[ATcoord] What do you now about Otter.ai captioning and transcription service?

[Monica Olsson]

Hi Ward,

I can speak to this program a little bit. At the beginning of COVID, when I was still at TCC Access Services, we found ourselves in the position of needing to quickly find an alternative to the classroom note-taker accommodation, since assigning a student as note-taker to share their work wasn't going to work in the remote environment. TCC purchased a subscription for 40 student seats of the Otter ai program and our Tech Specialist helped students use their accounts when logged into a live Zoom classroom.

The program is not perfect, and I would never recommend it for CART access, but some benefits of the tool (in my opinion) are these:

  1.  The program transcribes what it hears in real-time and the file is saved inside a student's personal account. Accuracy is much better than Verbit, but still produces errors.
  2.  Students and instructors have the option to upload a Vocab Library to help the program recognize difficult words.
  3.  Students can edit and manipulate the recorded transcript inside their Otter ai accounts, which was a feature i liked. They can correct misspelled words, add their own notes, perform a keyword search, and highlight sections.

I recall pricing being affordable, and they offered to pro-rate student accounts for us, if we needed to add a seat 4 months into our 12-month subscription, for example.

I do have to admit that our office struggled to find support in testing it for WCAG compliance, so lacking that information to share. I'd be happy to help contact them with a VPAT request.




[Title: SBCTC logo - Description: Compass]

Monica M. Olsson (she/her/hers)

Policy Associate – Accessible IT Coordinator

Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges

molsson at sbctc.edu<mailto:molsson at sbctc.edu> • o: 360-704-3922 • c: 206-914-7187

sbctc.edu<https://www.sbctc.edu/> • Twitter: @SBCTCWashington<https://twitter.com/SBCTCWashington> • Facebook: @WASBCTC<https://www.facebook.com/wasbctc/>

________________________________
From: ATcoord <atcoord-bounces at lists.ctc.edu> on behalf of Ward Naf via ATcoord <atcoord at lists.ctc.edu>
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2020 12:29 PM
To: Ward Naf <wnaf at whatcom.edu>
Subject: [ATcoord] What do you now about Otter.ai captioning and transcription service?


I have been asked what the accessibility folks in the state know about Otter.ai https://otter.ai/ Does anyone use it, or have they done any research into it. It looks like it does live or after recording transcriptions; and live captioning. It integrates into Zoom, Teams, WebEx, etc. They also offer mobile app for transcribing speech.



Anyone using it?

Anyone look into it and decide not to for some reason?

Does it work well?

Are there any known issues with it?

Anyone know if its WCAG 2.1 AA?

Anyone already have a VPAT?

Know what education pricing is like?







Ward Naf

IT Director

IT Accessibility Coordinator

Whatcom Community College<https://www.whatcom.edu/>

(360) 383-3430
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