Ep. 1, S2 - Making Meetings Accessible: Behind the Scenes of Fresno's Multilingual Initiative

What drew you originally to this idea of adding multilingual audio for city council meetings? Well, we're always looking at how we can best serve our residents and, and our government partners. When we saw the new capability of our Cablecast servers to include multiple audio programming, we immediately started thinking, how can we take advantage of this? How could we implement something, you know, to serve those residents who might need programming in an alternate language? During the COVID pandemic, when the government meetings were not accessible to the public in person, public participation shifted to online platforms like Zoom. Zoom has the ability to incorporate live interpretation. And so that sort of inspired us to think, hmm, how can we now that we have this new capability with, multiple audio programs, how can we incorporate those live interpreters into the content that's being viewed on our channels and through streaming? This podcast is for city communications teams and video professionals in government. We talk about expanding service delivery with video and streaming, media accessibility, gear, broadcast and streaming workflows, and more. It's all right here on the Government Video Podcast. Hello, and welcome back to the Government Video Podcast, where we explore how local government teams use media technology to inform, engage, and serve their residents. I'm your host this week, Michelle Alimoradi, and in this episode, we're excited to welcome Bryan Harley, Executive Director of CMAC, the Community Media Access Collaborative in Fresno, California. Bryan and his team are implementing multilingual audio services for city council meetings in Fresno, making government more accessible to the residents there for their diverse communities there. And Bryan is going to talk to us about the unique needs in their community, as well as the process of launching this multilingual initiative at CMAC. Including the technical setup and the interdepartmental collaboration. So we're going to dive into that. Welcome, Bryan. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the podcast. Oh, great. We love to hear it. So, Bryan, before we get into talking about this multilingual audio initiative, let's start by learning a little bit more about you, telling our listeners how did you get started at CMAC? What's your role and what do you see as CMAC's role for the community of Fresno and Clovis? Yeah. So I'm the executive director at CMAC or the Community Media Access Collaborative. We're a nonprofit organization that serves the city of Fresno and Clovis and their residents. We operate a public education and government access channels on their behalf. I have a team of around 15 employees, some full time, some part time and we provide, you know, a number of different resources and services. We have a community media center in downtown Fresno. With several recording facilities that the public can use. We have an equipment rental program where we check out cameras, you know, mics, lights, laptops, everything somebody would need to create a media project. We have a variety of educational programs, both short form workshops and longer form initiatives where, you know, residents might be learning in a cohort together for several weeks or months on certain specific projects. We have a production services team that assists local government non profit and schools. We host a variety of community events such as film festivals and, and, and, you know, we manage those channels I mentioned that are also streaming 24 7. So providing folks access to those channels and streaming platforms. So yeah, we do a lot of different things, a lot of different ways that we serve our community. We have a lot of, we have a wide variety of listeners here, so I always like to kind of demystify things and, or clarify things. So CMAC is what we would probably describe as a full PEG center, right? You're doing the public, the education and the government arm of this community media content and delivery, right? So you guys are, you're providing facilities for the public to come in and produce media, but you're also producing it for the community with your own staff. And as a part of that, you collaborate with two cities, right, to cover various meetings and other public information for residents in those communities. Right. What, what does that look like? What is that content on the government side? Yeah specifically on the government side, we work with the cities of Fresno and Clovis and actually we do a little bit of work for the County of Fresno as well covering their board of supervisor meetings, but, but yeah, for the cities of Fresno and Clovis, it's of course, council meetings primarily, but also various boards and commissions, planning Commission, Parks, Recreation and Arts Commission, Disability Advisory Commission, you know, every board and commission under the sun we're there making sure those meetings are recorded and archived and available to the public as well as, you know, special projects that come along like, you know, the Mayor's annual State of the City Address or, other Projects or initiatives where video is involved and they need our assistance. Do you live stream that? We do live stream all of those meetings that I mentioned. Yes. That's great. Well, so as you're live streaming, you are also thinking about how to increase access and usability of these resources for, for the community, right? And in Fresno and Clovis, you have a pretty diverse set of communities there. What drew you originally to this idea of adding multilingual audio for city council meetings? Was there a need that was requested specifically? Well, we're always looking at how we can best serve our residents and, and our government partners. So, you know, we've been providing closed captioning for several years now thanks to the affordability of it. You know, the, the cost has come down quite a bit, you know, that was a prohibiting factor initially. But now that that's a lot more affordable, you know, we're happy to provide those services. Earlier this year, we introduced captioning in Spanish. So, you know, translated captions, which is great. And we're looking at rolling that out into other languages as well. But when we saw, you know, the, the new capability of the, our Cablecast servers to include multiple audio programming. You know, we immediately started thinking, how can we take advantage of this? How could we implement something, you know, to serve those residents who might need programming in an alternate language? So during the COVID pandemic, when the government meetings were not accessible to the public in person, public participation shifted to online platforms like Zoom. Our city used Zoom. And you know, Zoom has the ability to incorporate live interpretation. And our city had already been providing documents in the four most spoken languages in Fresno, which are English, Spanish, Punjabi, and Hmong. So they, they were used to providing, documents in those languages. They were used to providing live interpreters in the council chambers in those languages. You know, when requested, when needed. And so that shifted to Zoom. And, you know, Zoom makes, has a very, good feature for interpretation that makes it real easy. You know, you can click that little interpretation box if you need the other language. You know, you'll, you'll hear the interpreter on the other end live translating what's happening during that meeting. And so that sort of inspired us to think, hmm, how can we now that we have this new capability with multiple audio programs how can we incorporate those live interpreters into the content that's being viewed on our channels and through streaming? I love, I love that about Zoom. I'm hearing that story so often that like when things move to Zoom, it was like, Oh, we realized this is a thing that we could do on Zoom that we should probably figure out how to do normally. It was actually, it was a really great little aha moment for a lot of things. I want to back up just a little bit and make a quick distinction because we talk about Captioning in particular, we've talked about it several times on the podcast, and in all or most of the cases, I believe at this point, we've been talking about automated captioning, and we've been talking about automated translations in the case of, of what you're using at CMAC. Those are all automated. So it's essentially it's AI. It's trainable AI. You can put in some of your own vocabularies. You can edit. But what we're talking about today with this multi language audio is actually a person in the room that's interpreting, right? So in order to offer this, Thankfully for you all in, in Fresno, you've been able to, you've had the resources to provide these translators for your different language communities. And so you're simply capitalizing on both the availability of that, as well as the availability of your video distribution to handle those multiple audio channels at the same time. So you've been able to replicate at least part of the experience from zoom to like your cable channels and your live stream on your website and on streaming platforms and, and such. Probably not all of those languages, right? Or do you switch it up? Yeah, well right now, we've implemented Spanish audio. And while we, you know, have access to interpretation in both Punjabi and Hmong we haven't gotten there yet. But that is definitely, part of the plan, and that's where we want to be eventually. There's just some technology parts of it that need to catch up. Do you offer the captions in those languages at this point? On like your video on demand or your web streaming? Yeah, we've started, you know, just within the last several months with Spanish captioning, and I know that we have support for the Punjabi captioning and we've done some of that not regularly at this point. but we hope to make that a regular thing as well. And then that, that fourth language Hmong is, not well supported amongst the different AI generated captioning, services out there. So I know, you know, Cablecast uses Amazon Web Services sort of as the back end that, that runs that. And right now, Hmong is not a supported language, but, you know, we're hopeful as advancements in technology are made that some of those lesser known languages, certainly in other parts of the country, you know, people might not even know about the Hmong language. But here in Fresno, you know, we have one of the largest populations in the country, Hmong populations right here in Fresno as well as, In the Twin Cities in Minnesota where Cablecast is headquartered. So, you know, certainly we know about Hmong, but it hasn't quite caught up in terms of, the available translation technologies that are out there. I have no doubt with this fast as everything is moving right now that it will be available before too long. So, let's walk through the process here. So, you have these translators already available in the room. what conversations needed to happen? Which people did you have to bring in to bring this audio onto the channel, was there any collaboration, permission, anything like that that you needed to go through to make it happen? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, and as I mentioned, those live interpreters during COVID, they moved to Zoom. And sort of after, after some of the restrictions of the COVID had lessened those live interpreters remained on zoom, you know, it just ended up being a workflow that worked well for our city and our city clerk's office who, you know, employs those interpreters. And again, our city clerk's office was a big driver behind this as well as our city accessibility office. You know, they make it a priority to provide this interpretation in the various languages, and yes, we are fortunate to have that, available to us, and then that they've made that investment in, in the live interpreters, and for us, it was just, hmm, how can we, we've got this resource, how can we take advantage of this? And as you said, make that experience on Zoom translate as much as possible to our streaming platforms and our cable channels. We worked very closely with the city clerk's office, in doing the early testing of getting that, you know, getting that working, but honestly, there was not much to it because again, the audio is already there. So it was just a matter of getting the audio into our integrated into our system from a technical standpoint. And so from a technical standpoint, were there any major workflow changes there, or was it pretty simple? Yeah, so as I mentioned, we're, we've been doing hybrid meetings, since COVID. So, residents can join the meetings both in person now at the council chambers, but also still watch and participate on Zoom. So we have a computer in our control room at City Hall there that is running Zoom. And we've got a Blackmagic ATEM video switcher for switching between the different camera sources in the chambers. And so the output of that switcher is fed into that computer running Zoom so that everybody, you know, participating on Zoom can see and hear what's happening in the council chambers. So when we were contemplating how to incorporate Secondary audio. We realized that on that same computer, we can just click the interpretation button, choose Spanish and use the headphone out Jack on that laptop to get the, the audio out. And once we've gotten the audio, then it's a matter of embedding it into our video signal that is fed into our cable cast servers. And so to accomplish that, we just used another black magic device called a audio to SDI embedder. And that embedded we use the headphone out jack, plug it into that device. And that embeds the Spanish language audio on the third and fourth Audio channels of the SDI signal. And for those who are familiar with SDI you can have, I believe up to 16 channels of audio. So there's lots of room there if we want to add additional audio channels in the future. And that's sort of what we're looking into doing. But for now it was just a matter of getting that Spanish audio onto the third and fourth channels. And then through the magic of the video processing through the cablecast servers, you know, it's presented to the viewer who's watching the streaming player. They simply have a button that they can click to choose between hearing the first and second channel channels of audio, which contain The English language or the Spanish audio, which would be under the third and fourth channel. So it's just that little button on the interface that lets them switch between the two different audio sources. Uh, And then there was sort of the challenge of how do we get this onto the cable channel? And so we had to work closely with Comcast to, as our cable channel provider you know, at first we were sending it and it wasn't, it wasn't showing up on the channel. It wasn't working. So we had to do some back and forth with their technicians, do some testing to make sure that their encoder that we're feeding our video signal into was recognizing those four channels of audio and, and mapping them appropriately. So it, it took some trial and error, but we eventually got that figured out. So now it's, it's very seamless. On the user end, the, the cable viewer's end, you know, they can have a little button on their remote to switch between the primary language or the secondary language. And that's how they can hear, you know, choose whether they want to hear English or Spanish audio. That little SAP button, right? Yep. And sometimes, you know, you press that and you don't realize it. That's what I was going to say. I press that button so many times by accident and then I don't know how to turn it back off. But now it's, it's actually, I think, being utilized a lot more than, than perhaps in the past. Hi, Michelle here. We hope you're enjoying this episode of the Government Video Podcast I'm taking a short break from today's discussion to remind you that this podcast is brought to you by Cablecast Community Media. We're a cross platform video solution from Tightrope Media Systems. And despite our name, we help cities, towns, and other local media organizations get their video to viewers on all digital platforms, including cable. If your organization operates a cable channel, um, but we help you reach residents whenever and wherever they watch. Be it on your city's website, on mobile streaming apps, on over the top platforms like Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, or even on their mobile phone. And we even help you push your content live to social media. We've been helping small non commercial stations launch professional, affordable, and efficient video initiatives for over 25 years. And our customers love us because we have great customer support and we have fierce industry loyalty. So if your organization is in need of cross platform video automation and delivery for local coverage of city council meetings or other local events, reach out to our team and schedule a demo today. And if you do, be sure to mention that you heard about it here on the Government Video Podcast to receive a special discount. That's all for me for right now. Back to the episode. I'm glad you shared the story about, you know, needing to connect with Comcast to make sure that this output was actually going out on your cable channel. I hear this often with captions as well, that folks have to connect with their provider, the cable provider, in order to ensure that this service that they've, you know, purchased equipment for, paid, you know, money for, for hours that is actually going out to you. To the viewers. Yeah. In fact, I mentioned we were doing Spanish captioning for several months now, and we still don't have those Spanish captions on Comcast, unfortunately because you know, technical issues, their encoders, just not, not seeing those secondary captions. So yeah, it's something we're still working through right now. And did you already have a fairly good ongoing relationship with someone at the cable provider? Was this something you had to just suddenly figure out as you were trying to offer captions and, and multiple audio programming? Yeah. Fortunately we do have a contact at the local head end for Comcast. And so, and, and they're great. They're very responsive when we give them a call and need assistance. So, yeah, it's been great working with them and it, you know, it's just a process, right? You know, we're just one of a lot of different entities that they serve. So, it's slow going, but we're working towards getting the problems addressed. That's always the thing I like to dive into on this podcast because it's different in every single city and, you know, you all have a Department of Accessibility, I'm sure that's Sounds like such a luxury to some other cities. I think it's one person, but yeah, still, and we can also probably relate to being a one person department for a lot of people listening. But that's great. And so. I hope folks were taking notes because you are getting, you know, really detailed into your workflow and we'd love to hear that. It'll also be useful. I'm sure that folks can read the transcript on a lot of the platforms that we offer this podcast on accessibility. Right? Accessibility. So, you'll be able to actually see that and, and maybe copy it down for your notes later because it sounds like it's a, it's a fairly lean fairly inexpensive setup that you have going on, right? It's pretty accessible. Yeah, it was very easy to implement And, and yeah, that audio embedder that we had to purchase was about, you know, 200. So it was very affordable for us to get this up and running. That's great because we know, you know, budgets are not huge and it's great when you can just Get something done really, really low cost, you know, plug in a couple of converters and get the job done. Yeah, really the most expensive part is going to be those live interpreters, right? And you mentioned you mentioned AI and I will say that our city is looking into because it is very, very expensive to hire you know, live interpreters. They're looking into solutions that are out there. For AI generated translation. So, yeah, it's, it's out there. For audio, audio synthesis. Yeah. Correct, correct. We're definitely seeing a lot more people offer audio synthesis as a feature, and I think that's going to also be huge in terms of making these accessibility features accessible financially for cities with limited budgets. So I'm sure we'll be seeing that, much like I'm sure we'll be seeing Hmong available among these language libraries before too long. I'm sure we're going to start to see the cost of this audio synthesis coming down and being more accessible and being more accurate too, I think is another big concern people have. Have you had any feedback since you've been offering either the captions or the, you know, translated captions or the multi language audio, either from Within the city departments or from the community? Yeah, so because we're still fairly early days in terms of the providing the secondary audio and even the translated captioning, we haven't really widely publicly announced that we're doing this. So, you know, it's it's something that our viewers and residents are finding out about as they're watching the meetings you know, maybe they're noticing that little button on the interface or they're switching the remote You know, I do there's a funny story what one of our city council members offices they have Comcast in all of their offices and that's often how they're watching the meetings suddenly one day they were hearing spanish language audio during the meeting and they're like what's going on? Why what why is this in spanish all of a sudden? And so they called up the clerk's office and got connected with us and realized we're actually testing this today And you had that little sap button pressed on your remote and you hadn't noticed it But uh, yeah, so there was some, some education through just sort of folks finding out about it as we're doing testing, but we're really looking forward to you know, once we've got things figured out with Comcast in terms of the, the captioning, you know, that we can announce more widely that this is available to folks and, you know, we're really excited about making that available because You know, we, we want to make it easier for our Spanish language audience to be active citizens and be informed and engage about what's happening in their local government. Fresno is a majority Hispanic community, you know, about 30 percent of our residents primarily speak Spanish at home, and 14% Have only speak Spanish and have very limited English proficiency. So ensuring that those residents have a way to understand what's happening with their government and get involved and engaged is super important to our city and to us as an organization that serves residents as well. We love to see it. We love to see that happening and we love to see how it's becoming easier, more affordable, and also just the workflow is, is becoming a lot more simple for folks to be able to offer that. One other thing that you do that's related that I think is great is you all also offer ASL interpretation of your meetings. And I don't I watched a lot of council meetings in my role, and I haven't seen that very often. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Sure. For our listeners. Yeah, that started earlier this year, about January. And there was another sort of initiative from our city accessibility office and the city clerk's office, you know, You know, folks might think, you know, captioning is, is enough for our deaf and hard of hearing community, but Advocates will tell you that there's a difference between captioning and American Sign Language. And so, you know, providing both of them was, was a priority. And so we, we accomplished this using Zoom as well. So, you know, Zoom has supports ASL interpretation just like it supports the other language interpretation. We use the second computer running Zoom that has the ASL interpreter full screen on that computer. And then we've got that computer feed going into our video switcher. And then we're just doing a simple picture in picture box so that in the corner of your screen, you can see that ASL interpreter. And again we love the zoom integration because it makes it super easy. If folks are familiar with ASL you know, some some interpreter can only be going for so long and they need a rest, they need a break. So often you're dealing with multiple interpreters throughout a meeting. And fortunately, Zoom makes it super easy. It just switches the window automatically to the next interpreter, and we don't have to adjust our picture picture box at all. It just switches over to, to the other the second interpreter. So really super easy for us to implement again. You know, once you have obviously the cost of. of the ASL interpreter, but from a technical standpoint, very easy to integrate that and make that available both on our live streams and the cable channel. So it's just always that little box that you see in the corner with that interpreter. Yeah, I think it's important to note that the logistics of actually finding The interpreter is, is the bigger ask for this workflow, but, and, and often probably handled outside of a media department or video production department at a city. But it's so great when you have the ability to incorporate that. And I just want to point out to our listeners that all of these things. are available on your website to view, right? If you want to take a look at like the video on demand or even the live stream that is offering different language captions, multiple audio programming and the ASL for these meetings. Those are available on CMAC dot. Org, right? Dot TV. CMAC dot TV. Yeah. Even, even better, even more appropriate. So, so folks can go there if they want to see what we've been talking about here and get a better idea of how that all comes together for the viewer at home. And that's also something that folks can access on several streaming platforms, right? Are you on all the streaming platforms? Yeah, we're on all the streaming platforms free apps on Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, iOS, and Android. Just search C Mac. Do you keep tabs on how many people Watch you on your streaming platforms. We do. Yeah. We're, we're excited to see that feature from Cablecast, the audience measurement tool that lets us get those insights into folks that are viewing on our various streams, as well as all of our video on demand content and yeah, for us You know, historically, and, and it continues to be today our government programming is the number one thing that people watch when we have our city council meetings, Fresno City Council meetings on Thursdays, we can just see that graph spike up, you know, that's, that's when people are tuning in. What advice, if any, do you have for other stations that are thinking about launching some of these media accessibility initiatives? Yeah, I would say, you know, understand the needs of your community, right? And that might sound like a simple thing, but it means talking to people, you know, talking to your residents, understanding the demographics of your community, talking to your local government partners, if if If you're a nonprofit that's working, you know, with your local government and see what they need don't assume that you know what they need. You might have some idea, but getting that real feedback from the community is super important. And you know, whether that's a need for captioning or if it's a need for secondary audio, or if it's a need for ASL interpretation, you know, you want to have those conversations and sort of. Suss that out of, you know, what is the priority and, and see what you can do with the resources that you have on hand. You know, maybe there is interpretation that your city's already providing and you could tap into those resources or maybe there's low cost tools out there that you didn't know about. In terms of captioning or audio synthesizing, or we were talking about ASL interpretation. I'm sure there's going to be some AI solution for that as well. That brings down the costs. So just sort of doing some research and looking into what makes sense, what's affordable for you and, and giving things a try, you know, just testing them out and not being afraid to experiment. Cause you don't know what will catch on. I'm, I'm sure that you're correct about like synthesized ASL or however, if we're going to AI, ASL, but I'm very freaked out about what that's actually going to look like. Like little hands in the corner, like signing. Yeah. Like I'm sure it's useful, but it's probably also going to freak me out. Well. Thank you so much, Bryan, for sharing how CMAC is, you know, making Fresno's local government content more accessible for all its residents. It's inspiring to see how community media can use, you know, the latest technology to break down these barriers without creating undue burden on small teams or small budgets. So for our listeners, if you're interested in exploring accessibility in your own government video operations we hope today's episode gave you some fresh ideas and insights. I'm your host, Michelle Alimoradi. We've been here today with Bryan Harley, Executive Director of CMAC in Fresno. And if you found today's episode helpful, please do us a favor and share it with your colleagues or anyone working in local government and media accessibility. Your support helps us spread these ideas and make a difference in community engagement and government transparency. So please don't forget to like, share, subscribe, leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time as we continue to explore the intersection of local government service delivery And video technology here on the Government Video Podcast.