It's Official

[soc_puppet]

In light of ongoing health concerns and our hosting hotel being just the best, AnimeIowa is going online-only this year!

This is a huge load off my mind; I was seriously worried about having even a fraction of our usual numbers in one place, since we usually get upwards of 3K people. Three days (four or more for staff) in a crowded hotel with poor sleep, hygiene, and eating habits all around is not a terribly good recipe for health in general, let alone when we've got a pandemic to contend with.

As head of the Accessibility Department, my priorities have also changed. I'm no longer frantic about how the hell we're even going to get enough hand sanitizer for the con in general, etc. My current projects are: Try to make sure we have descriptive audio for videos we get in advance; try and find something that can help live caption videos at least (possibly also just audio?); make sure we have links that are larger than just a single letter so people with motor control issues can click on them more easily (looking at you, Tumblr). Probably also some image description stuff?

Suggestions are welcome, and I'm probably going to be digging through access_fandom for more ideas, but in the mean time I'm just plain relieved.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Strongly encourage people who submit things to include image descriptions / audio transcripts? Strongly encourage people to volunteer to describe / transcribe stuff for people who are not able to describe / transcribe their own content? Probably want to set two deadlines in advance, one for the first lot, one for the second, so that anything submitted by the first deadline will be fully accessible by the second deadline, with a big enough gap between the deadlines so that the people handling accessibility for the stuff submitted inaccessibly have enough time to do the thing?

Seek out volunteers (podficcing/podcasting experience probably preferable for audio quality reasons) to record audio description tracks for videos? Seek out volunteers to transcribe recordings of panels and Q&As and whatever and then record all those things for transcription?

[alexseanchai]

fun fact we just discovered: Google Meet video calls auto-caption!

…it interpreted the name of the game Tol's siblings are playing as "Google", which it is not (it's Azul)

and it picked up on Blu's voice and not mine, probably because Blu is half as far from the webcam

but it is auto-captioning the audio

(still want to be able to turn off the Google Meet widget in my Gmail without also turning off the Google Chat widget)