Pay Gap, Accessibility, Tools: ID Links 4/11/23

As I read online, I bookmark resources I find interesting and useful. I share these links periodically here on my blog. This post includes links on the gender pay gap, accessibility for videos, useful tools, and creating branching scenarios.

Gender pay gap

Freelancing Females Rate Sheet — Freelancing Females – The Largest Community of Freelance Women

A database of freelance rates in many fields to help increase pay transparency and give freelancers benchmarks to know what they’re worth. Registration required to view. Pay transparency is one of the strategies to reduce the gender pay gap.

Ranting on the Gender Pay Gap in e-Learning

An old blog post from Julie Dirksen about the gender pay gap in the elearning field. Even though this is over 10 years old, the discussion is sadly still relevant. Julie reviews some of the reasons women are often paid less and the problems with putting the burden of fixing the problem on women.

Accessibility for videos

Transcripts | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) | W3C

I have been creating both basic and descriptive transcripts for a project with animated microlearning videos with a lot of visual information. However, I didn’t know the name for that descriptive transcript until now. Most people I have talked to have been unsure how to handle transcripts for animated videos, but this page explains it.

Descriptive transcripts for videos also include visual information needed to understand the content.

Who: Descriptive transcripts are needed to provide audio and video content to people who are both Deaf and blind. They are also used by people who process text information better than audio and visual/pictorial information.

Education and Outreach Working Group of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative

Standard or Extended Audio Description: Which Do You Need?

Explanation of the difference between standard and extended audio description for making videos accessible. Extended audio descriptions pause the original content to allow more time for description, extending the overall time of the video.

Videos that lack natural pauses or contain a lot of important visual information can be tricky to describe without interrupting the original audio. In these cases, extended audio description is necessary.

-Abby Alepa

Useful tools

AI Text to Speech: Human-level Voices | LOVO AI

This AI voiceover tool has options for adding emotions. While there are several AI text-to-speech tools that do reasonably well for a flat narration, most of the tools are weak if you want to add some emotion and dynamics. This one seems worth exploring for those additional features.

ScreenToGif – Record your screen, edit and save as a gif, video or other formats

Free tool for creating screencasts as gif or other files. If you need a very quick demo of how to do something, this looks like a good option.

Verbit Smart Player – Verbit

Video player with interactive transcripts and accessibility features like high contrast and audio description tracks.

Branching scenarios

Role-Play Training – Insights From Clark Aldrich

A lengthy article from Clark Aldrich on how to create Short Sims or branching role-play training. One of the most useful things in this article is the section “7 steps to create an effective role-play,” where he breaks down his process for creating branching scenarios with time estimates for each section. While some of this is specific to iSpring, the process is similar to what I teach in my branching scenario course.

Perhaps the perfect way to learn is by doing something worthwhile that lines up with the real world, and very judiciously receiving some friendly guidance when we get stuck.

If you’re running a flight simulator and want your pilots to learn how to land an airplane in a snowstorm, Short Sims can only have introductory benefits. They can teach you some of the strategies.

With practice, you should be able to create an entire role-play in about 40 hours over two weeks. If you are going over that, you’re probably overthinking or over-executing it. Remember that you need to keep it simple.

-Clark Aldrich