really like this – thanks, Google!

Can we have slow down, rewind and replay next please? I thought at first, they’re not miracle workers – but I suppose with enough buffering they probably could.

And I wonder if it would work with Google glasses…

Links

Moving your website's home

Moving a Website: What to do with old URLs listed by Google?

Reading Time: 5 minutes

What can you do about old website URLs that are still indexed by Google?
I received this question recently:

I was just contacting you to ask you about some of the links from my original website. When I put my name into a search engine quite a few pages from my original website come up like the news page etc and when you click on these it does take you to my new site with a page not found message. I was wondering what I should do about this, is there a way to stop these results showing? It isn’t too bad as someone could still go to the links and get to active pages but I was a little worried that it could send people away. I am hoping you may be able to help?

Photos of the User Interface testing process

An Interesting Content Design Meetup

Reading Time: 5 minutes

I’ve just spent an interesting evening attending a meetup / webinar called “Let’s Talk Content Design,” hosted by the UX Glasgow Meetup group.

Defining Content Design

Several speakers talked about this quote from Sarah Winters, defining content design:

Content design is a way of thinking… It’s about using data and evidence to give the audience what they need, at the time they need it, and in a way they expect.

— Sarah Winters, Content Design

Subtitling screenshot

Subtitling and Migrant Stories

Reading Time: 4 minutes

One of the unexpected but nice parts of my job lately has been editing the automated subtitles on some of our teaching videos.

This is a requirement for our course materials, to ensure our videos are more accessible for, for example:

  • Deaf students
  • Students with other hearing difficulties, for whom subtitles can help with comprehension of fast spoken or unclear dialogue, perhaps spoken with unfamiliar accents, mumbling, or with background noise
  • Foreign language speakers, for whom the subtitles might help with translation and following along with the spoken text
  • Students with learning disabilities, attention deficits, or autism, who may find subtitles help them to maintain their concentration on the videos
  • Students who need to study in a place where they can’t play sound
  • Students who need to see the spelling of proper nouns, such as full names, brand names, or technical terms
  • Students who just prefer to watch videos with subtitles as a habit

According to research by Ofcom in 2006, 7.5 million people in the UK (18% of the population) used closed captions, and of these, only 1.5 million were deaf or hard of hearing. 80% of those who preferred to watch with subtitles used them for other reasons.

Since we moved to hybrid learning, we have more and more teaching videos to work on, so that is an occasional silver lining to social distancing for me, as subtitling is a nice, quiet and absorbing task, and our videos are often very interesting 🙂

Testing the new Subtitle Editing Interface

Reading Time: 3 minutes

You know how occasionally you get a message that just makes you feel so special and appreciated? Well I decided to have done that when I got this:

Subject: Testing for new Media Hopper Create subtitle editing functionality
Dear Colleague,

I am writing to you as you have either attended training on editing subtitles on Media Hopper Create, or have recently requested captions using the service. We will soon be launching an updated version of the automated subtitle editing interface for media content that has been added to Media Hopper Create, and are looking for people to help us test this new functionality. We have some brief testing scripts that we would be asking for help with, and are looking to have testers completing by the end of Friday the 24th of April. If you would like to help with this process, please reply to this email with ‘UAT Testing for Media Hopper Create Subtitling’ in the subject line, and I will send you further instructions and login credentials for the test instance of Media Hopper Create.

Thank for your assistance.

Best wishes,

The Media Hopper Service Team

How awesome is that? Me, a Colleague? I’ve only been back in a full-time job since September! And I can help them because I went to their training! And I LOVE testing things!

Keyboard with a key that says Accessibility

Writing Accessibility Statements

Reading Time: < 1 minutes

Website accessibility

Website Accessibility
Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Today I attended a very interesting training session on Accessibility Statement Writing, run by some of the Disability Officers.

One point they stressed several times was to get an accessibility statement started and published, which could then be improved upon. They suggested using automated tools as a good place to start, although they wouldn’t catch every potential issue.

Useful links for reference:

Browser window screenshot showing and enormous blurry smiley icon

Changing the Favicon in my SharePoint SubSite

Reading Time: 27 minutes

A cautionary tale…

If you’re looking for how to do this yourself, let me save you some time: there’s a good post about it here: How To Change The Favicon In SharePoint Online, but it does require SharePoint Designer and the last 2 steps didn’t quite work for me.

Fatal Distraction:

Once upon a time…
I was almost making progress on starting a SharePoint project when instead I got annoyed with the enormous number of identical tabs that SharePoint opens in the browser:

Screenshot of browser window showing many similar looking sharepoint tabs open

Too much, SharePoint, and it all looks the same!


So I wanted to upload a favicon for my subsite. It’s the little icon that goes in the web browser tab to distinguish one site from another. Like this:

Smiley face icon

My favicon of choice, but bigger

It’s maybe a 10 minute job to change it on ANY NORMAL WEBSITE. So I thought it would be a nice, useful way to find out a little bit more about the workings of SharePoint…🤪

The Schlumberger configuration

Geophysics blogging means Equations!

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Following on from my previous post, ‘Geophysics blogging means new HTML entities!’, I discovered the maths was getting yet more complicated, with the need to represent equations like this:

Really complicated equation

Really complicated equation 😬

Ideally, I didn’t want to use images, for accessibility reasons, unless I could provide a meaningful alt tag, which takes me back to the original problem of representing the equation in text, but with less useful characters. Here’s a page with a lot of equations as an example: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/easc080162019-0sv1sem2/2020/02/06/7-2-1-electrical-resistivity/. I’ve made a lot of progress using HTML entities, but they can only get me so far.

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