WEBVTT 00:00:00.462 --> 00:00:06.014 CAMERON: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Pivotal Labs and the New York City Accessibility Meetup. 00:00:06.014 --> 00:00:07.676 Thank you for coming tonight. 00:00:07.676 --> 00:00:13.128 We're very excited to have our second meetup, and we're happy to have all of you here. 00:00:13.128 --> 00:00:19.730 So Pivotal Labs -- I just want to give a shoutout for hosting us tonight. 00:00:19.730 --> 00:00:21.112 I work at Pivotal Labs. 00:00:21.112 --> 00:00:24.392 We're an agile development consultancy, 00:00:24.392 --> 00:00:28.226 doing mostly web development and mobile app development. 00:00:28.226 --> 00:00:34.793 So if you have any needs in web development, or even web development with accessibility, 00:00:34.793 --> 00:00:37.294 we do that, so come talk to me. 00:00:37.294 --> 00:00:42.250 Today I'm excited to introduce to you Mirabai Knight, 00:00:42.250 --> 00:00:48.893 who works on Plover, which is an open-source stenography tool. 00:00:48.893 --> 00:00:52.501 Without further ado, I'll let you introduce yourself, Mirabai. 00:00:55.641 --> 00:00:56.387 MIRABAI: Hello. 00:01:04.254 --> 00:01:09.423 Hi. My name is Mirabai Knight, and I'm a stenographer. 00:01:09.423 --> 00:01:12.906 I won't keep doing that, because we have Stan to caption me, 00:01:12.906 --> 00:01:18.198 but I just want to talk a little bit about Plover, my open source project, 00:01:18.198 --> 00:01:22.648 and the accessibility implications of it, 00:01:22.648 --> 00:01:25.263 and then I'm going to hand it over to Plover's lead developer, 00:01:25.263 --> 00:01:27.512 Hesky Fisher, and he'll talk a little bit about 00:01:27.512 --> 00:01:32.398 developing open source projects that have accessibility implications 00:01:32.398 --> 00:01:35.491 and managing the community and stuff along those lines. 00:01:37.456 --> 00:01:44.064 So how many people here have actually seen a live captioner in action? 00:01:44.064 --> 00:01:46.879 Not on television, but in the room? 00:01:46.879 --> 00:01:47.982 That's awesome. 00:01:47.982 --> 00:01:50.759 That's definitely what I like to see in a room full of accessibility people. 00:01:50.759 --> 00:01:53.790 That's, like, probably 90% of the room. 00:01:53.790 --> 00:01:54.542 Glad to hear it. 00:01:54.542 --> 00:01:57.552 Because we're a fairly obscure profession, even now. 00:01:57.552 --> 00:02:01.930 Steno machines have been around since about 1912, 00:02:01.930 --> 00:02:10.023 but we were only hooked up to computers as of the late 1980s, so as a profession, 00:02:10.023 --> 00:02:14.647 live captioning is very young, and most people, if they have heard of it, 00:02:14.647 --> 00:02:18.286 only think of it for television and not for live applications. 00:02:18.286 --> 00:02:23.087 But myself, I work in universities, primarily, for Deaf and hard of hearing college students. 00:02:23.087 --> 00:02:28.037 I also work with professionals for business meetings and conferences. 00:02:28.037 --> 00:02:34.432 And it was around six years ago that I graduated from steno school. 00:02:34.432 --> 00:02:37.315 I'd gotten started as sort of an apprentice captioner, 00:02:37.315 --> 00:02:41.294 and I was very frustrated with my proprietary steno software, 00:02:41.294 --> 00:02:47.452 which cost $4000, had really obnoxious DRM 00:02:47.452 --> 00:02:51.886 that required me to jump through all sorts of hoops even to use the software, 00:02:51.886 --> 00:02:55.086 and really limited my ability to use it the way I wanted to. 00:02:55.086 --> 00:03:00.084 And it didn't have a number of key features that I really needed for my captioning work, NOTE Paragraph 00:03:00.084 --> 00:03:04.226 because all commercial stenography software is for court reporters, which... 00:03:04.226 --> 00:03:06.482 I've never done any court reporting. 00:03:06.482 --> 00:03:14.133 So my brother had sort of infected me with the open source bug when I was around ten years old. 00:03:14.133 --> 00:03:17.025 He's a big open source evangelist. 00:03:17.025 --> 00:03:20.409 And my frustration with the software, 00:03:20.409 --> 00:03:23.585 combined with that sort of thought in the back of my head 00:03:23.585 --> 00:03:26.349 that getting involved with open source was a good thing to do, 00:03:26.349 --> 00:03:30.391 made me think that this might be the way to go. 00:03:30.391 --> 00:03:35.476 So originally I thought that I would actually have to learn to program and develop it myself, 00:03:35.476 --> 00:03:39.572 because I didn't think anyone could possibly want to do it for me. 00:03:39.572 --> 00:03:42.393 But by a ridiculous stroke of luck, 00:03:42.393 --> 00:03:48.067 I put a posting in the elevator of my coworking space, 00:03:48.067 --> 00:03:49.651 asking for a Python tutor, 00:03:49.651 --> 00:03:54.622 and the guy who answered it and started off tutoring me in Python -- 00:03:54.622 --> 00:03:57.921 it turned out that he had a PhD from the MIT Media Lab, 00:03:57.921 --> 00:04:01.911 and was both a hardware and a software guy, and after a few weeks it was clear 00:04:01.911 --> 00:04:05.584 that I did not have a gift for programming, and starting from scratch it would be forever 00:04:05.584 --> 00:04:08.924 before I was able to develop the software that I actually wanted. 00:04:08.924 --> 00:04:10.673 But he got so excited about it, 00:04:10.673 --> 00:04:17.491 he decided he was just going to take over the development from me and do it on his own. 00:04:17.491 --> 00:04:20.755 I paid him as much as I could, but he worked at a steep discount. 00:04:20.755 --> 00:04:24.529 So he developed Plover for about a year. 00:04:24.529 --> 00:04:27.196 Then he got another job and had to give it up. 00:04:27.196 --> 00:04:29.228 When Hesky, my savior, 00:04:29.228 --> 00:04:35.043 contacted me out of the blue, because his girlfriend was in steno school. 00:04:35.043 --> 00:04:37.322 Actually, the same steno school that I graduated from. 00:04:37.322 --> 00:04:41.690 And he wanted to do his part to make steno cheap and accessible. 00:04:41.690 --> 00:04:43.880 So he's been developing it ever since. 00:04:43.880 --> 00:04:47.495 He's amazing, and he'll tell you all about that story later. 00:04:47.495 --> 00:04:49.212 But basically... 00:04:49.212 --> 00:04:52.360 I can go over the nuts and bolts of steno if you want, 00:04:52.360 --> 00:04:54.647 maybe in the questions, if you're curious about the details, 00:04:54.647 --> 00:04:56.774 but because I don't have that much time, 00:04:56.774 --> 00:05:03.399 I think I want to focus more on the potential of steno in various accessibility areas. 00:05:03.399 --> 00:05:08.394 So first off, I think, It's pretty obvious: Captioning. 00:05:08.394 --> 00:05:13.152 This guy right here, Stan Sakai, my captioner, actually started out on Plover. 00:05:13.152 --> 00:05:20.028 He originally just wanted to use steno to take notes when he was in college, 00:05:20.028 --> 00:05:22.226 but he wound up getting so excited about it, 00:05:22.226 --> 00:05:25.533 he taught himself, you know, and practiced ten hours a night 00:05:25.533 --> 00:05:29.183 for about a year, and finally realized that he had gotten up to 00:05:29.183 --> 00:05:31.150 about 230 words per minute, 00:05:31.150 --> 00:05:34.092 which is the speed you really need to be a entry-level captioner, 00:05:34.092 --> 00:05:37.933 and I think dropped out of college and launched his career as a captioner. 00:05:37.933 --> 00:05:39.988 I think he's pretty happy about it. 00:05:39.988 --> 00:05:41.410 He didn't do that with Plover the whole way. 00:05:41.410 --> 00:05:43.100 He actually switched to proprietary software, 00:05:43.100 --> 00:05:46.202 because Plover wasn't in the proper shape at that point, 00:05:46.202 --> 00:05:48.826 But I still count him as one of our success stories. 00:05:48.826 --> 00:05:53.703 So captioning for Deaf and hard of hearing people is incredibly important. 00:05:53.703 --> 00:06:03.760 It's very useful for all sorts of people, 00:06:03.760 --> 00:06:07.777 but primarily people with hearing loss who don't know sign language 00:06:07.777 --> 00:06:10.932 or might not even acknowledge their hearing loss, 00:06:10.932 --> 00:06:13.912 which is the vast majority of people who have hearing loss 00:06:13.912 --> 00:06:18.611 that interferes with their life moderately to significantly in some situations, 00:06:18.611 --> 00:06:20.523 but not at all in others. 00:06:20.523 --> 00:06:24.811 These are people -- often they've begun to lose their hearing in middle age, 00:06:24.811 --> 00:06:30.035 and that carries through to, you know, into their 60s and 70s. 00:06:30.035 --> 00:06:33.273 They don't acknowledge their hearing loss, they don't necessarily recognize it, 00:06:33.273 --> 00:06:36.346 and they have no idea what they can do to compensate for it. 00:06:36.346 --> 00:06:37.557 Hearing aids can only do so much. 00:06:37.557 --> 00:06:40.709 Many of them are not candidates for cochlear implants, 00:06:40.709 --> 00:06:43.714 and they often don't know that captioning exists. 00:06:45.274 --> 00:06:49.635 But along the way, as this accommodation has sort of picked up speed, 00:06:49.635 --> 00:06:52.767 more and more captioning is offered as a matter of course, 00:06:52.767 --> 00:06:56.906 not necessarily specifically requested by Deaf advocates 00:06:56.906 --> 00:07:02.458 who know their rights and are able to ask for it, but it's just become an included accommodation, 00:07:02.458 --> 00:07:08.178 and so this sort of invisible pool of people who don't know that they have rights under 00:07:08.178 --> 00:07:11.782 the Americans with Disabilities Act, who may be fine one-on-one in a small room, 00:07:11.782 --> 00:07:15.503 but who are totally at sea in a large auditorium, where they can't read anyone's lips -- 00:07:15.503 --> 00:07:18.696 they're finally beginning to realize that there's an accommodation 00:07:18.696 --> 00:07:21.104 that works for them. 00:07:21.104 --> 00:07:24.826 Also there are people who use sign interpreters in some situations, 00:07:24.826 --> 00:07:27.297 who prefer captioning in other situations. 00:07:27.297 --> 00:07:34.597 You know, they might want to have sign interpretation for conversational, or mobile, or very interactive sessions, 00:07:34.597 --> 00:07:37.415 but for things like lectures, where there's very specific terminology 00:07:37.415 --> 00:07:42.035 that might not have specific analogs in sign, captioning might be better. 00:07:42.035 --> 00:07:46.858 Captioning is also really useful for people with attention deficit disorder, 00:07:46.858 --> 00:07:50.421 it's useful for some people with dyslexia, which might seem counterintuitive, 00:07:50.421 --> 00:07:58.761 but having the bimodal input of getting something both from your ears and into your eyes at the same time 00:07:58.761 --> 00:08:02.678 can often help people to comprehend information and process information more thoroughly, 00:08:02.678 --> 00:08:06.585 even if they have a reading disability. 00:08:06.585 --> 00:08:10.847 It's also extremely useful for people who are not necessarily fluent in English, 00:08:10.847 --> 00:08:14.331 or can read it better than they can understand it aurally, 00:08:14.331 --> 00:08:18.196 which is true of a lot of people who are just learning English. 00:08:18.196 --> 00:08:23.023 So captioning as Universal Design, I think, is really important. 00:08:23.023 --> 00:08:26.787 I probably don't have to make the case too hard for you guys, 00:08:26.787 --> 00:08:30.442 but I just thought I'd lay out all of the ways that captioning benefits a lot of people, 00:08:30.442 --> 00:08:35.081 including that often-neglected pool of people who don't self-identify as having a disability, 00:08:35.081 --> 00:08:38.859 and don't know their rights under the ADA, which is a very large group of people 00:08:38.859 --> 00:08:45.036 who have been almost totally neglected by traditional accessibility solutions. 00:08:45.036 --> 00:08:52.467 So that's one option, one sort of way that stenography is useful in accessibility. 00:08:52.467 --> 00:08:58.173 Another way is for people with speech disabilities who want to communicate, 00:08:58.173 --> 00:09:01.611 who might use augmentative communication devices, 00:09:01.611 --> 00:09:07.224 but if any of you guys have seen those in action, you'll know that even the best of them are very slow, 00:09:07.224 --> 00:09:11.490 and, to a certain degree, somewhat stilted. 00:09:11.490 --> 00:09:16.737 If people are just using qwerty to type, they can do maybe 100, 120 words a minute. 00:09:16.737 --> 00:09:21.004 If people are using systems such as Minspeak, 00:09:21.004 --> 00:09:25.376 they can sort of cluster ideas and get the sentences out somewhat faster, 00:09:25.376 --> 00:09:29.259 but even so, they're nowhere near a conversational level of speech. 00:09:29.259 --> 00:09:38.569 But with steno, you can basically write as fast as you can talk. 00:09:38.569 --> 00:09:48.898 And if you just hook this into a text-to-speech engine, and you make it portable, 00:09:48.898 --> 00:09:55.969 which is still something I'm working on, you can make an AAC device that allows people to speak 00:09:55.969 --> 00:10:04.015 at a conversational speed, which is unprecedented and somewhat revolutionary. 00:10:04.015 --> 00:10:08.781 So I think that's a really important thing that we can look forward to in the future. 00:10:08.781 --> 00:10:13.154 There aren't yet any really good mobile or portable steno input devices, 00:10:13.154 --> 00:10:15.505 but I think there's a lot of potential for that. 00:10:15.505 --> 00:10:20.354 I'm also working on an application that hooks Plover into Glass. 00:10:20.470 --> 00:10:24.874 I've got a pair of Glass, and I've got someone developing an app for it, 00:10:24.874 --> 00:10:28.791 so I think that having that sort of feedback will also be useful. 00:10:28.791 --> 00:10:32.280 Certainly make it more mobile and portable. 00:10:32.280 --> 00:10:36.286 The third area, and I think this one might be particularly of interest to you guys, 00:10:36.286 --> 00:10:42.936 is addressing the terrible underemployment of blind and low-vision people, 00:10:42.936 --> 00:10:45.660 in this country and around the world. 00:10:45.660 --> 00:10:51.188 There are incredibly well-educated, brilliant, fantastic minds out there 00:10:51.188 --> 00:10:53.893 that are going to waste, because no one will employ them, 00:10:53.893 --> 00:11:01.079 and one thing specifically that makes stenography a really good fit for people with vision loss 00:11:01.079 --> 00:11:06.211 is that text processing speed, or rather speech processing speed, I think, 00:11:06.211 --> 00:11:08.157 is the fundamental bottleneck of steno. 00:11:08.157 --> 00:11:11.174 If you look at Stan, or if you look at me when I'm writing, 00:11:11.174 --> 00:11:13.914 our fingers are not moving particularly quickly. 00:11:13.914 --> 00:11:18.716 People might think that it's a matter of dexterity, but it's really all what happens in the brain. 00:11:18.716 --> 00:11:23.634 To be able to comprehend English speech very quickly and to encode it into steno, 00:11:23.787 --> 00:11:29.658 and then send the code to your fingers, of those three steps, 00:11:29.658 --> 00:11:35.392 by far the hardest is comprehending English without slowing down and seizing up 00:11:35.392 --> 00:11:39.523 when people are speaking to you at 240, 260, 280 words a minute. 00:11:39.523 --> 00:11:43.393 Those speeds are very fast for your typical English speaker. 00:11:43.393 --> 00:11:46.646 They're quite slow for your typical screen reader user. 00:11:46.646 --> 00:11:52.604 I know people who use screen readers who listen to them at 500, 600 words per minute. 00:11:52.604 --> 00:11:57.124 So for people who have already done the work training their brains to process speech at that level -- 00:11:57.124 --> 00:12:04.242 I don't have any scientific evidence for this, but I think there's a very good chance 00:12:04.242 --> 00:12:10.734 that they've already done a lot of the really hard work, and if they want to try to learn stenography, 00:12:10.734 --> 00:12:16.730 I think they will have a considerable leg up over most people, who, honestly, 00:12:16.730 --> 00:12:22.421 find themselves very hard pressed to achieve the speeds of 230 words per minute 00:12:22.421 --> 00:12:27.868 that are required to be captioners, court reporters, and CART providers like me. 00:12:27.868 --> 00:12:32.031 There's an 85% dropout rate in steno schools nationwide, which is pretty disgraceful, 00:12:32.031 --> 00:12:37.601 but I think a lot of that is because people do not have the sufficient speech processing speed going into it, 00:12:37.601 --> 00:12:40.230 and they're not able to develop it while they're in school. 00:12:40.230 --> 00:12:46.403 So those are my three ideas for how stenography can impact accessibility. 00:12:46.403 --> 00:12:48.995 And now, with Plover, which is free, 00:12:48.995 --> 00:12:54.414 and works with hardware that's $45, as opposed to this little number, which is about $4000, 00:12:54.414 --> 00:12:59.724 I feel like we might be poised on the edge of a sort of Steno Renaissance. 00:12:59.724 --> 00:13:01.855 I'm really hoping to get that going. 00:13:01.855 --> 00:13:05.740 So I'm going to turn it over to Hesky, and he'll tell you all about how this goes. 00:13:13.763 --> 00:13:14.328 HESKY: Static. 00:13:17.094 --> 00:13:18.745 Is this working? 00:13:18.745 --> 00:13:20.406 Excellent. 00:13:25.714 --> 00:13:27.294 Hi, everyone. 00:13:27.294 --> 00:13:29.904 I'm Hesky, and I'm the lead developer on Plover right now. 00:13:29.904 --> 00:13:35.640 As Mirabai said, my girlfriend enrolled in stenography school, 00:13:35.640 --> 00:13:37.049 and I wanted to learn a little bit about it. 00:13:37.049 --> 00:13:40.740 It's very hard to find information about stenography out there, 00:13:40.740 --> 00:13:46.501 and it turns out that Mirabai's blog is, I think, the only well-written description of it on the Internet. 00:13:46.611 --> 00:13:50.027 I found it, and then I saw that she was working on this project, 00:13:50.027 --> 00:13:54.506 and I just wanted to make it useful for us, so I started adding features that I needed, 00:13:54.506 --> 00:13:57.384 and basically I just started working on it for fun. 00:13:57.384 --> 00:14:05.742 I never thought of myself as an accessibility programmer, despite the sort of obvious connection, 00:14:05.742 --> 00:14:08.304 until I was asked to speak here. 00:14:08.304 --> 00:14:12.551 And I started to think about what I generally think of as accessibility programming, 00:14:12.551 --> 00:14:21.262 and how that relates to what I do, and I saw some parallels beyond Plover's use case. 00:14:21.262 --> 00:14:22.267 (clearing throat) 00:14:22.267 --> 00:14:23.697 Excuse me. 00:14:23.697 --> 00:14:31.730 I think that accessibility programming, like coding for Plover, 00:14:31.730 --> 00:14:34.579 often involves an intention, 00:14:34.712 --> 00:14:40.579 without necessarily having the skill first, of doing something incredibly complicated. 00:14:40.579 --> 00:14:49.529 So if you want to make some application usable, write that app or operating system or whatever, 00:14:49.529 --> 00:14:55.423 then you suddenly have to become an expert into it, beyond what a normal developer would have to know, 00:14:55.423 --> 00:14:59.340 to somehow dig into its guts, and make it give you its text, 00:14:59.340 --> 00:15:02.340 or change its colors or anything like that. 00:15:02.340 --> 00:15:05.089 And that's what it's been like, developing Plover. 00:15:05.089 --> 00:15:12.086 From the very beginning, writing normal code to do the logic that Plover needs to do is fairly easy. 00:15:12.086 --> 00:15:20.297 But then, suddenly, I had to convince the operating system to do things that it desperately did not want to do. 00:15:20.297 --> 00:15:26.909 As you can see, it involves things like being on top of other applications, 00:15:26.909 --> 00:15:28.687 or, you know, coming up, going down. 00:15:28.687 --> 00:15:33.825 And then, of course, the community wanted it for every operating system out there. 00:15:33.825 --> 00:15:39.059 So that became a journey of suddenly trying to become that type of expert 00:15:39.059 --> 00:15:47.257 on every operating system that I could get my hands on, and similar things like that. 00:15:47.257 --> 00:15:51.109 For example, Josh was the original programmer on Plover that Mirabai mentioned. 00:15:51.109 --> 00:15:57.051 He is quite amazing, and he is working on building an open source stenography machine. 00:15:57.051 --> 00:16:02.393 The machine that Mirabai uses here is $4000, and that's not unusual. 00:16:02.393 --> 00:16:06.463 And Josh is trying to target a much, much lower pricepoint. 00:16:06.463 --> 00:16:08.283 I don't know exactly what that's going to be yet. 00:16:08.283 --> 00:16:09.888 And I'm helping out. 00:16:11.709 --> 00:16:12.453 MIRABAI: $300. 00:16:12.612 --> 00:16:13.724 HESKY: $300. 00:16:13.845 --> 00:16:14.968 That's very good. 00:16:15.035 --> 00:16:19.039 So that's orders of mag... That's very good. 00:16:19.039 --> 00:16:21.996 So I started from scratch. 00:16:22.466 --> 00:16:25.903 Again, I had the intention -- I'd like to make a machine that's a stenography machine. 00:16:25.903 --> 00:16:31.622 But I don't know any of the required techniques that I need. 00:16:31.622 --> 00:16:37.204 So once again, you know, one minor example is: 00:16:37.204 --> 00:16:39.529 Usually the machine speaks via USB. 00:16:39.673 --> 00:16:42.087 I had never done any USB. 00:16:42.087 --> 00:16:47.248 I had always thought it would be a good idea to learn USB, but like many people, I had an idea 00:16:47.248 --> 00:16:52.013 that I wanted to learn hardware engineering, but I never had a project I wanted to do. 00:16:52.013 --> 00:16:54.981 Well, the problem is: Once you get to the project to do, 00:16:54.981 --> 00:17:04.038 then you have an intention now, but you haven't built that skill, and it's kind of a Catch-22. 00:17:04.038 --> 00:17:12.304 So if I can encourage anybody to start with projects earlier and build up the skills that become necessary 00:17:12.304 --> 00:17:15.376 as soon as you know what you actually want to do. 00:17:15.376 --> 00:17:25.008 So the other aspect of working on Plover that's interesting and similar to usability is -- 00:17:25.008 --> 00:17:29.511 for many people who do accessibility programming -- I'm not the user. 00:17:29.511 --> 00:17:35.721 So it's very hard to... 00:17:35.721 --> 00:17:41.995 I'm not a stenographer, and it's quite difficult to guess what a stenographer actually wants, 00:17:42.117 --> 00:17:45.914 especially when I'm making up a feature. 00:17:45.914 --> 00:17:51.081 Even when I'm asked explicitly for a feature, I'm interpreting it, you know, 00:17:51.081 --> 00:17:52.748 based on my understanding of it. 00:17:52.748 --> 00:17:57.272 And I think that probably has a lot in common if you're doing something for a user 00:17:57.272 --> 00:17:59.457 that's hearing-disabled or vision-disabled. 00:18:00.560 --> 00:18:04.724 You can only put yourself in their shoes so well. 00:18:04.724 --> 00:18:09.266 And so the most valuable tool that Plover has is its community. 00:18:09.266 --> 00:18:13.181 To constantly throw things out there and encourage feedback. 00:18:13.181 --> 00:18:21.657 There's no way I could have made any progress without the Plover community constantly giving feedback. 00:18:21.657 --> 00:18:23.043 Some of it not so polite. 00:18:23.043 --> 00:18:26.962 But that's still very worthwhile. 00:18:26.962 --> 00:18:31.945 And I think that has a lot of parallels, here, too. 00:18:31.945 --> 00:18:38.294 So, speaking of the community, I did not realize that I would become a babysitter, 00:18:38.294 --> 00:18:41.241 taking on this programming role. 00:18:41.241 --> 00:18:44.735 As soon as I had a official position, where I was the main programmer, 00:18:44.735 --> 00:18:52.029 suddenly it kind of became my responsibility to make sure that the community didn't self-destruct, at times. 00:18:52.029 --> 00:18:57.814 Every mailing list that's able to be joined openly will attract... 00:18:57.814 --> 00:19:01.367 Different types of destructive elements. 00:19:01.367 --> 00:19:06.127 People who post about their pet peeve on something unrelated. 00:19:06.127 --> 00:19:15.145 But less destructive are people who are passionate about the project, but want it to go in their direction. 00:19:16.148 --> 00:19:18.659 And it's really hard to deal with that kind of thing. 00:19:18.659 --> 00:19:21.163 Because it goes in two directions. 00:19:21.163 --> 00:19:28.598 I want to take their feedback, and it's extremely valid in most cases, but then, very often, 00:19:28.598 --> 00:19:32.274 it immediately starts to conflict with, say, my vision of where I think the project should go. 00:19:32.388 --> 00:19:37.410 But then I have to ask myself fairly: Is my vision the right one? 00:19:37.410 --> 00:19:38.120 Right? 00:19:38.120 --> 00:19:40.159 These are responses from the users. 00:19:40.159 --> 00:19:44.354 And in Plover's case, there's actually an interesting split between the users. 00:19:44.354 --> 00:19:48.371 There are the people that I think of as stenographers. 00:19:48.371 --> 00:19:52.268 People who are going to stenography school, or tried stenography school and are now learning 00:19:52.268 --> 00:19:55.926 on their own or out of books, but sort of classic stenography, 00:19:55.926 --> 00:20:02.087 and they agree to be bound by the restrictions and rules that all stenographers work by. 00:20:02.087 --> 00:20:04.616 And there's the blue sky users. 00:20:04.616 --> 00:20:07.177 People who show up to stenography and say, "That's great. 00:20:07.177 --> 00:20:10.312 Now, how can we make it a hundred times better?" 00:20:10.312 --> 00:20:15.472 Let's add 30 more buttons, and let's map the keyboard to everything." 00:20:15.472 --> 00:20:23.090 And, again, I have to try to balance this notion with... 00:20:23.242 --> 00:20:25.385 Well, that's not what this app is for. 00:20:25.385 --> 00:20:31.772 But maybe it is, because these make up a certain number of users, 00:20:31.772 --> 00:20:35.029 and maybe I'm the crazy one, right? 00:20:35.029 --> 00:20:38.786 They've got the million dollar idea, and I'm just saying that's stupid. 00:20:38.786 --> 00:20:40.233 Let's not do it. 00:20:40.233 --> 00:20:43.735 And so it's a complicated balance. 00:20:43.735 --> 00:20:45.127 A balancing act. 00:20:45.127 --> 00:20:47.566 To try to figure out which is the right way to go. 00:20:47.566 --> 00:20:52.222 If I had a simple answer, this talk would be shorter, 00:20:52.222 --> 00:20:57.806 But I'd say I just have to wait. 00:20:57.806 --> 00:20:59.745 And it's not clear that I always make the right decision, 00:20:59.745 --> 00:21:05.498 but what I try very hard to do is to not make that irreversible, 00:21:05.498 --> 00:21:07.103 in the sense that I just shoot it down. 00:21:07.103 --> 00:21:10.946 I usually just say, "That sounds great, but I don't have the time. 00:21:11.080 --> 00:21:16.719 But maybe if you would like to contribute that, that would be fantastic." 00:21:16.719 --> 00:21:20.120 And that's the nice thing about open-source projects, is it does attract people who are passionate 00:21:20.120 --> 00:21:23.003 and capable of contributing. 00:21:23.003 --> 00:21:29.940 And so we do get contributions, people who write code for us, and some of our best features come that way. 00:21:29.940 --> 00:21:36.031 And when that started happening, I felt like we had truly achieved a vibrant 00:21:36.031 --> 00:21:43.314 and self-supporting community, and I think that should be the goal for every open source program. 00:21:43.314 --> 00:21:50.552 If I'm the only programmer, then that's a strong single source of failure for our entire project. 00:21:50.552 --> 00:21:56.395 So those are all the points that I wanted to touch. 00:21:56.395 --> 00:21:58.084 It's time for Q&A. 00:21:58.084 --> 00:22:00.185 You can ask me, or Mirabai, or both. 00:22:08.666 --> 00:22:11.366 CAMERON: If you have any questions, please raise your hand, and I'll give you the mic. 00:22:16.580 --> 00:22:17.392 HESKY: Testing. 00:22:19.467 --> 00:22:21.042 AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was wondering... 00:22:21.042 --> 00:22:25.972 You guys both touched on Plover being free and also open source, 00:22:25.972 --> 00:22:28.167 and the kind of community around that. 00:22:28.167 --> 00:22:31.806 Do you think that the freeness, in terms of monetary cost, 00:22:31.806 --> 00:22:35.916 was a big decision about why people use Plover? 00:22:35.916 --> 00:22:37.903 Like, to get people into it? 00:22:37.903 --> 00:22:39.766 MIRABAI: Huge. Huge. 00:22:39.766 --> 00:22:46.645 Right now, your options -- discounting Plover -- your options for stenography software are, I guess, threefold. 00:22:46.645 --> 00:22:50.561 There's a free app -- free as in beer, not as in speech -- 00:22:50.561 --> 00:22:53.785 app on the iPad that's basically useless. 00:22:53.785 --> 00:23:00.271 It pretends to emulate a steno machine, but without haptic feedback it's almost impossible to actually use it. 00:23:00.271 --> 00:23:01.711 So there's that. 00:23:01.711 --> 00:23:04.998 But that actually came around after Plover got started. 00:23:04.998 --> 00:23:09.124 There's student software, which is around $500. 00:23:09.124 --> 00:23:14.868 You have to have proof of enrollment in a steno school, and it's missing a lot of key features. 00:23:14.868 --> 00:23:18.495 Like, it doesn't allow you to save files. 00:23:18.495 --> 00:23:22.979 It basically just restricts you so massively that you can barely do anything with it. 00:23:23.064 --> 00:23:29.439 And then there's the $4000 court reporting software, which is fully featured for court reporters, 00:23:29.439 --> 00:23:32.188 but obviously not accessible to most people. 00:23:32.188 --> 00:23:38.738 So for hobbyists, amateurs, people who want to use steno to write novels, people who want to use it to code software, 00:23:38.738 --> 00:23:41.556 Plover had to be free. 00:23:41.556 --> 00:23:43.166 I mean, that was just the only way. 00:23:43.166 --> 00:23:47.994 There's enough of a barrier to entry just in the learning curve of learning how to do stenography 00:23:47.994 --> 00:23:52.802 that making the software completely free, and making the hardware about $50, 00:23:53.138 --> 00:23:55.914 which is what it is right now, the cheapest option to interface with Plover, 00:23:55.914 --> 00:24:00.786 that had to be in place before we could start making the big push to get people to learn Plover. 00:24:00.786 --> 00:24:02.383 Which, by the way, speaking of Learn Plover, 00:24:02.383 --> 00:24:05.778 the author of our textbook, Zachary Brown, is back there. 00:24:05.814 --> 00:24:11.112 He's collaborating with me to write a free online textbook to teach people stenography, 00:24:11.266 --> 00:24:15.505 which we hope also will someday get turned into an interactive video game, 00:24:15.505 --> 00:24:17.380 which will hopefully make it even more accessible. 00:24:18.729 --> 00:24:20.354 HESKY: I just wanted to add a little bit to that. 00:24:20.354 --> 00:24:22.736 It's very clear from our users that money is an object, 00:24:25.487 --> 00:24:34.814 and that expresses itself technically by very difficult questions on how to get Plover running on older and older machines, 00:24:34.814 --> 00:24:43.089 and, in fact, some people on the group have gone so far as defining "accessibility" as "working on their computers", 00:24:43.089 --> 00:24:46.689 and I'm only half-kidding. 00:24:46.689 --> 00:24:48.002 MIRABAI: No, it's true. 00:24:48.002 --> 00:24:53.957 HESKY: And it could be almost heartbreaking when they tell you that, like... 00:24:54.120 --> 00:24:56.862 "So I've finally got all the equipment together!" 00:24:56.862 --> 00:25:01.284 And then I have to tell them that they have to buy some cable, and it just breaks the bank, 00:25:01.284 --> 00:25:03.288 because they have to connect things. 00:25:03.288 --> 00:25:07.313 And it's just... 00:25:07.625 --> 00:25:10.994 AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a follow-up on that. 00:25:10.994 --> 00:25:15.932 So if somebody wants to get Plover or contribute to Plover, what is the website? 00:25:15.932 --> 00:25:25.342 MIRABAI: The website is ploversteno.org. 00:25:25.342 --> 00:25:29.193 HESKY: All right, we actually suffer from too many websites. 00:25:29.193 --> 00:25:39.182 MIRABAI: Well, Sveta, right here, amazing usability expert, user experience designer, and web designer 00:25:39.182 --> 00:25:42.779 is actually helping us consolidate our websites into one general hub, 00:25:42.779 --> 00:25:45.649 so that people can just go to just one page and find what they're looking for there, 00:25:45.649 --> 00:25:48.804 instead of the terrible sort of fractured sprawl we have right now. 00:25:49.275 --> 00:25:51.119 Thank you, Sveta! 00:25:52.749 --> 00:26:00.964 HESKY: Right now there is the blog, the code, the download page, the wiki, the forum, 00:26:00.964 --> 00:26:05.909 the mailing list, the textbook. 00:26:08.615 --> 00:26:09.704 AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. 00:26:09.704 --> 00:26:13.314 You mentioned the 85% dropout rate from steno school. 00:26:13.314 --> 00:26:20.086 Is there any conversation either in Plover or within the larger community about how to work on that? 00:26:22.615 --> 00:26:25.091 MIRABAI: I could speak about this for hours. 00:26:25.091 --> 00:26:28.724 I think there are a lot of economic components. 00:26:28.724 --> 00:26:30.350 (mic booming) 00:26:30.350 --> 00:26:40.147 Sorry. I think, to a large degree, that dropout rate is because: A) steno's very difficult to do at a high level. 00:26:40.147 --> 00:26:42.122 Meaning professional speeds. 00:26:42.122 --> 00:26:46.267 I think it's much less difficult to do at sort of general conversational speed, 00:26:46.267 --> 00:26:48.558 or for text composition and text entry. 00:26:48.558 --> 00:26:52.907 I think that's a pretty reasonable goalpost for most people. 00:26:52.907 --> 00:26:54.791 But actual professional steno speeds, 00:26:54.889 --> 00:26:59.804 230 to 240 words per minute, very difficult for many people. 00:26:59.804 --> 00:27:05.753 The other thing to consider is that a lot of people are going into steno school who don't necessarily 00:27:05.753 --> 00:27:09.039 have the baseline language skills in English. 00:27:09.039 --> 00:27:15.459 It's seen as sort of a clerical field, and a good middle class career. 00:27:15.459 --> 00:27:21.519 But most of the schools are for-profit, and there aren't really any admission requirements. 00:27:21.519 --> 00:27:25.057 So they'll basically recruit on the subways; they'll tell everyone to just come in. 00:27:25.057 --> 00:27:31.826 They'll sell them the $1,000 student steno machine, let them go through a theory class, 00:27:31.826 --> 00:27:36.095 after a certain point, these students don't get to their goal speeds, 00:27:36.095 --> 00:27:39.897 their financial aid runs out, they're not passing tests, they drop out, 00:27:39.897 --> 00:27:44.682 they sell their machine back to the school, the school sells it back again to another set of students. 00:27:44.682 --> 00:27:50.557 So there isn't really any incentive for these for-profit schools to improve the graduation rates. 00:27:50.557 --> 00:27:54.157 And, honestly, I mean, even the ones that acting in good faith and trying to graduate 00:27:54.157 --> 00:27:55.723 as many students of possible -- 00:27:55.723 --> 00:28:03.296 the pool of people entering steno school is not necessarily the people who have the baseline skills necessary to succeed. 00:28:03.296 --> 00:28:07.841 So my solution is just to make steno not something you have to go to school for, 00:28:07.841 --> 00:28:10.778 and that you don't have to buy a $1,000 machine for and pay tuition for. 00:28:10.778 --> 00:28:14.743 Make steno something that, if you want to give it a try and see if you have a knack for it, 00:28:14.743 --> 00:28:17.882 and play around with it, you know, play a video game a couple hours a night, 00:28:17.882 --> 00:28:23.718 and see if your speed takes off, because you're just one of those inherently inborn natural stenographers, 00:28:23.918 --> 00:28:25.264 like Stan -- 00:28:25.264 --> 00:28:30.903 that's something you can do without risking a ton of time and money and effort and risk. 00:28:31.491 --> 00:28:34.063 HESKY: Just quickly wanted to add that, 00:28:34.063 --> 00:28:37.210 because of the structure of how you learn steno, you enroll in school, 00:28:37.210 --> 00:28:42.297 you have the large initial outlay for the equipment, software, and tuition, and then, 00:28:42.297 --> 00:28:45.426 when you realize that you're not going to make it in the profession, there's a huge frustration, 00:28:45.426 --> 00:28:48.204 and usually a complete dumping of the thing. 00:28:48.204 --> 00:28:52.803 You sell your old machine back, your old textbooks, and you move on. 00:28:52.803 --> 00:28:56.795 And it's unfortunate, because of that structure, dropping out is considered a failure. 00:28:56.795 --> 00:29:01.466 Because the person who drops out could have reached 130, 180, or something like that, 00:29:01.466 --> 00:29:03.123 and that's a useful skill in and of itself, 00:29:03.233 --> 00:29:06.458 but that's not what they signed up for in terms of schooling. 00:29:06.458 --> 00:29:13.074 We're hoping that, with people having open source and free methods, that that's not a failure. 00:29:13.074 --> 00:29:17.161 That's just reaching a very, very good typing speed. 00:29:19.059 --> 00:29:19.775 There's one. 00:29:19.923 --> 00:29:21.573 He already has the mic. 00:29:21.573 --> 00:29:23.501 Somebody already has the microphone. 00:29:28.427 --> 00:29:31.806 AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm hearing in this talk sort of -- 00:29:32.000 --> 00:29:34.501 it sounds like there's two separate communities. 00:29:34.501 --> 00:29:38.409 There's the steno schools and closed source software and closed source hardware, 00:29:38.409 --> 00:29:44.932 and all of the stuff that goes around that point of view, I guess, and then there's Plover 00:29:44.932 --> 00:29:47.067 and the community that's built around that. 00:29:47.067 --> 00:29:48.804 And I'm wondering... 00:29:48.804 --> 00:29:51.971 What are their relative sizes? 00:29:51.971 --> 00:29:53.259 Are they really separate communities? 00:29:53.404 --> 00:29:56.563 And is Plover changing what is steno? 00:29:56.563 --> 00:29:59.758 Or is steno still what it always has been? 00:29:59.758 --> 00:30:03.649 And what's the social relationship between the two communities? 00:30:03.649 --> 00:30:04.520 Are they getting along? 00:30:04.520 --> 00:30:07.191 Is there animosity? 00:30:07.191 --> 00:30:07.684 HESKY: Can I take this one? 00:30:07.684 --> 00:30:08.746 MIRABAI: Yeah, go for it. 00:30:08.746 --> 00:30:11.464 HESKY: Mirabai will probably have more to add to this, 00:30:11.464 --> 00:30:19.981 but we've done at least one demo session at the local school, for students to see, and Plover's still adding features 00:30:19.981 --> 00:30:23.043 that some of the other software comes with. 00:30:23.043 --> 00:30:27.585 I don't know how it's going to go in the future, but the relationship between Plover 00:30:27.585 --> 00:30:34.417 and the software companies and hardware companies is between being ignored and being hostile. 00:30:38.863 --> 00:30:41.619 AUDIENCE MEMBER: But there have been some hardware donations, right? 00:30:41.745 --> 00:30:42.708 HESKY: That's true. 00:30:42.708 --> 00:30:45.242 So what has happened is that, like every world, 00:30:45.242 --> 00:30:50.016 there are underdogs, and the underdogs have been far friendlier than the entrenched players. 00:30:50.016 --> 00:30:54.000 Right, I should have acknowledged that some of the companies have been friendly. 00:30:54.000 --> 00:30:59.349 But, you know, the hardware, for example, 00:30:59.349 --> 00:31:04.265 comes with protocols that have to be decoded in order to work with them, 00:31:04.265 --> 00:31:11.975 and several companies have been very aggressive about not letting us get to the protocol. 00:31:11.975 --> 00:31:16.007 And it's a very small world. 00:31:16.007 --> 00:31:21.391 I think at this point I've spoken to all the CEOs randomly, by email. 00:31:21.391 --> 00:31:29.009 And I've heard that one person who volunteered to work on one aspect of Plover 00:31:29.173 --> 00:31:33.588 actually had a salesperson, like, target him. 00:31:33.588 --> 00:31:35.907 It was a very bizarre story. 00:31:35.907 --> 00:31:40.359 But (inaudible)... 00:31:40.359 --> 00:31:43.300 MIRABAI: I can speak just in terms of numbers. 00:31:43.300 --> 00:31:49.386 I think there are around 30,000 active professional stenographers in the country. 00:31:49.386 --> 00:31:54.163 There's around 250 users on the Plover mailing list, which -- 00:31:54.163 --> 00:31:57.025 they're our most active and most engaged users. 00:31:57.025 --> 00:31:58.995 I don't know exactly how many downloads there are. 00:31:58.995 --> 00:32:07.203 So right now, the proportion of Plover users to professional stenographers is very, very skewed. 00:32:07.203 --> 00:32:10.994 But I think and hope that that will change pretty drastically, 00:32:10.994 --> 00:32:15.711 and honestly, from companies, software and hardware vendors, 00:32:15.852 --> 00:32:20.386 there's a certain wariness directed towards us, but from professional stenographers, 00:32:20.386 --> 00:32:26.356 by and large, there's been a lot of encouragement, because a lot of people are worried that this technology 00:32:26.356 --> 00:32:29.933 is vanishing, that the profession is dying. 00:32:29.933 --> 00:32:35.297 You know, the average age of a professional stenographer, I heard somewhere, was something like 55 years old, 00:32:35.297 --> 00:32:39.397 and as more and more people reach retirement age, 00:32:39.397 --> 00:32:44.883 and fewer and fewer younger people are graduating, it really leaves the profession vulnerable 00:32:45.012 --> 00:32:53.323 to being co-opted by less accurate, less useful, non-verbatim technologies to just fill the vacuum that's left behind 00:32:53.323 --> 00:32:56.731 if there aren't any stenographers to keep the place open. 00:32:56.731 --> 00:33:02.839 So most professional stenographers that I've talked to are very excited about Plover and are very encouraging. 00:33:02.839 --> 00:33:05.668 So we'll see what happens. 00:33:05.668 --> 00:33:17.840 CAMERON: We're going to have one more question, and then we'll take a quick break. 00:33:17.840 --> 00:33:19.093 AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a comment as a Deaf person. 00:33:19.093 --> 00:33:22.697 I think that it's great for... 00:33:22.697 --> 00:33:31.073 I think that Plover is great for people who are trying to help people become stenographers 00:33:31.073 --> 00:33:33.895 and encourage that profession, but as a deaf person, myself, 00:33:33.895 --> 00:33:38.245 I think that it's frustrating sometimes to find a good quality captionist. 00:33:38.245 --> 00:33:42.985 And, just to let you know, captioning is not the same as what they do in court. 00:33:42.985 --> 00:33:45.432 Court reporting. 00:33:45.432 --> 00:33:51.715 Court reporting is entirely different than captioning. 00:33:51.715 --> 00:33:56.583 So, in my experience, court reporters -- 00:33:56.583 --> 00:34:00.312 using both court reporters and captionists -- 00:34:00.312 --> 00:34:05.653 they're completely different. 00:34:05.653 --> 00:34:07.897 The training, I think, needs to be different. 00:34:07.897 --> 00:34:13.608 Those people who do captioning should be trained a different way for Deaf and hard of hearing people. 00:34:13.608 --> 00:34:24.428 I also know that Plover, when you use it, you still have to have some training, 00:34:24.428 --> 00:34:25.667 to have some professional training. 00:34:25.831 --> 00:34:30.336 You shouldn't just have a person who, you know, plays around with the program 00:34:30.486 --> 00:34:32.849 and then becomes a professional captionist. 00:34:32.849 --> 00:34:35.570 It's the same thing with interpreters. 00:34:35.570 --> 00:34:39.200 Just because someone knows sign language doesn't mean that they would be a good-quality interpreter. 00:34:39.200 --> 00:34:44.184 So I think it's important to note that to have a good quality captionist that can work 00:34:44.184 --> 00:34:47.082 with Deaf and hard of hearing people, they need to be professionally trained. 00:34:48.316 --> 00:34:50.917 MIRABAI: Can I just briefly respond, really quickly? 00:34:50.917 --> 00:34:53.919 Yeah, absolutely agree. 00:34:53.919 --> 00:34:57.522 Of those 30,000 professional stenographers, 00:34:57.522 --> 00:35:01.328 only about 300 in the country are certified captioners, 00:35:01.328 --> 00:35:05.615 which I think is just staggering, and it's very true that the skills are extremely different. 00:35:05.615 --> 00:35:11.396 So Plover is actually the only software that's specifically designed for live captioning. 00:35:11.396 --> 00:35:13.007 It doesn't work with broadcast captioning. 00:35:13.007 --> 00:35:14.600 It doesn't work with court reporting. 00:35:14.600 --> 00:35:16.549 Unlike every other proprietary software out there, 00:35:16.549 --> 00:35:18.521 which is specifically directed for court reporters. 00:35:18.521 --> 00:35:21.226 So, as a live captioner myself, 00:35:21.226 --> 00:35:28.518 I definitely want to sort of shepherd the potential captioning prodigies from trying steno out as an amateur, 00:35:28.518 --> 00:35:30.785 and learning through Plover, to get up there, 00:35:30.785 --> 00:35:35.217 and then sort of giving them that final push of captioning training, including ethics, 00:35:35.217 --> 00:35:37.146 including, you know, Deaf Culture, 00:35:37.146 --> 00:35:41.088 including all the sorts of things that professional captioners need to know, 00:35:41.088 --> 00:35:43.991 that you can't get just as an an amateur, playing around with the software. 00:35:43.991 --> 00:35:48.644 So I feel very passionately about that, and I feel like it's really vital to preserving my own career, 00:35:48.644 --> 00:35:52.589 to help bring up the next generation of captioners via Plover. 00:35:54.298 --> 00:35:55.881 CAMERON: Great. 00:35:55.881 --> 00:35:58.857 Thank you so much, Hesky and Mirabai. 00:35:58.857 --> 00:36:00.172 Please, a round of applause. 00:36:00.172 --> 00:36:02.049 [ Applause ] 00:36:08.138 --> 00:36:12.580 CAMERON: Coming up, we're going to have John Schimmel and DIYAbility crew 00:36:12.580 --> 00:36:19.169 talking about doing your own DIY hardware accessibility. 00:36:19.302 --> 00:36:21.363 So let's take five minutes. 00:36:21.498 --> 00:36:24.804 Introduce yourselves, please, chat amongst yourselves, 00:36:24.925 --> 00:36:29.726 and then we'll come back at 8:00 and pick up with John Schimmel. 00:36:29.726 --> 00:36:30.613 Thanks!