Reimagining Access: Inclusive Technology Design for Archives and Special Collections

  • Sustainable Development
Art and design students at a whiteboard, ideating and sketching concepts .
ArtCenter students flesh out concepts during a recent accessibility design workshop led by Assistant Professor Josh Halstead, a disability advocate who participated in the Reimagining Access symposium and class. Photo by Steven Butler.

Transcription Software

 

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by Nikita Pashenkov

  

Creating transcriptions for audiovisual content is an excellent way to make materials more accessible. However, creating transcriptions manually is costly and time-consuming, especially for archives that have large collections. For the Reimagining Access project, we piloted Whisper, an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) application by OpenAI that uses AI and pulls from thousands of hours of audio on the web for its dataset

Our assessment from the pilot was that Whisper is incredibly accurate, but not without flaws, sometimes adding additional text not spoken to the transcript. We realized that the human element is still crucial for editing and formatting. However, creating a complete transcript with Whisper takes significantly less time than creating one manually. We envision this tool (and other ASRs) to be used in the workflow of processing audiovisual materials, as important as other steps in processing digital and analog materials.

The Reimagining Access GitHub page includes installation requirements and instructions for Whisper.

https://github.com/artcenter-interaction/reimagining-access/blob/main/docs/index.md#whisper-gui

Creative Prompts


Reimagining Access - Creative Prompts

Thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Designmatters Studio co-hosted with Interaction Design, in the Spring and Summer of 2021, challenged ArtCenter students to incorporate human-centered design processes into innovative experiences accessing archival digital collections in ArtCenter’s Archives and Special Collections.

This guide gives designers, educators, and archivists specific discussion prompts and practical exercises gleaned from our Reimagining Access project at ArtCenter. It is meant to complement Human Interface Guidelines for Accessibility from major operating systems, not replace them. We offer questions and discussion to build and enrich access as a practice.

Download Creative Prompts