Elliott Stevens on Digital Scholarship and Accessibility in Storytelling
Over the past four weeks, the University of Washington Libraries has hosted a program called Storytelling Fellows. Led by UW Textual Studies’ own Elliott Stevens (Research Commons and English Studies Librarian, UW Libraries), alongside Perry Yee, Kathryn Miller, Dylan Burns, and Jinny Sanders, this workshop helps students and faculty build the skills necessary to create and share a podcast episode. We sat down with Stevens to talk about the Storytelling Fellows Workshop and his interests in digital scholarship and accessibility. Read on to find out more!
What is Digital Storytelling Fellows?
Started in 2017, Stevens explains, the Digital Storytelling Fellows is a technical workshop designed for graduate students and faculty who want to learn about digital techniques for the creation of multimodal scholarship and composition. This fall, the 32 fellows enrolled in the program have focused on podcasting, a longstanding mode of digital scholarship, as they’ve worked through the production of a short podcast segment. Throughout this one-month workshop, participants gather for four synchronous meetings in which they learn about various tools, platforms, and strategies for developing and hosting a podcast while sharing their work in a collaborative space along the way. Between these meetings, fellows work on their digital creations and connect with the program’s instructors, who Stevens describes as coaches, cheering participants on and encouraging them to try new things while offering guidance and technical expertise. He sees this coaching approach as one of the unique benefits of the fellows program. Often, working with technology can involve hurdles and frustrations, but the coaches in this workshop focus on helping participants get through the ups and downs of tech-centric scholarship through their blend of support and technical knowledge.
UW Libraries Research Commons and Open Scholarship Commons Sponsored Digital Workshop
Digital Storytelling Fellows is supported by the UW Libraries Research Commons, Libraries Instructional Design, and the Open Scholarship Commons (OSC). The Research Commons and the OSC are two places on the UW campus where students, faculty, researchers, and instructors can connect across disciplines while doing technology-driven scholarship. This mission is echoed in the Digital Storytelling Fellows and its commitment to building an online community of interdisciplinary scholars, researchers, and students working on digital projects through their free, online workshop program.
Stevens and Perry Yee developed the program after realizing that, to their knowledge, there were no other free or low-cost workshops focused on digital scholarship methods that were totally online. For their inaugural session in 2017, the Fellows program focused on video creation and editing using the browser-based software WeVideo. After a successful launch, the Digital Storytelling Fellows took suggestions about what kind of scholarly modes participants would want next. They landed on podcasting after receiving much interest in the topic, as well as finding that podcasting was an underserved medium in this kind of free and online programming.
The UW Libraries Podcast Workshop
There are four sessions throughout the workshop, Stevens tells us. The first meeting welcomes and introduces fellows to the program, getting them situated with Audacity, a digital audio recording and editing software, and setting them up with the tools they’ll need to complete the program. They also begin imagining an introduction for their podcasts, which leads them into the second session where they level-up in technical skills. In this second week, participants also listen to example podcasts and deconstruct them, learning how to layer audio files and build a world through the combination of different sounds. Session three is Stevens’ favorite: the draft workshop. During this week’s meeting, fellows bring whatever they’ve completed of their podcast, whether that be a full or partial script draft, raw recordings, or interview audio, and participate in a constructive feedback session that helps them to ascertain initial audience reactions. The fourth and final session is a reflection and a celebration for completing the workshop, where participants share their newly finished episodes, clips, or segments.
Over the four weeks, fellows receive individual mentorship from the program’s four coaches and participate in small-group learning, with eight or so participants in each session. This group-based model allows for the development of a small, supportive community, with lots of space for check-ins and one-on-one feedback. In addition to the larger topics of each weekly session, participants can also ask individualized questions aimed at their particular projects. Overall, the Digital Storytelling Fellows gives students and faculty the opportunity to work with others doing similar digital scholarship, creating an infrastructure of support and interdisciplinary community, while helping them achieve their research goals through a defined set of deadlines.
Digital Accessibility, Podcasting, and the Importance of Inclusive Scholarship
While in the Digital Storytelling Fellows program, participants also learn about the importance of accessibility in digital scholarship and podcasting, which is a particular interest of Stevens who, in his work as the UW Libraries Research Commons Librarian, has taken an active role in prioritizing inclusive materials and researching the accessibility of digital tools after working with Hadi Rangin, an information technology accessibility specialist for Accessible Technology Services (ATS).
When the Fellows program first ran in 2017, it focused on video creation and editing, but the organizers found that there was a prohibitive cost entailed in using accessible video editing software and realized that accessible podcasting technologies were much more freely available. Currently, they run the workshop using Audacity, which not only has inclusive features built into its software but also makes its accessible documentation available for users. In addition to the technology they use, Digital Storytelling Fellows also teaches podcasters to incorporate best practices for accessibility into their creations. During the workshop, they learn about strategies, like captioning and transcripts, that can help enrich their storytelling by making it user-friendly for all future audience members.
Best Practices for Digital Media Creation and Design for Assistive Technology
Part of Stevens’ work at UW Libraries also includes visiting classes to share what he’s learned about digital media creation and designing for assistive technology. There are seven questions he proposes creators ask to ensure they’re creating with accessibility in mind:
1. Are you using headings correctly?
When designing digital projects, especially website content, you’ll typically include headings (h1, h2, h3, h4). These not only affect the design and layout of your pages, but give your content an organizational structure that can be used by screen reading technology to understand the layout and organization of your content. Making sure you use headings and that you nest them properly is just one simple way you can improve the usability of your digital content.
2. Do your colors have enough contrast?
One simple way to make your design user-friendly is to make sure you have enough contrast in your color scheme. Incorporating an accessibility checker, like Lighthouse, can run an analysis on your pages and determine if your contrast is high enough.
3. Do you have appropriate alternative text for your images and do you include captions?
Alternative text or alt text describes images that appear in digitally-created content. This information, alongside image captions, can be extremely helpful for users employing screen readers so that your images can be visible through text-based means. Alt text, alongside captions, should describe the content in a straightforward manner that is concise and specific. It should also place the image in the context of its purpose on the web page and in relation to the other written content it compliments.
4. Is your link text descriptive?
It might be tempting to link out to content with phrasing like, “click here,” but link text should actually describe where and with what the link is connected. For example, if you wanted to link to upcoming UW Textual Studies Courses, you should place the link within the text that best describes it.
5. Have you included captions and transcripts for your media projects?
When creating in audio or video modes, or if you’re incorporating audio or video files into your content, you want to make sure that you also include captions and transcripts that accurately reflect the audio and video files so that users deploying assistive technologies can experience it accurately.
6. Are your PDFs accessible?
Sometimes, digital content includes images or PDFs with textual content. You’ll want to make sure that, no matter what format you’re sharing in, your content can be read with screen readers. There are various tools that you can use to make your PDFs usable with screen reading, but an easy way to test either your images or PDFs is to try highlighting text with your mouse. If you can, great! If not, your files probably aren’t accessible. Even if this first test goes smoothly, it’s always worth checking your files with software like Adobe that can not only help make sure all your text is readable, but that the content also has a structural organization to help ensure a screen reader goes through the text in a logical order.
7. Is your digital content designed for use without a mouse?
Not all users use a mouse to navigate digital content. One way you can check if your content is navigable without the use of a mouse is to test if you can move around your site with just your keyboard using the tab, shift + tab, arrow keys, space bar, enter, and escape functions. If you can’t, you might need to think about the underlying structure of your site or, if you’ve used a content management platform, whether you might consider another digital content tool that attends to accessibility in its template design.
Digital Scholarship at UW Libraries OSC and UW Textual Studies
If you’re interested in learning more about digital media projects, keep your eyes out for future Digital Storytelling Fellows sessions! You can also check out the UW Libraries OSC and sign up for their listserv to keep up to date on exciting upcoming events centered around digital scholarship and interdisciplinary research.
And don’t forget to check out UW Textual Studies courses. Many of our classes, as well as the culminating Capstone project, offer opportunities for you to experiment with digital projects and technologies! Many thanks to Elliott Stevens for sharing his work on the Digital Storytelling Fellows and digital accessibility!
For UW Textual Studies news, upcoming events, and updates on faculty and student research, sign up for the Textual Studies listserv and don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and X.