Disability Wales
Disability Wales
MultiStream were commissioned to undertake a groundbreaking live webcast from the Disability Wales conference held at the St David’s Hotel & Spa in Cardiff Bay.
Accessible webcasting is what made this particular webcast groundbreaking as it is recognised as one of the first live webcasts ever conducted that allowed hard of hearing users to read a live, real time, plain text transcript of proceedings.
Disability Wales is a charitable organisation of disability groups and allies from across Wales and they work with all areas of all areas of government by developing policy, campaigning, lobbying and challenging for the rights the rights and equality of disabled people regardless of physical or sensory impairment, learning difficulty or mental health condition.
Chaired by the BBC’s Pete White (presenter of BBC Radio4 programmes such as Pick of the Week and You and Yours) with keynote speakers including Sir Bert Massie, Chair of the Disability Rights Commission and Evelyn Collins, Chief Executive Equalities Commission Northern Ireland the conference is designed to provide a focal point to the activities of Disability Wales.
Stenographers or palantypists are common sights in courts and governments and they provide real time transcripts for ‘records of proceedings’ or directly to screens within the venue. MultiStream developed a platform that captures, in real time, the palantype output and synchronises it with the live video stream.
As far as we can tell, this is only the second time that a live transcript is provided ‘outside’ the video (as reading scan converted text within a webcast video stream is hard enough at the best of times) and the very first time that an accessible webcast was delivered using feeds from more than one palantypists.
In production terms this was a comparatively simple commission with three vision mixed cameras, a graphics feed, and occasional ‘play in’ of material from DVD or tape. Times between plenary sessions were filled through informal interviews with key Disability Wales stakeholders, and an ‘open mike’ vox pox whilst delegates could have their own 15 minutes of fame.
Since the event MultiStream have provided Disability Wales with on demand version of the webcast, which also makes use of our accessible webcasting solution.
The webcast delivered over 8 hours of live content and the viewing results were impressive for an event of this size - over 300 visitors from two continents tuned in and experienced one of the very first accessible live webcasts ever to be undertaken.
Highlights of the Disability Wales webcast are available on the Disability Wales website.