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CAMERON: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Pivotal
Labs and the New York City Accessibility Meetup.
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Thank you for coming tonight.
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We're very excited to have our second meetup,
and we're happy to have all of you here.
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So Pivotal Labs -- I just want to give a shoutout
for hosting us tonight.
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I work at Pivotal Labs.
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We're an agile development consultancy,
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doing mostly web development
and mobile app development.
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So if you have any needs in web development,
or even web development with accessibility,
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we do that, so come talk to me.
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Today I'm excited to introduce to you Mirabai Knight,
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who works on Plover,
which is an open-source stenography tool.
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Without further ado,
I'll let you introduce yourself, Mirabai.
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MIRABAI: Hello.
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Hi. My name is Mirabai Knight,
and I'm a stenographer.
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I won't keep doing that,
because we have Stan to caption me,
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but I just want to talk a little bit about Plover,
my open source project,
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and the accessibility implications of it,
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and then I'm going to hand it over
to Plover's lead developer,
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Hesky Fisher, and he'll talk a little bit about
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developing open source projects
that have accessibility implications
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and managing the community
and stuff along those lines.
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So how many people here
have actually seen a live captioner in action?
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Not on television, but in the room?
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That's awesome.
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That's definitely what I like to see in a room
full of accessibility people.
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That's, like, probably 90% of the room.
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Glad to hear it.
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Because we're a fairly obscure
profession, even now.
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Steno machines have been around
since about 1912,
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but we were only hooked up to computers
as of the late 1980s, so as a profession,
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live captioning is very young, and most people,
if they have heard of it,
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only think of it for television and not for live applications.
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But myself, I work in universities, primarily,
for Deaf and hard of hearing college students.
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I also work with professionals
for business meetings and conferences.
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And it was around six years ago
that I graduated from steno school.
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I'd gotten started as sort of an apprentice captioner,
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and I was very frustrated
with my proprietary steno software,
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which cost $4000, had really obnoxious DRM
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that required me to jump through
all sorts of hoops even to use the software,
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and really limited my ability to use it
the way I wanted to.
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And it didn't have a number of key features
that I really needed for my captioning work,
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because all commercial stenography software
is for court reporters, which...
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I've never done any court reporting.
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So my brother had sort of infected me with the
open source bug when I was around ten years old.
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He's a big open source evangelist.
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And my frustration with the software,
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combined with that sort of thought
in the back of my head
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that getting involved with open source
was a good thing to do,
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made me think that this might be the way to go.
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So originally I thought that I would actually
have to learn to program and develop it myself,
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because I didn't think anyone could possibly
want to do it for me.
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But by a ridiculous stroke of luck,
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I put a posting in the elevator
of my coworking space,
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asking for a Python tutor,
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and the guy who answered it
and started off tutoring me in Python --
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it turned out that he had a PhD
from the MIT Media Lab,
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and was both a hardware and a software guy,
and after a few weeks it was clear
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that I did not have a gift for programming,
and starting from scratch it would be forever
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before I was able to develop
the software that I actually wanted.
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But he got so excited about it,
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he decided he was just going to take over
the development from me and do it on his own.
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I paid him as much as I could,
but he worked at a steep discount.
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So he developed Plover for about a year.
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Then he got another job and had to give it up.
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When Hesky, my savior,
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contacted me out of the blue,
because his girlfriend was in steno school.
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Actually, the same steno school
that I graduated from.
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And he wanted to do his part to make steno
cheap and accessible.
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So he's been developing it ever since.
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He's amazing,
and he'll tell you all about that story later.
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But basically...
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I can go over the nuts and bolts
of steno if you want,
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maybe in the questions,
if you're curious about the details,
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but because I don't have that much time,
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I think I want to focus more on the potential
of steno in various accessibility areas.
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So first off, I think,
It's pretty obvious: Captioning.
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This guy right here, Stan Sakai, my captioner,
actually started out on Plover.
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He originally just wanted to use steno to take notes
when he was in college,
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but he wound up getting so excited about it,
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he taught himself, you know,
and practiced ten hours a night
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for about a year, and finally realized
that he had gotten up to
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about 230 words per minute,
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which is the speed you really
need to be a entry-level captioner,
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and I think dropped out of college
and launched his career as a captioner.
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I think he's pretty happy about it.
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He didn't do that with Plover the whole way.
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He actually switched to proprietary software,
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because Plover wasn't in
the proper shape at that point,
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But I still count him as one of our success stories.
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So captioning for Deaf and hard of hearing
people is incredibly important.
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It's very useful for all sorts of people,
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but primarily people with hearing loss
who don't know sign language
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or might not even
acknowledge their hearing loss,
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which is the vast majority of people
who have hearing loss
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that interferes with their life moderately
to significantly in some situations,
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but not at all in others.
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These are people -- often they've begun to lose
their hearing in middle age,
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and that carries through to, you know,
into their 60s and 70s.
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They don't acknowledge their hearing loss,
they don't necessarily recognize it,
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and they have no idea what they can do to compensate for it.
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Hearing aids can only do so much.
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Many of them are not candidates
for cochlear implants,
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and they often don't know that captioning exists.
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But along the way,
as this accommodation has sort of picked up speed,
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more and more captioning is offered
as a matter of course,
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not necessarily specifically
requested by Deaf advocates
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who know their rights and are able to ask for it,
but it's just become an included accommodation,
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and so this sort of invisible pool of people
who don't know that they have rights under
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the Americans with Disabilities Act,
who may be fine one-on-one in a small room,
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but who are totally at sea in a large auditorium,
where they can't read anyone's lips --
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they're finally beginning to realize
that there's an accommodation
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that works for them.
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Also there are people who use sign interpreters
in some situations,
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who prefer captioning in other situations.
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You know, they might want to have sign interpretation for conversational, or mobile, or very interactive sessions,
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but for things like lectures, where there's very
specific terminology
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that might not have specific analogs in sign,
captioning might be better.
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Captioning is also really useful for people
with attention deficit disorder,
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it's useful for some people with dyslexia,
which might seem counterintuitive,
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but having the bimodal input of getting something
both from your ears and into your eyes at the same time
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can often help people to comprehend information
and process information more thoroughly,
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even if they have a reading disability.
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It's also extremely useful for people who are
not necessarily fluent in English,
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or can read it better than they can understand it aurally,
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which is true of a lot of people who are just learning English.
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So captioning as Universal Design, I think,
is really important.
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I probably don't have to make the case too hard for you guys,
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but I just thought I'd lay out all of the ways
that captioning benefits a lot of people,
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including that often-neglected pool of people
who don't self-identify as having a disability,
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and don't know their rights under the ADA,
which is a very large group of people
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who have been almost totally neglected
by traditional accessibility solutions.
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So that's one option,
one sort of way that stenography is useful in accessibility.
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Another way is for people with speech disabilities
who want to communicate,
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who might use augmentative communication devices,
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but if any of you guys have seen those in action,
you'll know that even the best of them are very slow,
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and, to a certain degree, somewhat stilted.
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If people are just using qwerty to type,
they can do maybe 100, 120 words a minute.
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If people are using systems such as Minspeak,
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they can sort of cluster ideas
and get the sentences out somewhat faster,
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but even so, they're nowhere near
a conversational level of speech.
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But with steno,
you can basically write as fast as you can talk.
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And if you just hook this into a text-to-speech engine,
and you make it portable,
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which is still something I'm working on,
you can make an AAC device that allows people to speak
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at a conversational speed,
which is unprecedented and somewhat revolutionary.
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So I think that's a really important thing
that we can look forward to in the future.
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There aren't yet any really good mobile
or portable steno input devices,
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but I think there's a lot of potential for that.
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I'm also working on an application
that hooks Plover into Glass.
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I've got a pair of Glass,
and I've got someone developing an app for it,
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so I think that having that sort of feedback will also be useful.
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Certainly make it more mobile and portable.
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The third area, and I think this one might
be particularly of interest to you guys,
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is addressing the terrible underemployment of blind
and low-vision people,
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in this country and around the world.
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There are incredibly well-educated,
brilliant, fantastic minds out there
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that are going to waste,
because no one will employ them,
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and one thing specifically that makes
stenography a really good fit for people with vision loss
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is that text processing speed,
or rather speech processing speed, I think,
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is the fundamental bottleneck of steno.
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If you look at Stan,
or if you look at me when I'm writing,
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our fingers are not moving particularly quickly.
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People might think that it's a matter of dexterity,
but it's really all what happens in the brain.
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To be able to comprehend English speech
very quickly and to encode it into steno,
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and then send the code to your fingers,
of those three steps,
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by far the hardest is comprehending English
without slowing down and seizing up
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when people are speaking to you at 240,
260, 280 words a minute.
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Those speeds are very fast for your typical English speaker.
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They're quite slow for your typical screen reader user.
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I know people who use screen readers
who listen to them at 500, 600 words per minute.
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So for people who have already done the work
training their brains to process speech at that level --
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I don't have any scientific evidence for this,
but I think there's a very good chance
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that they've already done a lot of the really hard work,
and if they want to try to learn stenography,
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I think they will have a considerable leg
up over most people, who, honestly,
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find themselves very hard pressed to achieve
the speeds of 230 words per minute
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that are required to be captioners,
court reporters, and CART providers like me.
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There's an 85% dropout rate in steno schools nationwide,
which is pretty disgraceful,
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but I think a lot of that is because people do not have
the sufficient speech processing speed going into it,
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and they're not able to develop it while they're in school.
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So those are my three ideas
for how stenography can impact accessibility.
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And now, with Plover, which is free,
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and works with hardware that's $45,
as opposed to this little number, which is about $4000,
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I feel like we might be poised on the edge
of a sort of Steno Renaissance.
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I'm really hoping to get that going.
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So I'm going to turn it over to Hesky,
and he'll tell you all about how this goes.
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HESKY: Static.
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Is this working?
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Excellent.
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Hi, everyone.
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I'm Hesky, and I'm the lead developer on Plover right now.
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As Mirabai said,
my girlfriend enrolled in stenography school,
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and I wanted to learn a little bit about it.
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It's very hard to find information about stenography out there,
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and it turns out that Mirabai's blog is, I think,
the only well-written description of it on the Internet.
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I found it, and then I saw that she was
working on this project,
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and I just wanted to make it useful for us,
so I started adding features that I needed,
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and basically I just started working on it for fun.
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I never thought of myself as an accessibility programmer,
despite the sort of obvious connection,
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until I was asked to speak here.
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And I started to think about what
I generally think of as accessibility programming,
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and how that relates to what I do,
and I saw some parallels beyond Plover's use case.
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(clearing throat)
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Excuse me.
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I think that accessibility programming,
like coding for Plover,
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often involves an intention,
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without necessarily having the skill first,
of doing something incredibly complicated.
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So if you want to make some application usable,
write that app or operating system or whatever,
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then you suddenly have to become an expert into it,
beyond what a normal developer would have to know,
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to somehow dig into its guts,
and make it give you its text,
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or change its colors or anything like that.
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And that's what it's been like,
developing Plover.
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From the very beginning, writing normal code
to do the logic that Plover needs to do is fairly easy.
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But then, suddenly, I had to convince the operating system
to do things that it desperately did not want to do.
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As you can see, it involves things
like being on top of other applications,
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or, you know,
coming up, going down.
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And then, of course, the community wanted
it for every operating system out there.
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So that became a journey of suddenly trying
to become that type of expert
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on every operating system that I could get my hands on,
and similar things like that.
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For example, Josh was the original programmer on Plover
that Mirabai mentioned.
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He is quite amazing, and he is working on building
an open source stenography machine.
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The machine that Mirabai uses here is $4000,
and that's not unusual.
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And Josh is trying to target a much, much lower pricepoint.
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I don't know exactly what that's going to be yet.
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And I'm helping out.
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MIRABAI: $300.
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HESKY: $300.
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That's very good.
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So that's orders of mag...
That's very good.
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So I started from scratch.
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Again, I had the intention -- I'd like to make
a machine that's a stenography machine.
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But I don't know any of the required techniques that I need.
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So once again, you know, one minor example is:
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Usually the machine speaks via USB.
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I had never done any USB.
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I had always thought it would be a good idea to learn USB,
but like many people, I had an idea
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that I wanted to learn hardware engineering,
but I never had a project I wanted to do.
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Well, the problem is:
Once you get to the project to do,
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then you have an intention now, but you haven't built that skill,
and it's kind of a Catch-22.
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So if I can encourage anybody to start with projects earlier
and build up the skills that become necessary
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as soon as you know what you actually want to do.
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So the other aspect of working on Plover that's
interesting and similar to usability is --
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for many people who do accessibility programming --
I'm not the user.
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So it's very hard to...
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I'm not a stenographer, and it's quite difficult
to guess what a stenographer actually wants,
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especially when I'm making up a feature.
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Even when I'm asked explicitly
for a feature, I'm interpreting it, you know,
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based on my understanding of it.
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And I think that probably has a lot in common
if you're doing something for a user
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that's hearing-disabled or vision-disabled.
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You can only put yourself in their shoes so well.
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And so the most valuable tool that Plover has
is its community.
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To constantly throw things out there and encourage feedback.
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There's no way I could have made any progress without
the Plover community constantly giving feedback.
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Some of it not so polite.
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But that's still very worthwhile.
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And I think that has a lot of parallels, here, too.
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So, speaking of the community,
I did not realize that I would become a babysitter,
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taking on this programming role.
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As soon as I had a official position,
where I was the main programmer,
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suddenly it kind of became my responsibility to make sure
that the community didn't self-destruct, at times.
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Every mailing list that's able to be
joined openly will attract...
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Different types of destructive elements.
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People who post about their pet peeve
on something unrelated.
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But less destructive are people who are passionate
about the project, but want it to go in their direction.
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And it's really hard to deal
with that kind of thing.
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Because it goes in two directions.
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I want to take their feedback, and it's extremely
valid in most cases, but then, very often,
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it immediately starts to conflict with, say,
my vision of where I think the project should go.
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But then I have to ask myself fairly:
Is my vision the right one?
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Right?
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These are responses from the users.
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And in Plover's case, there's actually
an interesting split between the users.
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There are the people that I think of as stenographers.
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People who are going to stenography school,
or tried stenography school and are now learning
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on their own or out of books, but sort of classic stenography,
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and they agree to be bound by the restrictions and rules
that all stenographers work by.
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And there's the blue sky users.
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People who show up to stenography and say,
"That's great.
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Now, how can we make it a hundred times better?"
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Let's add 30 more buttons,
and let's map the keyboard to everything."
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And, again, I have to try to
balance this notion with...
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Well, that's not what this app is for.
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But maybe it is,
because these make up a certain number of users,
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and maybe I'm the crazy one, right?
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They've got the million dollar idea,
and I'm just saying that's stupid.
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Let's not do it.
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And so it's a complicated balance.
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A balancing act.
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To try to figure out which is the right way to go.
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If I had a simple answer, this talk would be shorter,
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But I'd say I just have to wait.
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And it's not clear that I always make the right decision,
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but what I try very hard to do
is to not make that irreversible,
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in the sense that I just shoot it down.
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I usually just say, "That sounds great, but I don't have the time.
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But maybe if you would like to contribute that,
that would be fantastic."
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And that's the nice thing about open-source projects,
is it does attract people who are passionate
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and capable of contributing.
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And so we do get contributions, people who write code
for us, and some of our best features come that way.
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And when that started happening,
I felt like we had truly achieved a vibrant
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and self-supporting community, and I think
that should be the goal for every open source program.
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If I'm the only programmer, then that's a strong
single source of failure for our entire project.
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So those are all the points that I wanted to touch.
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It's time for Q&A.
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You can ask me, or Mirabai, or both.
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CAMERON: If you have any questions,
please raise your hand, and I'll give you the mic.
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HESKY: Testing.
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AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was wondering...
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You guys both touched on Plover being
free and also open source,
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and the kind of community around that.
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Do you think that the freeness,
in terms of monetary cost,
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was a big decision about why people use Plover?
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Like, to get people into it?
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MIRABAI: Huge. Huge.
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Right now, your options -- discounting Plover -- your options
for stenography software are, I guess, threefold.
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There's a free app -- free as in beer, not as in speech --
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app on the iPad that's basically useless.
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It pretends to emulate a steno machine, but without haptic feedback it's almost impossible to actually use it.
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So there's that.
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But that actually came around after Plover got started.
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There's student software, which is around $500.
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You have to have proof of enrollment in a steno school,
and it's missing a lot of key features.
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Like, it doesn't allow you to save files.
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It basically just restricts you so massively
that you can barely do anything with it.
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And then there's the $4000 court reporting software,
which is fully featured for court reporters,
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but obviously not accessible to most people.
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So for hobbyists, amateurs, people who want to use steno to write novels, people who want to use it to code software,
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Plover had to be free.
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I mean, that was just the only way.
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There's enough of a barrier to entry just in the learning curve of learning how to do stenography
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that making the software completely free,
and making the hardware about $50,
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which is what it is right now,
the cheapest option to interface with Plover,
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that had to be in place before we could start
making the big push to get people to learn Plover.
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Which, by the way, speaking of Learn Plover,
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the author of our textbook,
Zachary Brown, is back there.
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He's collaborating with me to write a free online textbook
to teach people stenography,
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which we hope also will someday
get turned into an interactive video game,
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which will hopefully make it even more accessible.
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HESKY: I just wanted to add a little bit to that.
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It's very clear from our users that money is an object,
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and that expresses itself technically by very difficult questions
on how to get Plover running on older and older machines,
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and, in fact, some people on the group have gone so far as defining "accessibility" as "working on their computers",
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and I'm only half-kidding.
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MIRABAI: No, it's true.
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HESKY: And it could be almost heartbreaking
when they tell you that, like...
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"So I've finally got all
the equipment together!"
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And then I have to tell them that they have to buy some cable,
and it just breaks the bank,
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because they have to connect things.
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And it's just...
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AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a follow-up on that.
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So if somebody wants to get Plover or contribute to Plover,
what is the website?
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MIRABAI: The website is ploversteno.org.
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HESKY: All right, we actually suffer from too many websites.
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MIRABAI: Well, Sveta, right here, amazing usability expert,
user experience designer, and web designer
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is actually helping us consolidate
our websites into one general hub,
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so that people can just go to just one page
and find what they're looking for there,
-
instead of the terrible sort of fractured sprawl
we have right now.
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Thank you, Sveta!
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HESKY: Right now there is the blog, the code,
the download page, the wiki, the forum,
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the mailing list, the textbook.
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AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi.
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You mentioned the 85% dropout rate from steno school.
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Is there any conversation either in Plover
or within the larger community about how to work on that?
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MIRABAI: I could speak about this for hours.
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I think there are a lot of economic components.
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(mic booming)
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Sorry. I think, to a large degree, that dropout rate is because:
A) steno's very difficult to do at a high level.
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Meaning professional speeds.
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I think it's much less difficult to do at sort of
general conversational speed,
-
or for text composition and text entry.
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I think that's a pretty reasonable goalpost for most people.
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But actual professional steno speeds,
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230 to 240 words per minute,
very difficult for many people.
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The other thing to consider is that a lot of people
are going into steno school who don't necessarily
-
have the baseline language skills in English.
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It's seen as sort of a clerical field,
and a good middle class career.
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But most of the schools are for-profit,
and there aren't really any admission requirements.
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So they'll basically recruit on the subways;
they'll tell everyone to just come in.
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They'll sell them the $1,000 student steno machine,
let them go through a theory class,
-
after a certain point, these students don't
get to their goal speeds,
-
their financial aid runs out, they're not passing tests,
they drop out,
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they sell their machine back to the school,
the school sells it back again to another set of students.
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So there isn't really any incentive for these
for-profit schools to improve the graduation rates.
-
And, honestly, I mean, even the ones that acting
in good faith and trying to graduate
-
as many students of possible --
-
the pool of people entering steno school is not necessarily the people who have the baseline skills necessary to succeed.
-
So my solution is just to make steno not
something you have to go to school for,
-
and that you don't have to buy a $1,000 machine for
and pay tuition for.
-
Make steno something that,
if you want to give it a try and see if you have a knack for it,
-
and play around with it, you know, play a video game
a couple hours a night,
-
and see if your speed takes off, because you're just
one of those inherently inborn natural stenographers,
-
like Stan --
-
that's something you can do without risking
a ton of time and money and effort and risk.
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HESKY: Just quickly wanted to add that,
-
because of the structure of how you learn steno,
you enroll in school,
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you have the large initial outlay for the equipment,
software, and tuition, and then,
-
when you realize that you're not going to make it in the profession, there's a huge frustration,
-
and usually a complete dumping of the thing.
-
You sell your old machine back, your old textbooks,
and you move on.
-
And it's unfortunate, because of that structure,
dropping out is considered a failure.
-
Because the person who drops out
could have reached 130, 180, or something like that,
-
and that's a useful skill in and of itself,
-
but that's not what they signed up for in terms of schooling.
-
We're hoping that, with people having open source
and free methods, that that's not a failure.
-
That's just reaching a very, very good typing speed.
-
There's one.
-
He already has the mic.
-
Somebody already has the microphone.
-
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm hearing in this talk sort of --
-
it sounds like there's two separate communities.
-
There's the steno schools and closed source software
and closed source hardware,
-
and all of the stuff that goes around that point of view,
I guess, and then there's Plover
-
and the community that's built around that.
-
And I'm wondering...
-
What are their relative sizes?
-
Are they really separate communities?
-
And is Plover changing what is steno?
-
Or is steno still what it always has been?
-
And what's the social relationship between the two communities?
-
Are they getting along?
-
Is there animosity?
-
HESKY: Can I take this one?
-
MIRABAI: Yeah, go for it.
-
HESKY: Mirabai will probably
have more to add to this,
-
but we've done at least one demo session at the local school,
for students to see, and Plover's still adding features
-
that some of the other software comes with.
-
I don't know how it's going to go in the future,
but the relationship between Plover
-
and the software companies and hardware companies
is between being ignored and being hostile.
-
AUDIENCE MEMBER: But there have been
some hardware donations, right?
-
HESKY: That's true.
-
So what has happened is that, like every world,
-
there are underdogs, and the underdogs
have been far friendlier than the entrenched players.
-
Right, I should have acknowledged that some
of the companies have been friendly.
-
But, you know, the hardware, for example,
-
comes with protocols that have to be decoded
in order to work with them,
-
and several companies have been very aggressive
about not letting us get to the protocol.
-
And it's a very small world.
-
I think at this point I've spoken
to all the CEOs randomly, by email.
-
And I've heard that one person who volunteered
to work on one aspect of Plover
-
actually had a salesperson, like, target him.
-
It was a very bizarre story.
-
But (inaudible)...
-
MIRABAI: I can speak just in terms of numbers.
-
I think there are around 30,000 active
professional stenographers in the country.
-
There's around 250 users on the Plover mailing list, which --
-
they're our most active and most engaged users.
-
I don't know exactly how many downloads there are.
-
So right now, the proportion of Plover users
to professional stenographers is very, very skewed.
-
But I think and hope that
that will change pretty drastically,
-
and honestly, from companies,
software and hardware vendors,
-
there's a certain wariness directed towards us,
but from professional stenographers,
-
by and large, there's been a lot of encouragement,
because a lot of people are worried that this technology
-
is vanishing, that the profession is dying.
-
You know, the average age of a professional stenographer,
I heard somewhere, was something like 55 years old,
-
and as more and more people reach retirement age,
-
and fewer and fewer younger people are graduating,
it really leaves the profession vulnerable
-
to being co-opted by less accurate, less useful, non-verbatim
technologies to just fill the vacuum that's left behind
-
if there aren't any stenographers
to keep the place open.
-
So most professional stenographers that I've talked to are very excited about Plover and are very encouraging.
-
So we'll see what happens.
-
CAMERON: We're going to have one more question,
and then we'll take a quick break.
-
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a comment as a Deaf person.
-
I think that it's great for...
-
I think that Plover is great for people who are trying
to help people become stenographers
-
and encourage that profession, but as a deaf person, myself,
-
I think that it's frustrating sometimes
to find a good quality captionist.
-
And, just to let you know, captioning is not the same
as what they do in court.
-
Court reporting.
-
Court reporting is entirely different than captioning.
-
So, in my experience, court reporters --
-
using both court reporters and captionists --
-
they're completely different.
-
The training, I think, needs to be different.
-
Those people who do captioning should be trained a different way for Deaf and hard of hearing people.
-
I also know that Plover, when you use it,
you still have to have some training,
-
to have some professional training.
-
You shouldn't just have a person who, you know,
plays around with the program
-
and then becomes a professional captionist.
-
It's the same thing with interpreters.
-
Just because someone knows sign language doesn't
mean that they would be a good-quality interpreter.
-
So I think it's important to note that to have
a good quality captionist that can work
-
with Deaf and hard of hearing people,
they need to be professionally trained.
-
MIRABAI: Can I just briefly respond,
really quickly?
-
Yeah, absolutely agree.
-
Of those 30,000 professional stenographers,
-
only about 300 in the country are certified captioners,
-
which I think is just staggering,
and it's very true that the skills are extremely different.
-
So Plover is actually the only software
that's specifically designed for live captioning.
-
It doesn't work with broadcast captioning.
-
It doesn't work with court reporting.
-
Unlike every other proprietary software out there,
-
which is specifically directed for court reporters.
-
So, as a live captioner myself,
-
I definitely want to sort of shepherd the potential captioning prodigies from trying steno out as an amateur,
-
and learning through Plover,
to get up there,
-
and then sort of giving them that final push
of captioning training, including ethics,
-
including, you know, Deaf Culture,
-
including all the sorts of things
that professional captioners need to know,
-
that you can't get just as an an amateur,
playing around with the software.
-
So I feel very passionately about that,
and I feel like it's really vital to preserving my own career,
-
to help bring up the next generation of captioners via Plover.
-
CAMERON: Great.
-
Thank you so much, Hesky and Mirabai.
-
Please, a round of applause.
-
[ Applause ]
-
CAMERON: Coming up, we're going to have
John Schimmel and DIYAbility crew
-
talking about doing your own DIY hardware accessibility.
-
So let's take five minutes.
-
Introduce yourselves, please,
chat amongst yourselves,
-
and then we'll come back at 8:00
and pick up with John Schimmel.
-
Thanks!