Get your video and webinars ready for the European Accessibility Act

Hi everyone and welcome to our TwentyThree webinar on accessibility. We've had a lot of interest in this particular webinar and that makes me a bit nervous. I'll talk about that in a second. But first of all, welcome to everyone who's joining. If you want, say your names in the chat, do the usual things. If you've ever used a TwentyThree webinar before and some of you are running a lot of webinars even on our platform, you know that there are ways of sharing the conversation in public in the chat, but also ways of asking questions. So along the way, if you have any questions, shoot them there and we'll take some questions at the tail end. First of all though, I'll introduce myself. I'm Steffen. I'm one of two co-founders here at TwentyThree, which means that I've been part of building a video platform and a webinar platform for the last 15 years, mostly from the product and engineering side. And that's one of those things where 15 years ago, nobody would have asked questions about accessibility. And then over time from 2011, when we started discussing this as a part of EU proposals and leading in basically to June 28th with the European Accessibility Act coming to be enforceable, there's a lot of interest in this stuff. And honestly, we wanted to do a small webinar, just a few people kind of to talk about how to kind of get your video to be accessible, but also how to talk about video slightly more widely. And well, we sent out an email and a lot of you signed up for the webinar. So we're quite a lot of people today and that's amazing. But as I said before, it also makes me a bit nervous. My background is I've been building video for a long time. I've been building products around video for a long time. So it also gives you some sense of exposure to accessibility, but also be talking about accessibility more widely from an EU perspective, from the EAA perspective, and give you guys a bit of a background for that. And they're going to be people in the webinar today that are going to be much more well-versed. A lot of you have basically spent the last, maybe not three or four years, but certainly kind of close to that, implementing accessibility efforts on the web presences from your companies. So there's a lot of people around the table today that know about this stuff. And that's amazing, right? We as a community need to get a lot better, not about taking accessibility at this kind of level, but about making sure that the accessibility something that happens at the tail end, but rather something that we build in as we're building our web pages, our products and our services. That's very much what the EA is built for, to kind of nudge people in that direction. And I'll introduce a few of our efforts from the TwentyThree side at the tail end of this webinar, where we are hosting some community forums and even doing events at our upcoming TwentyThree Summit, to kind of bring some of us and you guys together in a room to talk more about accessibility more widely. And we're going to be doing that a lot. So I'm going to take a look at the Q&A, widely on the web, but specifically how it matters for video. So before I dig into just talking about accessibility, I'll show a single slide that is kind of the standard deck. If we go out to a customer, we'll obviously say, we're TwentyThree. We've been building this platform out of Europe. We're compliant in all these different ways. And these are the products that we're building. I just said video and webinars. But basically, we're building a video product for organizations for all their different touch points. There'll usually be a lot of slides to kind of support that storytelling. But one of the slides that is always in our slide deck is this idea of kind of why does video matter? And why does video matter to us and to our customers? Specifically, it's because video is, in many cases, the human side of digital. For the last however many years, we can say it's three decades into the internet. We can say that we're only whatever, two or three years into the AI revolution. But anywhere in between that, digital has become an amazing scaling force. Digital allows us to be always on, always present. People can always find our web page, can always figure out how they register for a course at our university, how they buy a product from us, or even find our internal HR guidelines. All of those things are always present. But digital can always very quickly become a stale sort of always on, we always roll. And video becomes kind of the antidote to that. So that's why we're building video products. It's why you guys are doing a lot with video. But when we start talking about accessibility, video is also a humanizer for a lot of the things that we want to be showing. Not necessarily about contrast colors and accessible controls for the keyboard. We'll get there. We'll talk about that. But also specifically about how do we actually show all the things and make accessible all the things that happens in a company, in an organization, in a business. Well, video is an amazing force for kind of showcasing what's happening and making all the things that maybe happen behind closed doors or aren't accessible to the public that should be, that must be available immediately just by holding up a camera and by applying the internet to that. So video in that way really quickly becomes that kind of human side of digital. So prefacing everything with that, what we'll do today is we'll talk a bit about accessibility. We'll talk a bit about the European accessibility Act. What is it actually? Kind of quick primer for those of you where this might be a new thing. In other cases, it might be an old thing. We'll repeat some of the things that you learned in 2019 when this was passed. We'll talk a bit about how video can become a competitive advantage for accessibility. How to kind of shift around the perspective of video to not being just about how we're technically accessible, but also how our organizations become accessible. I'll give you guys a guide to get real with video. Time allowing, I'll show some of the tools that we feel in TwentyThree to make all that happen. And then we'll talk a bit about the services from TwentyThree, how we can help you guys. Essentially, we'll bring a few of our specialists on stage and tell you how can we help look at your current web presences specifically for video to see how close you are to being conformant. All right, so let's get started. Well, the European Accessibility Act is, as I said before, a piece of legislation that was proposed in the EU a long time ago, 14 years ago, and that made its way through everything that it needed to make its way through. That was passed in 2019. And then the last six years have started taking effect for more and more businesses. So that means that some of our customers already kind of were heavily invested in accessibility in the tail end of that legislation passing, but certainly in 2021 and 2022. But the thing that's happening and actually happening not today, but tomorrow is that the EAA is now starting to take effect for a lot more businesses. So enforcement basically starts for most businesses from tomorrow onwards. And the Accessibility Act, we can start talking about the technical parts of it. I will say that it's basically a European directive that's aimed at improving accessibility kind of more broadly across services, across products for people with disabilities. And it just sets a kind of common accessibility requirements across the EU for all the businesses, not just that are based in the EU, but that operate in the EU. So very important distinction there. And as I said, it is part of this broader inclusion agenda that's running from the EU. And it's about kind of improving, I mean, if you're a EU geek, like some of us may be, it's about kind of improving how the internal market is being nudged along to not have people that are very into accessibility and people that are very out of it to provide a common and level playing field for all of us that want to build our businesses and our products and our services and feel them to customers in the EU. Accessibility can become, and we will get there, I promise you, something about acronyms, right? We'll talk about the WCAG, we'll talk about the 2.1s and the 2.2s and the number of A's that we can apply to accessibility standards. But I always find that it's really nice to start out by talking about accessibility, from a technical perspective, but basically about saying, hey, what are we trying to achieve? The technical thing is very input oriented. It's essentially about thinking, how does a button work? How does landmarks in a webpage work? All of those things. But what we want to be achieving with everything that we're doing when we're fielding services to our customers and to our consumers is that we want to make sure that everything that we put out there is perceivable. Basically, can it be understood based on what is fielded, in our case, in a browser, that it's operable? Can we work with it, right? Whether we use a keyboard, a mouse, or something else, is it understandable? And ultimately, is it also robust? So these are kind of check marks that are kind of output based, right? We want to make sure that we evaluate our efforts, yes, against the common standards, but also about this kind of drive to be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. As I said before, there is a few more things to understand about the EAA, right? The European Accessibility Act is something that has been coming into effect for more and more businesses. And crucially, June 28, tomorrow morning, it starts being enforceable for a lot more businesses. So the EAA primarily applies to B2C businesses. It's basically for every organization that provides products and services to consumers in the EU. So it means that if you're running a B2C business, if you're running an organization that applies, that caters to the public, then you will be required to meet accessibility guidelines and to provide some documentation about that. I'll get to that in a second. It also makes this kind of crucial distinction that a lot of B2B services are not included, right? If you, like TwentyThree, are running a B2B service, we are not directly applicable. But in some cases, we are basically making services that apply to end consumers in kind of this B2B2C version of the world. And again, we want to make sure that the services that we bring to our customers in order to bring to their consumers are accessible. I'll talk a lot more about that in a second. All of that comes with fun things. And I think partially, this is also where the true experts come in, in terms of how do you not only, well, build an accessible page in practice, how do you embed it in an actual organization to make sure that every time you publish a new page, that is testable and all those kind of things. But there's also documentation part of it. So with the EAA also comes the requirement to establish essentially public accessibility statements, to establish user feedback mechanisms, and to maintain a lot of technical documentation about the conformance to the standard. So think about this as being, yes, we end up as web practitioners and webmasters and all those kind of things. So again, a lot about what is the color contrast on this button, and that is important. But the EAA also proposes a lot of kind of practices of documentation. How do we actually not only conform to standards, but also demonstrate conformance to standards? Okay. So we're getting into it. With the EAA comes a European harmonized standard. It has an amazing acronym with numbers and all those kind of things. For the purposes of this conversation, it follows the WCAG 2.8 AA standards for all web and digital services. That's a lot of rounding errors in how it applies to other services in the real world. But on the web, what we end up talking about here becomes a lot about the WCAG standards, 2.1, potentially 2.2, and those two AA's. And more widely on the web, how does a web page conform to all these standards? It's a lot about text. It's a lot about the structure of your web pages. It's about making sure that stuff is navigable and obviously media, and we'll talk a lot about media in a second. But it's also about how to make sure that the content is available. So this is all about how to actually make kind of accessible structure of pages that is with readable content and again navigable interfaces. And crucially that we are good about both supporting and testing with assistive technologies like screen readers. Behind the surface of that, there's a full on very nice, very long standard documentation that establishes a lot of success criteria. Available documentation not only saying, hey, what should you be doing, but also examples of how you achieve that. So this is a field that has come a massive way, not in five years, but maybe even in 25 and 30 years in terms of becoming a progressive agenda for how we build accessible web. But also not only kind of how you set the standard and the requirements, but also really great examples of how that can be achieved. How can you provide all your interfaces in really nice ways? And in the field, you'll have seen maybe not this particular one, but very similar versions of this one, right? This idea of kind of how do we break down the full on checklist of all the things that we need to be doing in order to conform to the standards that we're being set up for. This is essentially kind of role driven. What should I do as a UX designer? What should I do as a developer? And I said before, practice here is only one part of it. Documentation and process is very much part of it. It's not just part of the accessibility agenda. So much for kind of leading to talking about TwentyThree humans and digital tools. What are WCAG guidelines? What is enforceable? Who are, what is the application area for the EAA? When does it come into effect and who does it apply for? What I want to talk about after kind of talking about the more wide progressive agenda of the accessible web is also accessible video. It's very much about making sure that the video that you feed into all of those accessible pages, whether that's about a full on video section, a landing page, a video player, a webinar, all of those things actually fit the high watermark that you want to be doing for accessibility. So that comes with its own requirements and its own practices and its own processes. So that's where we're going to go now. As I said before, there's going to be wide opportunity for asking questions and having fun in the chat. So do feed questions in along the way. I've been a bit kind of on the overall level of saying kind of what is going to hit us tomorrow morning when the EAA starts happening. But what I want to do from here on is talk about how video fits into the accessibility agenda. First of all, maybe talk a bit about how video is your edge in accessibility. Because accessibility very quickly becomes this idea of just kind of having an accessible player. And trust me, it's hard and it's important and it's really something that you want to be geeky about. We'll get geeky about all this stuff in a second to make sure that all of your actual video efforts fit into that. But before we get there, I want to talk about accessibility, not just about the video player. Kind of this kind of ongoing practice of how video is planned, how it's made and how it's shared. And I'll share a few examples of that. So I'll talk about the difference between technical accessibility and color contrast, landmarks, how much jittering is in your video and how you produce that video, what videos you make accessible, alternate text and captions and audio descriptions, all the tick marks you want to be doing for a technically accessible video effort. But organizational accessibility is crucially important to understand as well. So it's not really about just making your video accessible. Well, it also kind of gets your captions and your audio descriptions and make sure your video players are accessible. Rather, it becomes about being accessible with video. I'll share a few examples of that. So think of all the events and things that are happening kind of in the corners of every organization. It can be the public events for whatever school balls and town halls and press conferences, traffic updates and voting guides and whatever disaster preparedness plans. All of those things are happening in all of organizations. And making them accessible, yes, it's about putting them on the web page and text and all those kind of things, but probably the easiest way of taking a lot of these efforts that are happening in school rooms and in boardrooms and in public town halls, making them accessible is actually with video. So video kind of turns around to become a way of feeding a progressive accessibility agenda. Same thing for education, whether that's just the workshops and the civic education or even just for the classroom. It's about taking something that wasn't accessible before and making it accessible now just through the magic of putting a camera up and having resilient distribution means. And obviously, the internal part of that becomes an agenda as well, right? This idea of having your staff training, everything, I guess, into procurement guys and all those things. So when we start talking about video at every touchpoint in TwentyThree, it's also a nice way of thinking about how do you make the touchpoints in your organization that maybe weren't digital before, that weren't accessible before, how do you take those and make them accessible with video? So that's kind of the spring green left side of the screen, this idea of how do you actually make all the things in your organization that aren't accessible now, how do you make them accessible with video? That would have been a nice agenda before. Now it's a requirement. Then on the technical accessibility side, well, this is where we get into the checkmarks. And I showed you a version of this for web accessibility before. Now you get one that's just about how to actually prepare for accessible video. And I'll go through this, maybe not down to the minute. This is a really good overview for what are the requirements involved in the WCAG 2 standards, whether that's 2.0, 2.1, or 2.2. It doesn't matter tremendously. The point here is what is required with level A and crucially what is required with level AA, because that is the thing that we're all going to be held up to from tomorrow morning. And here again, a lot of this comes down to kind of having a perspective on video that isn't just about the video player, but also about what do you actually plan for making on video, how do you produce it, and what is the video player, or sorry, the video file that you prepare after that. So here it's about ensuring that all relevant information is recorded. This can be the meeting that wasn't recorded before that actually should be accessible, but it can also make sure that it's also about making sure that the things that are happening in a room are being recorded in order to be accessible, whether it's scripted or unscripted content. You want to make sure that how you're recording stuff meets a lot of the required standards for sensory characteristics, it says here, but it's also about use of color, flashing, and a lot of other things that are happening in the video. And you want to make sure that dialogue is understandable for the audience. That's a technical requirement. You want to make sure that your mics are good, but also that the audio is produced in a way where you can hear everyone in the room and everything else. A requirement from the standard is that there are no flashes in the video, or rather, no flashes that take more than three seconds. So if you have a very kind of, I want to say, modern concert video with flashing lights, that might be a thing that you want to be worrying about. But you want to ensure that there's sufficient color contrast between text and background if you level that into the video file, and you want to make sure that there's low background noise. So you're going to see that all the things on the left here, like all of those things marked in red, are kind of starting out at organizational accessibility and kind of viewing into not the kind of the technical parts of what we put on a web page, but rather about what are we producing, what are we taping, how do we hold up the mics, how do we plan for the videos that we're making for them to actually be accessible. Then there are requirements for alternate content. So you want to make sure that there's always a text equivalent for the videos that you're producing. You want to be providing captions for all audio content. The difference here between level A and AA is actually that there's a requirement for live content to be transcribed as well, certainly within a few days, or I think it's two weeks. But in most cases, you want to be doing live transcriptions for events like this one. You want to provide alternatives to media. So this would be essentially saying, well, there's a video, but you also have a transcript version of this. And finally, if you want to be level AAA conformant, you also need to provide a sign language track for videos. So all of these things about, well, we have this video, there are people that are talking, we have, well, we don't have any flashes, we have set up the audio there's no background noise, all of those things are tick marks. Once you start publishing, you want to make sure that there are alternative ways of consuming that content, that there are ways for, well, for everyone with impairments to also understand, perceive all of this content, understand it in a robust way. And then finally, obviously, there's the video player part of it. You want to make sure that when you have a video player, that video controls are keyboard friendly, that there are no keyboard traps, right? You don't want to do all your tapping around in your video players and suddenly you can't get any further, nothing worse than that. You want to make sure that all the controls in your player, certainly your plays and your pauses and your skipping and your volumes, but maybe also controls for video quality, controls, obviously for captions, audio descriptions, full screen, and all the other things that can happen in video players, that they are keyboard friendly and don't steal the focus from the keyboard with a trap. You certainly want to provide the basic video controls as a part of the experience. You want to not autoplay video on load, certainly not with audio. Again, something that the internet has certainly moved further towards not doing just because of how browsers work. And you want to make sure that people are not required to use latest technology. And this is a crucial part here to not assume that people are using the exact same devices that you are. This can be, well, people say, well, you can just update to the most recent version of Chrome. But in fact, behind the scenes, a lot of the people that need these things are using not just a browser, but an alternate browser that can be a screen reader, a specified browser that is built for their particular purpose, for their understanding, and for their robustness. And those are not necessarily updated in the same way that, well, Chrome comes out, I guess, every six weeks. You don't really want to be backward compatible. Rather, in this particular case, you want to make sure that you don't assume that videos have actually been updated. You want to make sure that you don't assume that you don't have access to the latest technology. So all of that calls for a bit of a broader perspective to video accessibility. That is not just the video player. Rather, it's about planning it. It requires, with new accessibility standards, that all relevant content is recorded. And that's a tough one. It requires that you have a practice for doing it, platform for publishing. You want to make sure that production actually takes into consideration the requirements, whether that's about contrast, background noise, and covering angles. You want to have robust ways in your process of providing alternative content. And in the end, you also want to have players and all the things that kind of navigate around the players to just work, being unobtrusive, allowing for keyboard controls, disabling autoplay, advertising, which is a usual risk in this space. The advertising can come in from any which way, and then accessibility kind of goes to the wayside. So in practical terms, it's sort of easy to focus on the technical parts of this. But you want to make sure that there's a process for accessibility working through and through to make sure that content and communication is recorded and shared. You want to make sure that pre-production of video files ensure, again, that all relevant information is recorded. You want to have the dialogue be written at a level where the audience will understand it. You want to avoid the flashes, have sufficient color contrast backgrounds, and low background noises. For alternative content, there are different standards here. Certainly the AAA is one to strive towards, this idea of having full text alternatives, having sign languages. But even now, the requirement is for just being A conformant, having captions for all videos, and having audio descriptions for videos in order to be AA conformant. And then, again, the player obviously has specific requirements as well. So we're talking about kind of this video-wide perspective. Yes, you want to make sure you have the tick marks done in order to be technically accessible. But you also want to be thinking more widely about the organizational side. And that's going to be vastly different for you guys in different contexts. So that's going to be fine. I don't want to be presuming too much on how much and how little of your content is being made available online for video to make it accessible. But obviously, it's a big progressive effort to kind of shift the pathway there. So what should I be accepting from my video platform? And I'll stand up here and say we have a video platform. This is certainly what you should be expecting from us as TwentyThree. But this is basically what you should be expecting, regardless of which video or webinar platform you're using. So the platform must provide a player with basic video tools so that it doesn't do kind of crazy things with advertising and keyboard, all those kind of things. You want to make sure that the platform provides a player with kind of all the sufficient colors and target sizes, all the labels that are needed. To make sure that the controls and the content in your video is readable and legible. You want to make sure that the player that your platform provides is responsive. Essentially small stuff like reflowing correctly and supporting orientation on whatever device is being used. Again, think of this as not being, well, we're just looking at stuff from a computer. Everything is the same. There's a wide world out there in terms of actually having responsive standards around. Again, this matters tremendously for video, but also for webinars. And all the kind of supporting pages like a webinar registration page, a full video section to also conform to. Then obviously the platform must provide a player that supports captions, but also audio descriptions. Audio descriptions here is a way of having people that are visually impaired perceive and understand the video as well. So what will usually happen here is having an alternate audio track that explains not just the audio that is being said in the video, the music that's playing, but rather that actually reads aloud and gives context what is happening on the visual part of the video. I'll show you some of that in a second as well. And then you want to expect the platform to also provide all the tools to make this happen. It's one thing to say, well, we can upload subtitles here, but rather you want to make sure that the platform has a resilient tool set that allows you to do the transcriptions, the translations, whether live or on demand, that it provides a resilient and a robust way for you to do audio descriptions, that it has all the services needed in order to have you ship players and everything around the players in conformant fashions. All right. So kind of a quick primer to kind of video as the starting point for accessibility more than just one of those tick marks at the end. And it is sort of tricky, right? Because certainly the day before, right, we're going live tomorrow. We quickly get squeezed into just thinking, about, well, do I conform? But conformance here is also about kind of leaning in and making sure that we get better at seeing opportunities for making more of the things that are happening in our businesses and organizations, making that more accessible. Then the guide, right? How are you going to get ready for the EAA coming into enforcement tomorrow using video? And here we're going to dive a bit more into the TwentyThree side of things. So I'll say we have an accessibility page. We've actually had it online for a few years. So at Twinfree.com accessibility, we're going to give you a lot of the tools that you need in order to make sure that, yes, we're ticking all the boxes for technical accessibility, but also a lot of the documentation that goes behind it. And I want to say this, that we firmly believe that Twinfree and video is for everyone and accessibility is at the heart of what we do. So we are striving to make accessible everything that is in scope for the EAA. And matching the double A standards here. So a lot of that becomes a part of making sure that everything that hits an end consumer, running through our customers, meets these requirements. Again, Twinfree.com accessibility, not necessarily if you want to hear more right now, but if you want to engage with our accessibility efforts tomorrow, a year from now, or five years from now, that's where you're going to find the information. On that page, first of all, there is our Twinfree audience accessibility conformance report. This one describes how the Twinfree product lets companies host videos and webinars for customers using video with players, video sections, video hubs, webinar hubs, all those kinds of things, registration pages, and crucially also with webinar audience rooms. So it covers how we're accessible for those end users, whether you're using video or whether you're using webinars with our platform. So that full report has been up there for the last few years. We updated it a few days ago. You can see kind of the report date here is from this week. So we made a few updates just to make sure that we're tight on how we did it. We did some retesting with recent versions of browsers just to make sure that we didn't fall into any traps. And what is in this report is essentially an overview of all the success criteria that are prescribed by the WCAG standards, both on level A and level AA. So kind of crucially, not only, hey, we're compliant and conformant, but exactly how, what are the pitfalls and the caveats? What are you responsible for as a video producer, as a webmaster? And what can you lean on us to help you with? That means that our video players follow the web standards as well, right? So I've spoken a lot about what that actually means, but it also means like wide browser support. When you load a video player from Twinfree, it'll work in your browser. We provide the necessary tooling here as well for having captions and audio descriptions and or alternate content there. The things that we're building, this is for video players, for the webinar room, the things that are around, again, registration pages for webinars, video sections and webinar hubs. We allow audiences to interact with video through their keyboards or through their screen readers. So screen readers here are kind of a side part of this, but it's also making sure that there are waypoints and navigation structures in the pages, in the products, and in the rooms and the players to make sure that we adhere to these accessible rich internet or ARIA guidelines to guarantee accessibility for users that are employing screen readers. And as I said before, same goes for keyboards. Visual accessibility is part of this as well. So compliance with color contrast and font sizes, all those kinds of things. This is obviously where this will be done in collaboration with customers and how people want to do. We support players out of the box that meet all of these requirements, whether that's about sizing and sizing of buttons, responsive players, same for webinar rooms. But one of the caveats or one of the pitfalls is to make sure that when you apply your own brand guidelines to video players, to registration pages, to webinar hubs, and crucially also to webinar rooms, that you also work this kind of best practice in there, right? That you make sure that visual accessibility still is met once you start applying your brand colors and make sure the color contrast are in there. Certainly, I can say that from the screen reader side, we provide the tooling there. And in a second, you'll hear from one of my colleagues on how we're going to help you also test that. Then transcriptions is a huge part of what has changed in TwentyThree in the last few years. We've supported captions, I think, since 2012. So you could always kind of upload your WebSRT files, download them, mold them with other tools. But in the last years, we've launched not only a resilient robust transcription tools that does automatic transcription in 70 plus languages in the product, but also tools that are free to use for all of our customers. So this is crucial in the sense that you're actually going to get every time you upload a video, you can either automate this, just say, when I upload a video, I want a transcription, or you can click a button that says, I want to transcribe this. And you're going to get 70 different languages you can transcribe to. So that can be your Danish, in my case, it can be your Polish, or your Brazilian, or your English, or your German, or whatever, right? So you're going to get a lot of opportunity here for doing that, including multi-language support. We also support, once you've done a transcription, resilient ways of translating content to those same languages. So it means that you can run both your pages and your players, but also the video and the webinar content in your players in accessible ways, just using the tooling that's there out of the box. And this is where I get to kind of sneak peek a launch that is coming up in the beginning of July. We're going to launch the new version of our Webinar 6 product. There's going to be a lot of fun stuff in there, new ways of doing mobile, new ways of running webinar series, content generation and AI, and a lot more things. But the main thing for the purposes of this is that we're now also supporting live transcription of content and webinars to the exact same languages that we're doing. So it means that you can have Stefan talking on screen and actually get a live transcription in your webinar room running from that. Part of that is also if you have our translation add-on, you'll also be able to get translated versions of it. So you could have Stefan speaking in English and then get a Portuguese translation, or a German translation, or a Danish translation for the people that want to engage with this in different ways. So it's also a different angle to accessibility, where quickly we get into kind of the whatever, the hearing impaired or the visually impaired. But a lot of this also becomes about making stuff available for people with different languages. So here again, we are both way into, for the last decade, providing the tooling that allows all this stuff to happen, but also with our release now, adding support for doing this not only after the fact, but also doing it automatically while stuff is happening live. All right. So that is a kind of quick primer to a lot of the tools. What does a platform need to provide in order to give you the accessibility? So this is kind of technical, right? I want to talk briefly about our accessibility forum. So this is something, again, we've been running for the last few years. We invite all of our customers and everyone that's interested in accessibility as a kind of checkbox thing, yes, but also as a progressive agenda to be part of our product development process in quarterly accessibility forums that are driving our thinking forward. So some of that is how do you affect the product on TwentyThree to progress on the accessibility agenda, but it's also a great way of meeting other people that have the same needs and wants, the people that are crucially geeky about how do we progress this agenda. The next meeting is going to be in September, and you're obviously invited. So reach out to me or reach out to the address that I'll flash on screen in a second if you want to join our accessibility forum. The more, the merrier. And we're excited about kind of making this something that is available to a lot more people. So just recapping, a lot of tools that are built to enable accessibility from our default video section themes to our landing pages to our video player to the webinar room, all of those different touch points that are part of the TwentyThree platform. Automated transcriptions, automated translations. Automated transcriptions are available for everyone to use every day when they upload a video. You can just click the button. Textions is available for everyone that has that add-on. Webinar live transcription is coming to a browser near you with our upcoming launch. If you want to preview it, reach out again. It's been in beta for a few months, so you can absolutely start using this now. And then finally, also audio descriptions for videos. This is where I'll take a step forward and show you guys a few examples. This requires me to toggle my screen sharing, which is going to be fun. Let's see. All right, perfect. I'm just getting a thumbs up from the team behind the screen here. You can see my browser. That's perfect. We're doing fine here. All right, so I wanted to show you a few examples just of all of this, right? So first of all, I have a video. This is my colleague Cecilia and her interviewing Amelia, another one of our colleagues. This is available on our web page, all of those fun things. But for the purpose of this, I basically kind of, I uploaded a video. And what you get there is an automated transcript. So this transcript is automatically generated. You can have all your vocabulary set up ahead of time. So if somebody's called Amelia Holmsten, you can kind of cue that this is how you spell her name. So you get really, really great transcriptions for all videos. And tied to that, when I find a different video here, let's see, probably this one isn't transcribed. In a new video that's uploaded, I can either click Start Transcription. That will give me the option of literally picking whatever language I'm going to be transcribing to. And even better, I can also set up everything that comes in to automatically be transcribed. So this means not that you're going to get captions that just go into every player automatically without you reviewing it, but rather that every time you upload a video, immediately we'll provide a transcript of that video. You can review it, see whether it matches your brand guidelines, all of those things, and then click Publish. So how does all this work? Well, you can see as a part of subtitles, in this case, I have a few different transcriptions and I have a few different subtitles. In this case, there's an English version. This is what happened for the video in question here. But I also have translated this into Danish. I've translated it into German. And there's a Spanish version that I might not have actually looked through. My Spanish is not perfect, right? So it might be that I want a colleague to review it before it goes out. But either way, this gives you all the tools to have an automatic transcription coming in. You don't need to worry about alternative programs and all those kind of things. They're just here. You can work with the transcriptions to go and fix that. For example, it could be we want to merge a few things here. Or we want an Oxford comma. So here we go. This gives me a really, really nice way of just quickly editing and fixing whatever needs to be done on my subtitles, on my transcriptions, and making them available wherever this player lives. You also see that there are audio transcriptions for this. This is an interview. Amelia and Cecilia are sitting in a room. So we want to be hinting that. But it's maybe not the most interesting video. So I picked up another one. So this is a video where nothing much is happening. This is a video showing a drone shot of a beach with rolling waves. And in the video, when the video ends, it has a drone shot overview of the city. These are ways of making sure that you're not only kind of compliant for the people with captions and transcriptions, but also providing automated audio descriptions just from writing in the text here and putting them into videos. So one of the requirements as you kind of move up the level steps from the single A's to the double A's to the triple A's is to provide alternate content for your videos. And actually, probably what you can see is that once you start having good transcription abilities, then making sure that those are easy to use. This is where I should make sure I have the right page. Sorry about this. Otherwise, my demo is going to be annoying. There we go. So what happens here? This is a video section that's running on TwentyThree. So kind of full-on designed video CMS with videos and navigations and ability to playback videos, whether muted or not, with a lot of branding features that make sure that we hit all this stuff. But you can also see here that a part of this page and something that comes out of the box, you literally just enable it, is the ability to show a transcript as an alternative text to what is happening in the video. So instead of just showing captions on the video, you can actually have a really resilient way of navigating through this entire talk. And again, it's a really nice way of making sure that whether you're embedding the video here or elsewhere, that you have alternatives to the alternative text versions of your videos. And then last up, I just want to show you our player library. So there are plenty of ways of having fun with players. I don't want to be digging down too deeply into it. Just saying that at TwentyThree, we provide something like 10 different design players that all meet the requirements for your accessibility needs, right? So that's all about keyboards and navigation, being able to switch contrast to work with autoplay and not autoplay with menus and keyboard traps and all those kind of things that I spoke about before. So it's not just about saying, well, we have an accessible player in a corner that's kind of boring, and then you have the fun brand ones. In fact, all of the fun brand ones are accessible, and you can pick them from here. And then afterwards, you can apply your brand color, make sure that everything you need here has the necessary color contrast. And crucially, this is not just about being able to tap for a player. This works really well with screen readers. So just a good kind of quick view at some of the accessibility tools that we're providing. So I will share my screen again here and see if I can get back to this one. We're good again? Perfect. It's a smooth machine here. All right. So that was a few examples. It was me talking about the EAA. Something about the video being the glue that might actually bring accessibility to a lot of the things that aren't accessible today. And then very practically, what are the things that you can get and you should be expecting from a video platform and kind of exemplifying how you're going to go do that. Next up, I'm going to welcome my colleague, Anja, to stage because we realized a long time ago that providing the tools is crucial, but it's not adequate to make sure that you're actually helping our customers not only kind of technically be accessible, but make sure that everything is truly accessible. So Anja, if you walk up here. Hi, Anja. Hello, everyone. Good to see you guys today. And what I wanted to talk about for just a brief few minutes is that everything that Stefan mentioned is super important for us as a team or the technical requirements that we are following up on. And we're making sure that the product is up to speed. But on top of that, we have a wonderful team that's there to support you understand all of these things, first of all, so that it's not only the table with requirements that Stefan showed that doesn't really speak to you, but that you actually know how it translates to the experience you're providing for your audience, for all the people who are watching your videos and attending your webinars. We have a lot of community events that we invite you to, including the forum that's coming in September. I hope to see you there. And that's something we really want to invite you for and see you there to have a huddle to make sure we get also the feedback from you on all of the new things we're introducing. But on top of that, we also are here to meet in smaller groups with you internally, with your team, your organization, to make sure that you feel secure with all of the new laws that are coming into place now and that you're already checked in with all of the requirements you've seen before. So what we want to emphasize today is that we are here as the specialist team and also the whole TwentyThree team to support you with your efforts, to help you move towards the new experience and even stay ahead of everything that will be introduced in the future. So first of all, we really invite you to reach out to us. Let's have a huddle and actually go for your website, click on those buttons, check how they behave on hover, what are the captions that you have in your players, whether you have all of the relevant color contrasting in place. Just shoot us an email and let's go for it together and see how we can improve it. Maybe you have a custom out of the box thing that you would like us to implement to design for you. That's also something we can offer. So if you have more ideas than what we already by default provide in the product, we can also have a meeting about it and see what we can achieve together. On top of that, I think it's really great idea to also have a huddle, not only with specialists, but also client director to see how we can move your whole organization towards being accessible with video as Stefan said. So using the video and webinar to actually open up and have more people know your brand. So whenever you feel like you're ready to have a chat, maybe you have follow up questions after today. Maybe you want us to help you understand all of the things that Stefan talked about. Maybe you want to have a preview. Maybe you want to have a look at the new features or you would like to make sure you're using translations, transcriptions, you know how to access that in the back end of the platform. Please reach out. You can see right now on the screen our specialist email. You can also always just reach out through the standard support channels. If you're a customer, you probably use it at some point in time and then you'll probably see one of those beautiful faces on the screen reaching out to you back. So we're excited just as you are hopefully. And let's talk about it sometime soon. Perfect, Anja. Thanks. Just stick around. We'll see as we do a bit of housekeeping. Even if you're not reaching out, we might be reaching out to you guys. We're doing a kind of a special thing over summer where we'll do just a 30 minute order just to make sure that at least all of the options are available, that you're not running an old version of a player, all those kind of things to make sure that you actually are where you want to be on accessibility. So this is something that we're reaching out to all of our customers on to make sure that they well, maybe won't need to go deeply and spend a lot of time on video, but just making sure that we check the check boxes with a 30 minute quick audit. We'll reach out to everyone, including the people in this room with that offering. Then I'll repeat a few of the things that I've said before. That's always good as a part of all this. Everything we've said today, at least in versions of it, is available on trainfree.com. We're going to make this webinar available there. Everything that was said in the webinar, at least in the short version of it, is available from there as well, including you can find an accessibility deck. Essentially, if you want to bring in some of this information in a meeting, that's a really helpful way of doing it. But this is also where you can download the updated accessibility audience accessibility conformance guide. Those are four really hard words to say in tandem, and I'm really proud of myself for having done so. You're doing a great job, Stefan. That's really nice, right? So what's also important here is if you have anything as a feedback, whether that's about product details, that accessibility deck, the conformance report, or if you want to join our accessibility forum, then reach out at accessibility at trainfree.com. It's going to be me, but also a few of our colleagues that are part of setting all of this up. And it's just to kind of restate our commitment here is that we are committed to upholding the principles of digital inclusion. So this is something that is aspirational. It's about processes, about documentation, about all those things that we spoke about already. We want to make sure that the tools that we're providing will let you kind of tick all those boxes, whether on the organizational side or the technical side. And that also means that there are ways of letting us know if we're not living up to that standard, right? So if you ever come across something where you think, hey, this could be better, again, reach out at accessibility at trainfree.com. This is where you're going to find us. So short Easter egg at the tail end of things, right? We're coming into summer, and for us, that means, well, sun and nice weather in Copenhagen for the most part, but it also means we're only two months away from our annual TwentyThree Summit. Actually, the theme there is the human side of digital. So we're hosting a two-day conference in Copenhagen about everything video, everything webinars, everything web, all the things that we're talking about today on Thursday, August 28th, and Friday, August 29th. We'll have, hopefully, more than 1,000 people, shiny, happy, meeting Copenhagen with 400 different companies, 50 speakers, and more than 40 sessions on everything that touches the video agenda. We will also be hosting sessions about accessibility of video. So this is also a good occasion to, yes, come talk about video, come talk to Train Free about all the things that matter to you guys, but actually to meet the others that are crucially interested in the accessibility agenda when it comes not only to making video accessible, but to have your organization become accessible with video. And to help this along, for just the people in this webinar, we are offering 10 exclusive spots for the Train Free Summit with a coupon code. This means if you go to trainfree.com to the summit, you can, well, basically get a free ticket using this specific coupon code. We'll make this available for the next week or so, or for the first 10 people that come in. So make sure you be happy, be fast. And we really want to see you there. And if you get a free ticket or not, this is a good occasion to come talk about accessibility with your peers and with people that passionately care both about the web and accessibility and about video. I think with that in mind, we're going to, I mean, I'm looking at the clock here, and we want to make sure that we are conscious of time. But maybe let's flash the question from Igor on screen, Cecilia, if you can. So Igor is asking, morning, Stefan. That's nice. Thank you. Morning, Igor. Many thanks for the presentation. All that's good. And I wanted to bring this one up because it actually is sort of a crucial thing right there. I don't want to be talking too much about our peers and how we compare to them. Honestly, it's not necessarily been a massive focus. It might be in the coming months. Also, as we get more and more feedback from our customers or people that are not customers yet on what their requirements are for accessibility on a video platform. One of the things that we've been seeing is that, well, certainly live transcriptions is not available on every product. Certainly audio descriptions is something that people are paying lip service to without actually doing it. So this is one of those things where some other platforms will be supporting audio descriptions a bit, but honestly, not really. What I do want to talk about here, more than just saying negative things about the rest of the field, because I think we're all kind of building this field together. I'm committed to from the TwentyThree side to make sure that we tick every box and also that we're better than our competition. So, I mean, if you want to help us be that, absolutely. Let's make it happen together. But I think there's also a part of this that is European. And it's something that, I mean, we're a 20 year old company at this point. We're all out of Copenhagen. We've been all out of Copenhagen. The founders are still here. So we're sort of a weird company in the tech space. And sometimes people will say, like, why are you like this? Why do you talk so much about Europeanness? Why do you talk so much about the GDPR? In this case, why do you talk about the EAA? That's a novelty in a business or in a version of the world where digital businesses are meant to be global. This is not about saying that TwentyThree shouldn't be global. We are very much invested in doing that. But we also want to be European. So we want to make sure that whatever we do for compliance on data, compliance and conformance on accessibility and just availability, that we are a European team based out of Europe. And we want to be building a world where European tech has a different perspective on the world. So I just wanted to flash that as well. A few more questions. So Aaron is asking, thank you for a good presentation. What's your take on subtitles and videos that I want to show as a part of PowerPoint presentations in the physical meeting room? Can I download the transcript together with the video and put it in the presentation? Or would I put the video in PowerPoints? Okay, so that's a lot. And honestly, I probably have less of a take on how to use video in PowerPoints. It's something that I'm doing a lot, but not necessarily how I do it. So on TwentyThree, what we do, we do this for a number of different reasons. We're sort of interested in making sure that captions are immediate, that they're updatable, that they're compliant with what you want to be doing, but also that they're translatable. So captions on TwentyThree will always be kind of side files that tie into the video. So when you upload a video, we'll make a transcript. That transcript is editable on the TwentyThree platform and you can download it. So you can download that in a common format. It's usually going to be in WebSRT, but there are a few other things, a few other formats. You can also take captions made on a different platform and upload them to TwentyThree. So that's going to be your VTTs and your .subs and all those kind of fun different formats. So to answer the question more specifically, what you can do is you can certainly download the video or embed it from TwentyThree. If you can embed a video iframe directly in the tool that you're using, that could be in whatever slide tool that's web-based, including PowerPoint, well, the captions are just going to come there and you'll be able to switch languages as well. If you don't have a tool that allows you to do that, you can download the video and you can download the SRT file. I don't know what the support in PowerPoint is for that, but certainly the data is available for doing so. And we can maybe take Aaron's other question on SoMeet because it's one of those crucial things that we're going to be finding ourselves in a world where accessibility, just like the GDPR of now seven years ago, when that came into effect, everyone was like, yeah, what is this actually going to be? Nobody had resilient ways of knowing whether they were conformant, which questions to ask, how do they test, all of those different things. Hopefully our ecosystem is better prepared for accessibility requirements than honestly a lot of those kind of global services were for the GDPR or SoMeet services were for the GDPR seven years ago. But the last seven years have also showed that there's a lot of lip service being paid to that progressive agenda that we're seeing in the EU. The progressive agenda of actually having digital inclusion, of actually having data portability. So it's not to say that I don't want to be talking about social media, but it's also saying that social media is sort of different here. Social media is most likely going to be your Facebooks and your Twitters, whatever they're called, it's going to be your LinkedIns. And they will cater at least some to accessibility standards, but it's tough because these are global companies that are not necessarily feeling affected by this legislation in the same way that we are in Europe. So whether we can say that accessibility requirements are affecting social media, absolutely categorically yes, just as the GDPR affects global companies that are operating in Europe, so does the EAA. So the accessibility requirements are going to be, well, relevant and crucially enforceable by tomorrow morning for, again, your Facebooks and your LinkedIns. So what we do from the TwentyThree side is we can help you, at least in the cases that, or the boxes that we're in on those particular platforms. We can help you make LinkedIn conformant or Facebook conformant, but when you're using TwentyThree to distribute your video to those platforms, what will happen is actually that you get your automatic transcripts, your editing tools, your transcriptions and translations, and those are automatically pushed to those social media pages. So making video conformant within that box of social media, absolutely we can help you on that one. Maybe on the bigger European agenda, that's going to be a bit tougher. Okay, that leaves us as having spoken for exactly an hour, so that's going to be, amazingly great. And it also means that Annie and I get to thank you for being part of this. We want to keep the conversation going, so don't forget those kind of calls to actions. Reach out to us at accessibility.twentythree.com. Or if you want to be just engaging with not accessibility more widely, but are we compliant? Are we conformant? Then reach out to the specialist team and they'll happily help you make an audit. And then finally, please come join us for the TwentyThree summit in late August. And I'll make sure we flash that coupon code again. So if you want to be one of the first 10 ones to get an exclusive spot for