 Well, welcome everybody to Access and Welcome. Are your doors truly open? I'm excited to be here with all of you and our three fabulous panelists here. And we wanted to make sure this is a very welcoming to questions and comments and thoughts. So before we get started, we just wanted to see. Are there any burning questions or things that you hope will be addressed during this session? And no, there will be plenty of time to ask questions as they arise. Yes? I've been curious about not the same as dual-language captioning, which is great and cool and everything, but actually going after Spanish-language original programming as a concept for a very growing segment of our community. Yes. That would be great. Thank you. Any other things? Okay, well, I'll introduce myself, and then I'm going to have our three panelists. I'm here with Michelle Bailey, Allison Seeger, and Daniel Krosick. Thank you. Yes. I'm glad to say that Tony Arian is not with us today. He couldn't be with us because of some illness. So I'll introduce myself. I'm Emily Anderson, and how I was introduced to access happened when I was a child. I grew up in Rochester, New York, and I had two grandparents who were deaf and part of the deaf community. And when I could read, my grandmother, every time she saw me, would give me a card, the manual alphabet, and say, if you'd like to communicate with us, she could talk. This would be a great thing for you to learn how to do. They fingerspelled. That was the way they had grown up at the Rochester School for the Deaf. So I accumulated a lot of cards because she would keep saying, oh, you know, you could try this out, here's a card. And then I think, I don't remember exactly what happened, but one day I realized in order to have an equal relationship with my other grandmother, who live nearby, and my grandparents, I should learn the manual alphabet. And so I did. And that enabled me to communicate not only with my grandparents, but all of their friends. When we had events with them, I would take them to see their friends. And what I appreciate from that was this effort that I made to get, you know, communicate with them actually gave me more than what they got. It just opened up a whole world to me. And that has continued on through my life, where after I worked at the Bread and Puppet Theater, I moved here to the Burlington area and had a theater company. Some people here know very well the Awareness Theater Company. And it was a company comprised of adults with developmental disabilities. And we put on shows that were their stories. And I felt like that was, like, the most political thing I could do was give somebody a space in order to tell their story and have people see them in a different way. I had a friend, Bill Vilmer, a man with Down syndrome, who had a TV show at VCAM. And I realized after he interviewed me, I was like, wow, we should be on TV. Let's make a TV show. So for many years, quite a few years, we worked on shows and would put them on. And it was just a way to have this group of people to be regularly on television. I already have been at CCTV a lot, because whenever I had a show anyways, the best way for me to get a recording of it was to take it to CCTV, set it up, do the show, and then they'd give me a VHS. And I'd be really excited about this VHS that I had. Sometimes I had to pay for it if I was lucky I got it for free. Now I coordinate a program called the Bridging Program, and it's comprised of high school students with disabilities who are imagining their lives beyond high school. And I regularly, four times a year, go to CCTV first with all the students, and they learn what public access is. That's a space where they can come and put their own show on TV. They're full of Hollywood. This is a great moment for them to realize you can sit in front of a camera, you can operate a camera, you can tell your story. So they come back after that initial visit as three smaller groups. And they arrive that day, Travis says, what are we going to do? Or Megan says, what are we going to do? And we make a show that day and film it, and then they have that. And then at the end of the year we watch all of them as an event. So that's my connection to access and community media and putting people, that's one lens that I have. But we have three more people here who will introduce sort of their connection with access and community media and share what is most important to them about access. And we didn't figure out an order. Do you have a preference? That's just for you. Okay, that sounds good. Okay, perfect. So I'm pleased to present to you Michelle Bailey from the Vermont Arts Council. Well, thank you for inviting me to be here today. I am the senior program manager at the Vermont Arts Council, and I'm also the accessibility coordinator there. And the Vermont Arts Council is the state arts council. We provide funds, public funds, and private funds to Vermont artists, arts organizations, cultural organizations, schools, to support the arts and creativity in our state. We're kind of the backbone of what's called the Vermont Creative Network, which has really been formed across the state over a number of years, focusing on the creative economy and advocating for and supporting our creative industries in many ways. And myself, I won't get into too much of the Arts Council just yet, but just in terms of speaking a little bit personally, my connection to access really did start at the Arts Council, because I've actually worked there. I just started on my 35th year working there, if you can imagine, I can't, but I'm here. And in the mid-90s, we, when the ADA was just kind of getting officially a law and all those things, we got some funding from the Nationalowment for the Arts, and I wasn't a part of that group, but we really started looking at helping our arts organizations and artists to make their facilities, their programs, their services more accessible to people with various disabilities. And that work, I was kind of watching from afar in my role there, and it turned out that I was really very interested in this work. And so when the Accessibility Coordinator at that point was leaving, I volunteered to take on that role. And I had a whole lot of learning to do, and I learned a lot. And I'm still learning a whole lot, but I've gone to accessibility trainings, I've gotten an accessibility certificate, learning all a variety of things, it's not a deep degree in it, but it's just a certificate, kind of thinking about what you need to be as an ADA coordinator, what does that mean? And so it's really been very interesting to me. And then just before COVID, I have two elderly parents, this is my personal connection, who moved in with me, and both of them immediately diagnosed with Alzheimer's. So I was a caregiver of two elderly parents with Alzheimer's throughout the entire pandemic, living with me in my house and making those transitions. So I have that personal lived experience as a caregiver and a support person with family members as well. And that's kind of opened my eyes in a lot of different areas as well. So I'll stop there, but that's kind of my personal professional connection to the work. So I'll pass it on to you, Allison. Thank you. So I'm Allison Seger. I'm the Director of the Vermont Language Justice Project, currently housed at CCTV here in Burlington. So it's interesting you were just talking about your own personal connection. And I just had, you know, that light bulb moment, which is you might be able to tell from my accent, I'm not from Vermont. I'm from London, England. And when I moved here a long time ago now, 96, people didn't understand what I was saying half the time to the point was, and I just made that connection. You know, I'd go on the phone to talk to somebody and I'd end up passing it off to my partner because nobody chose to ask more questions or to actually delve a little bit deeper to find out what I was saying. And I was speaking English because that's what we speak. So so that's so I'm just just was just thinking about that. So when we talk about access, what was I'm a social worker by training. I've been a social worker since 1982. So that's a long time. And when I came here, I was working in the schools, working primarily with immigrants, mainly refugees, actually, whose first language wasn't English and was the thorn in everybody's side, working in schools where I would be the person saying, well, is this information going to be translated? Because I'm working with populations that don't understand English. They don't understand the written English. They don't often read in their native language. I would take people to appointments where there were never interpreters present. So people were encouraged to bring their children, which is we hopefully all know now is not a good way of using of interpreting. I've been I was in hospitals where women had to undergo a vaginal ultrasound and would have their son would be asked to be the interpreter, which of course is completely inappropriate. So I've always been what about an interpreter? How are you going to put that in as your line item on your budget? So that's always been really big for me working here in Burlington, which for those of you who don't live here, it's a refugee resettlement town. So there is a lot of people who don't speak English as their first, second, third, or maybe fifth language. So at the beginning of COVID, what was very clear to me very, very early on, I also have a daughter who I adopted to whose first language isn't English as well. What became very clear to me at the beginning of COVID was that information that was going out, lifesaving information was only going out in English. And very felt very strongly that in terms of saving people's lives, some of whom were my clients, as well as family members, that information about COVID needed to go out in a multitude of languages that were represented in our community. So one of my side things that I do also is I am a filmmaker. So I put the two things together and we formed a task force very early on in the pandemic, which ended up composing of about 40 different community partners who all worked with refugees and immigrants in Chittenden County, which is where we are right now. To figure out how we could put messages out in multiple languages that were spoken in the area, we got a bit of funding initially through the Vermont Department of Health. And so this would be my week. I would watch the governor's address on a Tuesday. I would watch the governor's address on a Thursday. I would get the press comments. And then on Friday after my daytime job, I would meet with the directors of the two refugee programs in Burlington, Colchester. And we would go through all that information and we would write a script that was easy to understand, not ambiguous, just gave facts, not opinions, about really life-saving information that we as English speakers, readers and writers could access on the internet whenever we wanted. We had a group of ten very highly qualified translators who ended up working for us and three other three years later still work for us because we pay them incredibly well, which is really important. And I would send them the scripts. They would then translate the scripts. They would then send me back an audio file of that script. And then I would make what I would call often an album cover. Like you, when you go to listen to a piece of music on YouTube, you would have just a picture of the album. And underneath that would be the audio file of what was being talked about. There'd be pictures on the album cover of what we were talking about in the language. And we started just putting them out and we would put them out through the people, through all the community partners. Fast forward, we got a large chunk of money from the CDC, which was given to Vermont through a health disparities grant. I was able to quit my job at the Howard Center as a social worker after 23 years and was able to set this project up full-time. It's called the Vermont Language Justice Project. We're housed within CCTV. And today we've done tons and tons and tons of stuff. We don't focus really nearly as much now on COVID, which is awesome. We are doing videos about mental health, about how to access your pharmacy, about how to operate an ATM machine, about we did one last week about what does the emergency alert system mean? How do you turn those things off of your phone or how do you turn them on on your phone? We're about to do videos about unemployment. We've had over 160,000 views on our YouTube channel and we now have about 650 subscribers to our YouTube channel. For me, it's a work of just passion and love. And knowing that if we're going to talk about our community being healthy, it needs to be everyone that to me is what access is about, is that information needs to be accessible to everyone. Since we got the grant, we now work in 17 languages and see that even if it's a very small group of people, so for example, in southern Vermont, there's small groups of people from Eritrea becoming over as refugees. They speak a language called Tigrania. There's probably about 20 of them. That's it. But now we do all our videos in Tigrania as well because they need to know what's going on as much as the several thousand people who speak Nepali need to know. That's what we do in a nutshell. That's it. Wow, thank you. Cool, very great. Hard to follow that. So, hey, I'm Daniel. I've been working in access a long time since 2001, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and then in Lowell Mass. I got real deep into the tech nerdery. And when I was in Lowell Mass, I was the guy running around evangelizing on behalf of BitTorrent. I was telling somebody about this earlier that even at that point, I wasn't quite like, you know, BitTorrent could be good or bad. You could be, I was just like, guys, this is awesome. We can share stuff amongst ourselves. Fast forward many years of me selling different servers. Seven years ago, I started municipal captioning and somehow in my efforts to go around and help people with the accessibility around captioning. And that's really what I do most of my time is helping people examine all the options for captioning for accessibility. I've also kind of gotten deep into the tech nerdery around other areas of accessibility, I guess. So maybe my contribution in this can be a little bit around, you know, the world of captioning and how that fits for accessibility, but also just other things that I'm seeing as technology ways that we can increase our accessibility. And that includes things that are what I would say a clear net gain like I could have a hard time finding anybody to find anything negative about it, which I'm going to show you this little box here because I think that's a good example of that. And then a much larger part of the spectrum that is super complicated and that talking about like, hey, we can use AI to do XYZ gets real messy and I don't even know if I want to still be seen as evangelizing on behalf of it the way I maybe was about BitTorrent as something access stations could use to save money. Because what I like to do when I'm talking to people about all the AI stuff is be really clear that like some of this, I'm just pres- I'm just describing what's there. I'm not prescribing to you that you should think this is good or bad. But yeah, so that's it. I know I'm kind of vague there, but I just want to say I've been coming at the world of access for so long that when I look at accessibility, I only really look at it from the viewpoint of the peg access operation. Everybody outside overlap or work with in the world of captioning comes from a passion for the heart of hearing and passion for accessibility, for people who need it that way. I've developed a passion for that, but my passion is from like access people not being totally stuck with a problem they can't solve and then having their channel get in trouble or whatever. So, you know, I guess I come from it from the viewpoint of like, hey, you're in the access world. Here's the fun thing you can do to add accessibility that would help your community and also keep you from getting in trouble or keep you from having people complain about X, Y, Z or something. Right. So I'll stop right there and wait till we come back around to get into this little toy and other stuff. But that's that's awesome. Well, thank you all for sharing your your stories. And I want to welcome everyone else who has arrived. We are we are you are accessed and welcome. Are your doors truly open? And I have some questions to ask our panel. But I just wanted to see are there any questions people have right now that are sitting with with the with what you have just heard that you would like to get clarified or some information. Yes. OK, so what I'm hearing is that you actually change all of the things into a format that allows people with different languages to hear. Does that go out on the public access station or do they access it in other ways? So they access it in a multitude of ways. So everything we do gets put on YouTube or YouTube channel. Our public access TV station, which is CCTV, has Spanish speaking programs. It has French speaking programs. Another one more Swahili. Thank you. So we put our videos in those languages up around the same time those those TV shows are going out. So if you tune in to watch a migrant justice show, there will be a Spanish PSA about whatever it might be, either before or after or maybe two or three after. So that so it does go out. The other ways they go out is through. We have a list of over 100 people who want to see our playlist. So we send we send them out that way. I'll just give you a cool story, which might people have a thousand times already, which is a Mandarin speaker has a WeChat list, which is equivalent to like WhatsApp or texting. She has a WeChat list of over 100 Mandarin speakers throughout Vermont in often in very rural areas. We think about lots of small towns that you might go to. There'll be a Chinese restaurant there. And those folks are very isolated. Some of them are trafficked and very, very alone. She has a WeChat list of 100 phone numbers of different Mandarin speakers throughout the state. She will send out the finished video that we have out to those folks, you know, who live in all sorts of places that I've never heard of in Vermont. Send them one of the other things that we did a lot during during covid was in Burlington and Winnowsky. Winnowsky is the neighbouring town next to Burlington. They they have robocalls everywhere. Schools have robocalls right for snow. They in Burlington and Winnowsky, they they divide up their robocalls by language. And so we were able to send out our messages through their robocalls systems by language. The Housing Department in Winnowsky also has a robocall system by language. They send out our messages to. So during covid and now it's still happening. If there's a message under two minutes, that's kind of a big message that's important, we'll probably say we're about to do one about getting a flu shot, we'll probably send that out to the schools and they can just put them like that. So wow. Yeah. Well, thank you for asking. Any other immediate questions? Hey, so the question I have for our panel is what are the values behind your work? Well, you know, for the Vermont Arts Council, our mission is cultivating and advancing the arts and creativity throughout Vermont. And our vision has always been in, you know, sometimes phrased differently, but is that everyone in Vermont has access to the arts and creativity and their lives, education and community. So that's, you know, behind all of our work at the Arts Council. And there's often, you know, different ways that we can go about that. We still have more work to do, you know, no, we're not there yet, for sure. But we've really in the last few years include in addition to the work that we've been doing around accessibility for people with disabilities, we're also looking at, you know, diversity and equity and inclusion in all of our work as well. We've set up a what we call an IDEA idea network of folks, advisors from different backgrounds, races, ethnicities, disabilities, age, you name it, where we want to ask these advisors to help us look at our work and work toward getting out and reaching more people that we haven't reached yet. So those are kind of the underlying values of our work right now. So, yeah, thank you. Yeah. I mean, I think what we do speaks for itself in terms of values. I mean, I feel that, you know, the biggest underlying value is if is that we want to have our community be as informed as possible about everything that we can be informed about as English speakers and readers and Internet users. So, and it because it saves lives and what could be more important than that really is to give information to people who can make informed choices for themselves. Megan, I don't know if you want to just go to our web page and you can just if you go up to the go to the front page, there's a yeah, if you click on that thing there to the right under find us on YouTube, you'll find out. No, no, below that. That, yes, it is. Oh, you don't have sound. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. I want to guess it's just a show. We did a show. We did some focus groups and what this guy is talking about is how it's really about our values, which is, you know, when you have information, then you can make decisions about yourself. You can help you out there. There you go. You can say it better than me. These videos and this messaging is really helping us learn new things. We are learning new things that we otherwise did not know or had no idea they existed. Also, it helps us be careful, be careful about the dangerous that existed, exist around us. These videos, this messaging, carry important messages that we think are to strengthen and to build our lives in this new culture. It's educate. They educate. They carry education about again, new, new things that people need in order for their life to prosper and it helps bring change in the community. Things that when you learn new things, you know how to make change around you and around the community. Those are all that's really our values. So, yeah, I guess the values driving us are to be able to are wanting to see access stations survive and thrive under increased accessibility requirements. You know, starting municipal captioning occurred after I had a bunch of people ask me like, how do we do this? I don't know how to do this. And even in the last years, I think it's still for the most part looked at by everybody as like a problem they have to solve an issue that they either can ignore. Oh, there's no call for it in our town. We don't have to deal with that yet. Maybe next year or, oh, God, it's a problem I got to deal with right now. How am I going to deal with it? And, yes, the fact that you could be sued at any moment or that there could be things, those things make it feel like it's a problem first and foremost. But I think if we really look at it as an opportunity to serve people in our community that are not being as well served or to welcome people in to do things that they weren't feeling capable or comfortable of doing before, then it's less like, how are we going to do this? And is it even have a benefit? Maybe people aren't even watching our captions and more of like, oh, while we're actually able to target a group of our community. So I think for me on the value side, it's trying to help those of us within access stations look at things less as a problem and more of an opportunity by giving ways of like, hey, you spend capital money on all sorts of stuff. Like, here's the thing, you could spend your capital money on that actually like targets some additional viewers or targets new creators or brings people in. So like two examples, one is this thing. I'm dying to show off. So I'm just going to go for it. I'm having my credit card taken away from me by people so that I don't do this anymore. Purchased this box when I discovered it and saw that nobody had done a YouTube video about it other than like the company themselves pitching it. And I was like, oh, I'm going to get this. And I still have not made a video about it. But I like to joke. This is like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction that it's glowing and you don't know what's in there. This little thing is an instant dialogue cleanser or cleaner. I added the S, cleaner. SDI in, SDI out, and it uses AI technology inside to break out the background noise and separate it from the dialogue so that you can have an SDI out that either goes on air that is easier for people to hear what's being said because it stripped out the background noise or if you feel like, no, we're not changing the audio. It was recorded with a lot of background noise and that's what people want to hear. You could still feed the enhanced audio to the captioning boxes and get higher quality captions because it's not dealing with the background noise. So they use this in German. This is a German product. And when they're talking about it, they talk about German broadcasters use this to have a secondary audio channel. You know, we all have like SAP channels on broadcast channels here with maybe like a Spanish translation. They'll use this to have a second audio channel that is designed for the heart of hearing to have a better, and I know you can get like, you know, on your soundbar at home, you can do like dialogue enhancement or make this movie less boomy or whatever. But this is on your channel across the board and on your live stream so that someone who's watching, you know, the meeting or the show is gonna have a better chance of understanding what's being said. So if anybody wants to buy this off me for what I paid, I really gotta get my money back and have a read for it, but I think it's so cool that for, I mean, yeah. I mean, and here's the other thing. I know, no, so this software is using this thing and I don't, again, I'm plugging something out of any buy into it. Audionomics. You can download the demo of this software on your PC and run it for free or maybe buy the license for like 600 bucks or something. And you could run this right now, post production on all your content. You don't have to do it live during the meeting. You could take your meetings and you could post produce them to have much cleaner audio without the buzz and the noise and the murmur. And then you could use that. This is the same, this software was what, I guess they used for that Beatles documentary series that it was what they used to like pull John and Ringo and Paul from behind all the instruments and be able to do that. So now you could use that on your PEC channel to make the channel easier for someone to hear. And like to me, that's a like, there's no way to be like AI is bad in this. However, well, everywhere else it gets a little sketchy sounding. So anyway, that's the one thing, accessibility wise. And then the other thing is just like what we're looking up up here, right? Like that right there is we're not paying for that. That's a free captioning tool that they're using, right? And it's not as good if we had an actual stenographer here there would be less, you know, phonetic errors maybe but it is substantially better than us having no captioning. I don't think we have anybody in the conference right now. Maybe there is, I don't know if there's anybody in the conference who's deaf or who's hard of hearing or who has an auditory processing thing where they prefer to read. But if we aren't providing it, we're not actually making space for anybody who needs those things. We're never going to have anyone coming to our conferences who actually would benefit if we don't start providing it. And that's a free thing that they're using. So like, yeah, but like, I would rather we all have the budget and ability to do it the like paid professional stenographer way but most stations don't even have that ability to do it for like one series of their meetings, let alone all of the meetings. So I guess for me, I feel like it's often a thing of like how much can we provide even if there's some compromises in what we're doing. We maybe have to use AI but we're able to do captions on every one of the sessions here at the same time or able to do something on, you know, all of your programs. Same thing with translation. What they are doing is the gold standards. What you should do. You should have a human who speaks the language do it the right way, infinitely better than having Google translate their messages, right? Don't do that, never do that. Important health information. You don't want like auto translated stuff. But if we were doing this thing here right now and we wanted to offer some people who were not native English speakers and ability to read those captions in Spanish or in Portuguese and it's not as good as if it was being done by a human translator but it's something we could offer. Like I think there's a benefit in exploring that. So maybe having your captions and then offering a way that people can have the real time translation into other languages, even knowing it's not as good and it's got disclaimers, it at least opens the door and says, all right, you're not a native English speaker but you can follow along with most of what's happening in the meeting. As best as we're able to provide with current technology. Anyway. But yeah, don't do auto translate for anything that's like important enough like health information. Can I just follow up on that? Please. Yeah, yeah, please. Dan mentioned at the beginning about the opportunity. If you think about our population and the statistic that I've heard mostly is that one in five people has some sort of a disability. And I think it may be even getting closer to one in four. And if you think about that, that's 20 to 25% of your population. If you want to be reaching people, that's a pretty significant chunk of people as terms of an opportunity to reach out and to have that audience and those participants in your program. So I would encourage you to kind of think about that. And even with the captioning, my son is, my youngest son is in his mid 20s and he watches everything online with captioning. He's not, he's not deaf. He's not hard of hearing. And I just asked him one day, I said, do you do this all the time? Or he said, no, all of my friends, we all do that now. That's just what we do. We watch everything with captioning. And so, I mean. There's more millennials using captions than there are boomers. I just want to add one thing about captioning. We now do a lot of our videos in ASL. And just so that folks know that ASL is only spoken in this country when during the beginning of COVID, we were trying to find somebody that spoke Burmese sign language. It's very difficult to get, but it's very different to ASL in England where I'm from. It's completely different language, different alphabet even. And one of the things that I learned that I didn't know was that many people and I'm used to, I mean, you probably know this is that many people that grow up deaf, family deaf. English is their second language. So many people who actually are deaf or family deaf, they don't read or write English that well. It's as simple as that. And so, as important as captioning is, it's really important to also think that you're not solving the problem for the deaf community. It's really important to remember that. Very true. I just want to put that out there. Yeah. Okay. Please. Yes. Yes. So I texted him real quick and I asked him, what can you use to translate? DeepL Pro. DeepL Pro. Thank you. And just to add one thing on that, thank you. I'm gonna check that out. Some of the languages that we work in are not written languages. There's many indigenous languages that are not written down. So in Burlington, there's a language spoken by Somali banter from Mai Mai. It's not really a written language. I mean, it can be written phonetically, but when you think the Somali banter, 95% of the people due to their situation in Somalia as being slaves, 95% of them never went to school. So, anyway, thank you. Thank you. I'm not sure I understand. Exactly. I'm gonna bring back, couldn't it? That after, that's it. I did not, but I don't know how I did that. I wonder if I'll add dishes here. So, any other questions? Yeah. Oh, and also, I've recently been involved in a couple of events, Zoom meetings, where we try to find, is there, first of all, is there a shortage of ASL interpreters, but are there resources that are providing ASL interpreters? And that's here in Vermont? In Massachusetts. In Massachusetts. So, we have this task with Smithing. You know, I told you about the one that met twice, so we now meet once every two weeks. And somebody who represents the state among comes to those meetings, and there's always two interpreters in those meetings. And recently, there's been two trainee interpreters who are also not meeting. So, I can give you her information, and she can maybe get you in touch with the equivalent in Massachusetts, for sure. I'm happy to do that. So, that's my text. I was a sign language interpreter for nine years at my school course. And we had connections all over the place for interpreters, for people, for places you could bring the text. Yeah, it's a small community. And the ones that come to us are from all over the country. Like, it's a work, because you know, it's like they're digital nomads, really, if they're, so they can be anywhere. Well, that's the thing, sometimes we're against it. Absolutely. Yeah. I would also, just as a resource for New England, they, in Massachusetts in Boston, is the base of the New England ADA Technical Assistance Center. And they are a 1-800 number. They also have a website. They have a lot of resources. You can call them up, email them. They have, they can give you, they can point you to the resources that you might need. And it's all free. And if you have a question about something, they're not there to get you in trouble. They are set up specifically to help you figure out what you need to do and how to do it. They're not gonna come to your building and do an assessment, but they're gonna help you connect with those resources. And there's, there are 10 of them all over the country. The one in New England happens to be based in Boston, but it's for the whole region. So, yeah. Yeah. New England ADA. Yep, Technical, New England ADA Technical Assistance. And get some great people there to help you. Maybe they're making workshops to do visually impaired people. It's production work with them on a video about their organization. And as part of that, we had to do audio descriptions. And our co-director just did the audio descriptions and she had done that before. And I'm wondering if there's any best practices or thoughts around visually impaired people also consuming our channels and how audio descriptions, which are quite complicated in some projects. Sometimes you just have a person at a podium and that's probably pretty great, but when you have a lot of visuals that you're trying to describe, is there a way that... So, actually, this overlaps with one of the things that was gonna put my hand up and talk about, yay! Cause I wanted to bring it into ways that new technology is starting to get used for accessibility that we haven't really done before or looked at before. So one of those ways is like, I wanted to mention it was the creative side with AIR and I'll turn to that in a minute. And the other I was gonna bring up was descriptive audio, descriptive images. You know, like your website, every image on your website, legally supposed to have an alt tag descriptor. I don't know about y'all, but I don't think most of us are addressing that even to the degree we've been maybe addressing. Captioning for accessibility. And I know that when that DOJ ruling comes through, it's not just about you're gonna have to have your channel captions that cities have to have, follow international web accessibility guidelines, which means all of your images are gonna need descriptors and things. And yet, I mean, that's the kind of thing like a person can spend time doing, but also, now that AIR, AIR, AIR engines are getting good at identifying visually and writing up descriptions, it becomes the kind of thing where people are feeding video into tools and having the tool write up what it sees or describe the main person that you are seeing. Again, I'm not saying any of this is accurate or good as much as starts towards a workflow where we might be able to say, all right, take all the images that are on our website, generate descriptors, and then have someone go through and say, that one works for us, nope, that one's bad, let's wait. Everything should always be human vetted, but the ability to maybe go through and curate 1,000 auto-generated descriptors for images as opposed to having staff sit and write 1,000 descriptors might be a more manageable workflow. The other thing I wanted to say about the AIR stuff is I'm sure everybody's seen just how crazy it's been, how everything's moving. One point, it's, oh, you describe a thing and it makes the art. Next thing they've got, well, you feed it the image and it gives you what the prompt it thinks that you could be used to make that. All this stuff is moving ahead and one thing I don't think we talk about is that we often look at it from the vantage point of me, perfectly normal interactions with Photoshop and Illustrator and Premiere. The tools are built around me because I'm able to use keyboard, mouse, normal input devices. Maybe if I was a fine artist using markers, I'm fine with my hand holding that marker, but then there are a lot of people who are actually just been unable to do the things because they're not able to draw. Maybe they were and they had an accident or arthritis or they're not able to use the keyboard and mouse inputs in the same way. And so I think one thing to look at is that these tools that are often off-putting when we think like, oh, it's replacing the human drawing with a computer drawing. It is also an artistic tool for people who are finding this gives them a lot of creative expression. It allows them to do things that they weren't able to do before because they weren't able to do this. So I just think we sometimes think of ourselves as like, oh, well, we teach people how to do non-leader editing in our non-leader editing suite and the people who wanna come in and edit video in this way. But there's probably a people who've never been able to make video because they're not able to work with a non-linear editing suite. They're not able to do things in those ways. Can we now start to say, hey, you can create using these new tools and we're a place for you to come in and express what you made or share what you made because we're not just maybe having to only serve the people who have been able to use the editing suite, the camera. Anyway. I just wanted to double check your question was about are there best practices around? Yeah, sorry, I didn't get an answer. No, no, that's okay. That's okay. Did you get your answer? Well, I think if there's any other thoughts about image descriptions or how, I feel like this one's kind of, I think we're getting pretty solid on captioning, but I think the descriptions will be next. Yep, I think you're right. Yeah. Is there anything out there already that people are figuring out? There are best practices out there. I'm not gonna be able to tell you the resource right now, but I know when it comes to audio description or verbal description for people who are blind or have low vision to get a sense of that, there are techniques and we've been looking into possible trainings and things like that because I do my impression, which is limited experience in Vermont, not New England, but I think there's a shortage of audio describers and that area could really use some more people and more work. So, but yes, there are best practices around all that. I was just smiling to myself, we use Storyblock for a lot of stock footage and I just all put the pieces together. It's been a light bulb, air and a half today. I'm sure those descriptions, I don't know if any of you use Storyblock, you know, it's like stock footage. I'm sure a lot of those descriptions are AI generated because Danny over there who I work with and we just laugh at some of the descriptions. Beautiful woman sitting on her expensive couch, talks to child, it's like, right, right, right, right. That's AI. I really hope it's AI. It's awesome. That's a very point too about context. I just remember every time you have an image description, but I often, it's very different depending on the situation. If the description of the post is about someone's using Adobe Premiere workshop, it's a person on computer editing with Adobe Premiere. It would be a very different description if it was about the person who, not the project, right? Right, right. And that's really, it seems very human-centered. It's kind of making a judgment call where you're not transcribing or transcribing. Right, right. Can I throw out one more thing that I feel like we didn't get to really address because Tony wasn't able to. Yes, please. So Tony Arian directed a station in New York for years, a lot of us know him from that. I don't know if it's outreach director or director for our loft LGBT plus center. And I think one of the aspects of this panel that we didn't quite get to really talk about so much is also using welcoming and inclusive language, making people feel welcome even before they're in the door by how we talk about our space, how we talk about our organization, our restrooms, all of these things that we kind of maybe subtly communicate or not subtly, directly communicate. And I just know that as I go around and I tour stations, I see a lot of this start to pop up more. I see more inclusive restrooms. I see more pronouns being directly put in signatures. I feel like I see access stations, whether or not we've ever had a regional or national movement about it. I see access stations making efforts to be inclusive in the community and show that. And I don't know, I think that's a vital part of our thing. I don't know if anybody here has questions or thoughts on it or examples, but I just feel like that was another big part of this thing about welcoming that we didn't maybe get to cover yet. Yeah, thanks for bringing Tony into the room for sure. Any comments or questions? So I have some more questions. How do you think your work relates to community media? In some ways you have already addressed this, but... Well, at the Arts Council, we support community media. We also know that it's a wonderful tool for getting artists and arts organizations in two places and homes and to audiences that might not be going to the theater or able to go out to a gallery for whatever reason. And so there's that piece of it. We're a funding organization and a service organization and so we see the world of community access TV and media and film and all of that as part of our universe of arts and creativity that we want to support, so I'll just leave it that for now. Great, thank you. Can you just repeat the question? Yeah, oh. Can I just say, well I just want to say that the Arts Council did give a grant to CCTV that we've been using to implement workflows around captioning and accessibility. Oh, nice. A series of, so I just, you know, just to show up to that work and had a lot of us to install hybrid systems in three community partner locations, something that people don't have to come in to do their work. They can also do their work from their centers, which I think is really important to recognize not everybody wants to all of us come in to the center and to do their work and someone says it's important for them to be able to do their work right where they are. And yeah. Was that a digital capacity? Yeah. Yeah, so we were lucky enough during COVID we received a one-time funding opportunity from the legislature with some ARPA money. I think it was ARPA money. Anyway, it was during the COVID to do what we call digital capacity grants that would allow arts organizations, creative entities to purchase equipment for reaching populations digitally, which had been a struggle at first during COVID. Everyone was pivoting to not be in person. And so we did trainings and offered equipment and other website upgrades and things like that to people. So yeah, that was great. Unfortunately, that was a one-time thing. But we do have a cultural facilities grant that some of that could be done, but not as broadly as the digital capacity. Oh, great. I'll CCQ God. Yes. The question is, how do you think your work relates to community media? Well, I think it's a really interesting question because when we talk about community, who are we talking about? Who is your community that you're serving? Is your community English-speaking people only? Or is it everybody? And I think that's something that you really need to be thinking about when you call yourself a community access station. One of the things I think that we have been able to do since our project started, apart from seeing those shows up on our schedule and being based within CCTV is there's occasional films that we make, which is translated, interpreted, coming into the studio and talking into the camera. So we've done this. We're in the middle of this series about mental health. And this really serious subject, the New Suicide Hotline 98 came out last year. And so we're talking, we're doing one video about mental health for adults. And again, if you think who the population is, it's refugees and migrants, and you think that their story is going to be more intense in terms of mental health than me, for example, hopefully. We bring people in, and we have them talk through user teleprompter and read their message out in that language. What that's done is that it's brought different people into the studio who have never come into the studio before. So our interpreter who speaks Pashtun Dari, which is the two languages predominantly spoken by Afghan refugees in our area, has come in, has grown in confidence as a community member in talking in front of the camera. And if we had the outreach and I was doing more than what I have the time to do right now, I would be encouraging him to come in and do a radio, a TV show, and bringing people in. I don't have the time to do that. But now they know it's there. They didn't know it was there before. So when we talk about community, that's what I'm thinking about all the time, is who is the community and who do we want to bring in? And who are our programs reaching out to? So that to me is very much a work in progress. And we're at the beginning. OK, so I feel like my. Onto the important stuff. No, no, no, no. I have an idea. I'm just trying to figure out. OK, so all the years I was in community media before the pandemic happened, there was a consistent thing that like, we're the underappreciated. Nobody knows who we are. We're the, as hard as we work, no one quite recognizes how valuable we are, right? Pandemic happens. And that do a certain degree changes. Maybe not everywhere, but like, suddenly you being able to broadcast these meetings and handle this hybrid requirement means that you're like clearly crucial part of democracy. They can't overlook you the same way, right? You're suddenly doing something new in the community. The community hopefully looks and says, ah, the media center, the government access, they're the people that understand how we can use this new technology to keep democracy going to keep people meeting, right? I just feel really strongly that in a similar way, we have an opportunity to be seen in our community as the place that knows and understands the new technology and is able to increase accessibility, bring accessibility to other parts of the city, to the community. So, you know, nobody is better set than you guys to be able to help people come in and record their message in English and then create a Spanish version of that message and put it out. And maybe it involves serving people that aren't just doing only nonprofit work or government work. Maybe it's that we're offering businesses or things that aren't our normal community ability to come and make your message and we're gonna help you excessively make that message to the rest of the community. Maybe it's not just helping reach the heart of hearing, but it's helping reach the people in our community that don't speak English or whatever different groups. I think the thought that like maybe this is the place where people who are unable to use traditional computers are able to come and use unique new inputs or whatever. We have an opportunity to be seen as the place that brings accessibility. And we already are in so many ways. Captioning is just like the drop in the bucket. ASL is just one other component. So like, I don't know, I just, I feel like we did a good job coming through the pandemic and shifting our own definition of ourselves from being this unrecognized hidden secret of community to being this crucial part of how our community communicates and continues its democracy. And I feel like there's a way for us as this other giant shifts in AI and everything's happening, putting people at unease that we can also kind of embrace a new role there that we're the ones kind of helping people figure out how to use this to increase accessibility and better serve the community to media. So there you go. Awesome. Wow, great. Answers. Right now, I just want to just get a sense. Does anyone have a question here for any of our panelists? That has, then I will proceed with my questions. So you come from beautifully very unique perspectives. So as you look down this panel, how does your work relate to the others presenting here? Should have prepared that on session. Or I would go with just your gut reaction. I think, yeah. I mean, we're always looking at the Arts Council for partners and people who know more and deal with more things than we have the capacity to deal with. And so knowing the two of you and your organizations and the resources that you can share and that we could share that to me and to the organization, that's always a plus for us is this collaborative kind of approach and looking for those community resources and folks who can help you work together to meet these goals. So you're not alone out there, but working together with the people who are doing the work. Just like if you're trying to make your programs accessible, you've probably all heard the phrase nothing about us without us. So getting people who are knowledgeable professionally and who have personal lived experiences to work with you to develop whatever you're doing in a way that's gonna be usable and useful for them so that it's not just me sitting in a room doing something by myself, you know. Can you just say the question? Yes, as you look down this panel, how does your work relate to others, the others who are presenting here? You're two, you're two side partners. Don't laugh at me. No, I was just saying, it's like an interview question. I know. Oh yeah, thank you. It's all about, for me, it's all about language and it's about how we can get our message out to as many people as possible with the highest quality that we can do. I am a big anti-Google translate. I hate it. It works for Spanish, it kind of works for French, but once you get beyond any of those languages, it's a nightmare and in my opinion, if you can take one thing away from this apart from his little box. Don't take my box. We do this for sale, don't take that. We do this for sale. Please do not use Google translate from people who I work with. It's best, it's confusing when something gets translated, for example in Nepali, but worst, it's dangerous. So don't ever think that by putting your little thingy up there that says Google translate which of your 800 languages, that you have solved the problem. So that's all I have to say. Well, I have a quick follow up question. Because I was, you said you got a grant from the CDC to exist. Like is that for a while or will that run out? Will you need to get more grants? No, no, so no, that's a great question. We got a nice chunk of change, as we say, in the old country. Love it. But it is gonna be running out. We do work with other places and get extra money coming in. But no, that was a really nice lot of money for which we could do a lot of things which we won't be able to do when it runs out. So we're looking all the time for funding and I spend a lot of time chatting people up and charming them with my English accent. Good. And I think the other thing I really wanna just, once I say one more thing, what I'm really learning about is, and I just come back to is again, what does community mean for you? Who is your community? Who are you trying to serve when you call yourself an access station? Don't take things for granted that everybody in your community can read and that being what we're doing. Like don't go for the gold standard. Always go for the gold standard. Thank you. I like to look at what I do is like seeing something interesting in one place and then telling everybody else about it. Oh, these guys are doing this in Burlington. Oh, these guys are doing that in Pradoboro. So for me, like being able to take the story of what your two organizations are doing in Vermont and then say to people in the other 49 states, hey, you know, the Vermont Arts Council are this program translating health information like that sure would be handy here in North Carolina. This could be like, and you have organizations, maybe not the same type of arts council, but you might have other organizations that you can partner with around accessibility. And the program they're doing there with that nice chunk of change is needed in your community, even if they don't have a nice chunk of change available for it. So maybe taking what they're doing there and actually starting to say, hey, is there any sources for funds for this? Because you probably don't have quite as many languages spoken of refugee communities, but you probably have a handful that are not being served and that you might be able to get a state organization or some other organization to let you do a variation of what they're doing. And I agree, gold standard, anything that is crucial, anything that you're using AI to translate with, you need to be doing so knowing that it better have a person who actually understands it go over because otherwise there may be a idiom in there that contains very incorrect recommendation or information. It's worth taking the story of what they're doing and just taking that shot of saying, is there some place in our community that could give us some funding to do a program in that part of the spectrum? And nothing we do is like, you can take it, use it. Just the funny story for like one minute is that when the vaccine started coming out, we did a whole series of videos in I think 15 languages about getting a vaccine and the Department of Health for Miami contacted me and said, could we use your Spanish video? This is the Department of Health for Miami asking if they could use our videos. It's like, of course you can, but really you can't make your own. Give me a break. Oh, Miami, yeah, that's pretty cool. It's like- I think Spanish translators that they have to choose one of them. Right, right. I have the best one. She has the best accent ever. Oh, good. I have a question related to what you're saying earlier about offering something is better than nothing at this point and related to best practices and disclaimers. And I realize like at Google, it's not talking about the glory. Yes, you have to bing it. I mean, I need to start something back. What I commonly hear is some apprehension about misrepresenting control in public office. Oh, huh? I don't know when you're, when you're presenting these meetings and providing captioning if something is misrepresenting to a point where a voter has bad information. Oh, instead of a yes or something like, you know, like, so that's something I feel like is a little bit of a speed bump for some embracing something that is captioning that isn't working. And so I don't know that disclaimers are a good way to get started and to open up that door are the best practices for language use in those disclaimers, post it, put it in the contact on the platform. Yeah. I first off, excellent point. Yeah. Second thing, I think we've all watched captions on like an NBC broadcast or something, the news, whatever, and been like, oh my gosh, none of that is lining up with what's being said at all. Yeah. So I think you're right. There should, there ought to be disclaimers, but they would also have to put it on like the presidential debate and anywhere that they're putting, close captions that are sometimes close and sometimes off. But I think for municipal level, your desire to cover your ass is much greater than even NBC. So I do think having a, in the same way we put a disclaimer, so this program is the opinions of a producer and not that of media factory or something, I think it wouldn't be bad to put up things saying, with grant funding, we are now providing captioning. Captioning is generated at the best of its ability, or whatever, disclaimer. Yeah. That's a really good point. So in many ways, we've already addressed this, but I'm gonna ask this, how does one from your point of view get started on inclusion or access? I'll add in, how do you recommend getting beyond the barriers? Well, you know, the first thing to do is to start educating yourself and understanding. And as an organization, I suggest that you have someone on your staff or who works for your organization that is the contact person for any accessibility accommodations or language transition or whatever it might be. I can say that having a friendly, helpful person on the other end of the phone or email, just to answer questions and respond to you is a huge first step, just because if you don't know what to do, but you could at least say, you know what, we wanna try to help you, so I'm gonna look into that for you and see what we can do. It's much better than being ignored. There's this customer service kind of thing. Legally, there's probably a lot more to all of this, like the disclaimers that I wouldn't even dare to try to figure out I'm not a lawyer, nor am I an expert. I have enough knowledge kind of at a top, skimming the top level to know a little bit about a lot, but I just think that having one person in the organization who like you, who raises the hand in the meeting and says, what about translation? What about captioning? What about wheelchair accessibility? What about, and just being a great woman who used to work with me a lot, always referred to her around accessibility. She said, I'm the tzizi fly in the room that's just gonna keep nibbling and they keep saying, what about, what about? Let's do this, make it happen, and it sometimes takes a long time, but just having that person and having some welcoming language on your website that says we want to be welcoming, we want to help, call, or email. Here's what we offer, we have this accessibility page on our website that we've created that says what to expect, kind of a know before you go kind of page, but since we don't have many events, we're more of a service organization, we just put together what to expect, and that if we do, what our kind of philosophies are and our values and what we want to achieve, and it may not be perfect, but here's what we're working toward and we're striving to do better, and so if you have any feedback for us, let us know. And working with folks in your community, as I mentioned before, who have disabilities or whatever context that works for language who can help you create these things, and they just take start somewhere, and there are all kinds of checklists. We, because we get federal funding and state funding, we have to do a whole ADA and accessibility transition plan, although transition, we've say implementation now because the ADA is many, many years old now, and technically we should all be doing these things now, but the reality is we're not yet and we still have a lot of work to do and there's a long way to go. So, you know, make your list of what do we need to do? What are the different populations we want to reach? And there's all kinds of tools and resources, even on our website. And at the ADA Center that I mentioned in Boston, they can help you with a lot of these tools and it's just get started and start with something small and start assessing your situation and finding out where are our gaps. And let's address those. Oh, thank you. That's a great answer. Thank you. Can you just say a question again? I don't know about any of the questions. How does one from your point of view get started on inclusion or access? Well again, I think it's about who is your community? So, I think we in this day and age need to assume that our community is not all English speakers as their first language. And if we go, if we make that as a basic assumption, we can go from there. For me, it was very personal. You know, I have loved ones who don't speak English, who don't read and write English. And when COVID here, I was really scared as to whether they were gonna know what to do. And so that's why I set this thing up. It wasn't like this big lofty thing up there. It was personal. And when you tell your story about your grandparents, it's personal. And that to me can really make a difference. For me, what I do every day is personal and has become my profession as well. So, you know, when you're thinking about, when you're thinking about a project that you wanna do, think about who's at the table and who is not at the table and how can you make your table accessible for more people? It doesn't, at this point, clearly because it costs money, make your table accessible to everyone, that's what it should be. But if you can make your table, you're accessible to just one group who you haven't thought about until that point, that's a stop. And that's what I would recommend. So I really like what both of you have said about making a district of this table, about looking at where your gaps are. It's been many years since I worked at an access station. I'm cosplaying by starting one now, but I don't have any members, so it's real easy. I don't have to help anyone. But when I did work at a very challenging access station, but a lot of challenges, we really only had like 12 very active producers. And they definitely came from different cultures and different groups, but there are a lot of people in that city that were not being served in addition to those 12 very active producers. And when we would spend a lot of, I mean, not always, but you spend time evaluating things, you're kind of thinking like, well, what is this producer? What is this person? But those are the people that have like made it in the doors, passed all of our challenges, stuck around even though it's hard because they are determined to, and that's it, they're gonna be there no matter what. We've made things hard already and they still are there. I don't know why we're accommodating the 12 people who come even though we have a really hard time. It's hard to think about all the people that never made it in the door or did not think about your organization as a place for them. Let's just use an example that removes it from any culturally. Let's imagine your organization is just like hardcore tech nerds, people come in the door and you're immediately quizzing whether they know what RJ45 is versus ethernet. Oh, you mean a cat six, not a cat five? Like if you're not one of those people who likes to fight over acronyms, you're not gonna feel comfortable there. You're not gonna come back a second time. You're not gonna think. So the place can have this welcoming environment to tech nerds of every ethnicity and gender and sexual orientation. But if you're not like willing to argue over what cat five versus cat six is, you're not really welcome there. You know what I mean? So like, I think a large and a hard thing to do is start to see like, who is not feeling welcome at our organization? Maybe it's not because we don't have a wheelchair ramp for them to get in the door and we're physically not letting them in, but who doesn't feel like this is an organization for them because it's always been an organization for the 12 producers or whoever it's there. And are there groups that we can go to in the community to try to do outreach? Can we build an outreach that then goes to the loft LGBTQ plus center and gets a hold of a lot of people in one or goes to the Brazilian Portuguese Alumni Association and puts out a message saying like, hey, this organization is for the Brazilian Portuguese speaking, not just the groups that we already have in this city. So I guess my thought is, though it's really hard is like in the same way people do six week, eight week, 10 week strategic planning meetings, do a long extended brainstorming around who's not being served and what ways you could do outreach to let them know you're there to become more accessible, whichever way that is, whether it's through language or just culture change, but like how can you let in the 99% of your community that might not feel as comfortable as the ones that are already in the door? I don't know. Wow, thank you. So Daniel has touched on this a little bit, but Allison and Michelle, you haven't, but Daniel, please feel free to. No, I've already touched enough. Are there any practical applications or concerns around the use of AI in your work and our communities around inclusion? I don't have to say. I don't have a lot of experience with AI other than the standard things that we've experienced with the automated captioning and things like that. But I do know that from hearing a little bit about the world of the arts, that there's a lot of issues in terms of artists and copyright and licensing, not licensing, but hope for getting the word I'm looking for. Anyway, it's just, thank you, intellectual property. You know that that's a big issue. I think that was a part of the recent sag after and writer strikes in Hollywood. I mean, there's just a lot of stuff about all of that that is still feeling very new to me and a lot of people, I think, but yet it's moving at such a rapid pace that it's kind of scary to think how our world is changing so quickly and how that someone could copy me and put me in a video without my knowledge. There's a lot that I don't know yet. So I do have also heard in terms of AI that some of the larger, some organizations may be using AI tools as ways to screen for employment or education opportunities that are discriminatory in some way and I can't say that we've really experienced much of that in our work, but these are things that I have heard of and so I just think the big thing that I really caution people just like we were talking about the language translation and captioning and all that stuff is that human over, there's a lot of great tools out there, but you really have to double check, put the human oversight into all of this and make sure that it's my favorite captioning mistake was we run a program called Poetry Out Loud that's for high school students to recite poetry and there was a recording of it that we had that was doing some automated captioning on YouTube and it wasn't published, but it was just as we were looking through it, it said, Poetry Out Loud. I just had this vision of like a room full of chickens. Hi. Yeah, I love it. There's some very funny things, but it also can be very dangerous if the words are really wrong in some way. So anyway, that's my limit, very limited knowledge of an understanding of AI. You have a captioning, just identify Poultry's Poetry. Oh. Oh. Yes. Poultry's Poetry. So now you know, if you want to see Poultry, say poetry. So about three months ago, the National Weather Service got in touch with me. Who got it? Who got it? The National Weather Service, which there's an office at the Burlington Airport, which I didn't know about next to the yoga studio there. Yeah. Because a few years ago, when there was the terrible flooding in New York, a lot of people died. They put out messaging, the National Weather Service put out alerts and messaging in English, but the people who died were mainly Mandarin speakers. And we think about the emergency alerts going out. They're only in English. We just did a video about that just recently. So they got in touch with us because we were, there was an article about us because we did a lot of videos about the flooding. And so we were in the paper. So Rodney from the National Weather Service who is a Liverpool football club supporter, which so am I. So we're now friends for life. Got in touch with me to talk about our project and the project that he's involved with on a national level about using AI when there is a weather incident of which we all know there's gonna be more and more with global climate change, claps about how we could maybe work together. So that's something that we're looking at in terms of because weather patterns change really quickly. If you're not gonna get a hundred different languages, you're not gonna get a hundred interpreters that are able to do the things. They wanna develop some kind of AI thing so that information can go out really quickly so that same kind of disaster doesn't happen again. The problem with it again is kind of what I said earlier and I saw you nodding there, which is that not all languages are written languages. And how is AI gonna be able to do that? So I think thinking about that is really important and it's something that they're struggling with. There's so many indigenous languages. Again, my mind is not written language. So AI could be useful, but it's just a problematic because it will always exclude what it doesn't have. And then there's issues of ability there. Right. One last thing. I honestly think the biggest threat for community media centers is people not coming in the door and giving a shit about us. Biggest problem we've had is that because people associate us with a outdated technology form, for the most part they go, oh, that's cool, but now I got Vimeo, YouTube, whatever, why do I need that? And it's just been unfortunately a cultural trend of less and less people think, hey, you know what I should do is go knock on the access center door to meet some people and talk about video and technology. I really think that if we use this moment, now I'm not saying embrace the AI technology and start using it and doing it, although it's in premier, you're gonna be messing with this one way or the other. Use this moment to invite people from your community to come in and sit around a table and argue about it. Give them pizza, give them iced tea, a soda, do an AI round table. Everybody has a different opinion. It is not already formed by your political party. Any other hot topic? If you said, hey, let's people come in and talk about gun rights, pretty sure what they're gonna say depending on how they already feel, and it's gonna be, I mean, not this would be a good conversation, but they're gonna come in with their sad opinion and they're gonna, you know, with this, Republicans and Democrats hate it. Republicans and Democrats like it. Everybody's got strong feelings. Just use it as a chance to get some people in the doors who wanna come in for the first time, whether it's because they're interested in the technology or they're interested in arguing or they're interested in having their opinion presented, but- Or they're interested in pizza. Or they're interested in the pizza. But like, knock on the, go ahead. And people, and we also had an art show at the same time called On the Air. Some of the art on the walls was actually generated. And people, some people came in who literally thought it would be via robot. So it was a great opportunity to just talk about the technology with people or with people. I mean, the wonderful thing about what we are doing in community media is you could just point a camera at people having an engaging conversation and that's good media. So if you could get people in and having a conversation about it, you got a show. Just start making shows about it. You don't have to take it, we like it or we hate it. Say, you know, Burlington discusses AI. Boom. You could do 100 episodes because it's not ending at this moment. Yeah. Wow. Thank you. That was, I wanted, at the way beginning, I asked if anyone had a burning question they wanted answered and you had a question. I wonder, did it get answered? You touched on a question. As far as getting people in the door to do one thing and then pursuing that to say now that you read your health information message that you were in your language on a teleprompter that gives you more comfort in the studio. So that was one way to answer that. Okay, cool. We have time for a couple questions. Quick question. Very quick questions. Yes, so quick questions. Medium questions. One long question. One long question. A comment disguised as a question. Thank you for dragging me in here from outside. Yay! See, I went around and I was like, everybody get in here now. I was taking the title of the panel a little bit more literally with regard to getting people into my media center. I appreciate everything that's been addressed from the true accessibility standpoint and whatnot, but I guess maybe the question that is and maybe answered by some of the folks in the room as well on the panel, what's the first thing you wanna see when you walk through the door of a media center? I was over at the media factory last night and it's a very welcoming space, place to sit down, should you see a computer first? Just what's your open dream if you do knock on the door and walk through and what do you wanna see first? Plants. Plants? So for my space I'm opening, I put an AI art gallery in the front with three vertical monitors and one on rotating and I got this thing that's a Vesta board like the train flip boards and I can put messages like welcome, Deb and Jim. So I rarely get visitors, but when I do and I take the time, I put up a little thing that they walk in and it welcomes them. Obviously media centers aren't preparing for every single visitor, but for me it's like, look, I've welcomed you with a sign and somehow that- It's in multiple languages. Yeah, well actually I just only saw welcome them in English and with little colorful squares, yeah, multiple languages would be helpful. Oh, is he a person? I had to literally fill the reception area. I like your pictures, are you right? It would be that the media center is reflecting the community, so the stuff that the media center reflects who we are trying to reach out to. See, I think that's a dream that I would have. Yeah, that's a dream. But as a municipal access station, the reality is I'm located in the board room and I have a closet first space. So my thing is I go up the door to say hi to them and then bring them into my closet. But the reality is I would love to have a space where I welcome people and do training and have all those things. Right, yeah. They don't keep me that space. Right, right. So maybe you have photographs of the community, really your community. That would be another thing, another way you could do it. You could put your pictures up on your walls. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Equipment. Equipment, yes. First and easiest tech. Yeah. Because we're also in a closet and there's no way around it because it's literally used to have the floor. Well. Thank you. Yes, thank you, thank you for. Yes. Yeah, for those who are there at the space last night, you know how to kind of get like the exacts that just works. So we learned over time that people actually had quite a bit of apprehension walking in the door for the first time. They don't know anybody. To be, they also don't feel comfortable around the tech. You have the coming the water and they've heard about it. They don't know how to use it. And so that entryway became quite a barrier for people running through the door. And maybe some would turn around and walk right out because they know people in the store don't know exactly which area they're going to walk out. So we've done some things changing around some office spaces, putting people who are more forward-facing in the front, putting up some signs and clues on duty without major construction. We've done so a lot more to do, but there was educational to learn sort of how that apprehension that a lot of people are coming through the door for the first time, not being comfortable with the tech, not being comfortable with people they don't know. Maybe not speaking English. So yeah, it was an interesting learning experience and a lot of work still to be done. Wow, thank you, Seth. Yeah. Well, thank you everyone for being such wonderful guests and questionnaires and listeners for this fabulous panel. And I wanna thank Michelle and Allison and Daniel for all that you shared. I mean, I feel so enriched. So thank you. Thank you.