EMILY GRIFFIN: Hi, I'm Emily Griffin with 3Play Media.
And today I'm thrilled to be chatting
with Sarah Snow, Community Manager of the Glide messaging
app.
Sarah, thanks so much for taking the time to chat today.
SARAH SNOW: Thank you so much for having me.
I'm happy to be here.
EMILY GRIFFIN: So, Sarah, I work for 3Play Media,
and we're a professional closed captioning company
based in Boston, Massachusetts.
As a provider of captions, we understand how important
they are for making video accessible to the deaf and hard
of hearing communities.
So when we heard about your SXSW panel about video captioning,
we were really excited to learn more.
So to start off, could you please just tell me
a little bit about what your role is at Glide?
SARAH SNOW: My role is a community manager.
I interact with the community, and I spread the word
about Glide.
And what's really great about Glide
is that it's an asynchronous video communications platform.
So, like right now, unlike scheduling a synchronous call,
you would just send a message.
And if your friends or family are available to watch it live,
they could watch it in real time.
But usually, the people that you want to speak to
aren't available the exact second
that you want to talk to them.
So you could also just go back and watch the videos
whenever you want.
So it makes video communication extremely accessible.
And we create a lot of video content
for our community on social media and within the app.
And we really try to close caption all of the videos
that we put out on social media, because I
think it just makes the videos a lot more
accessible for everyone.
EMILY GRIFFIN: Awesome.
Could you tell me the story of how
you discovered the importance of video captioning?
SARAH SNOW: Oh, for sure.
Well, it's part of a larger story,
but about, I think, a year and a half
ago, I started getting messages from users that
were deaf or hard of hearing.
And they said that they couldn't understand the content
that I was sending them because there
wasn't any closed captions.
And I immediately took it to heart
and started adding closed captions on my videos.
I also went out and learned some sign language
to really even delve deeper into the deaf and hard
of hearing community.
And they really embraced it.
And they always thank us for adding closed captions.
And it was at that time that I started becoming friendly
with the influencers within the deaf and hard
of hearing community.
And I teamed up with someone, who's
now a good friend of mine, Rikki Poynter.
She has a YouTube channel, and she's a big advocate
for closed captions.
And we got together, and we made a video called "With Captions,"
which is a video that I recently posted on the Sarah Glide
Facebook page.
And I put it on YouTube about a year ago.
And we addressed all YouTubers and asked
them to start closed captioning their videos.
Because there's a lot of people that
want to watch their content, but without closed captions
they can't understand it.
So that's a campaign that we did.
And it has on Facebook now almost a million views.
So that's just one of the things that we've
done to really encourage people to add closed captions.
EMILY GRIFFIN: What does Glide do make video more accessible?
SARAH SNOW: So what Glide is doing
is it's breaking barriers for people that might have trouble
communicating without video.
Our three founders [AUDIO OUT] years ago.
And that's why Glide was born.
They found it really hard to communicate with their friends
and family back home, because sending a text message,
it's not as personal as talking to someone face to face.
And just the logistics of getting on a video call,
it's really hard.
It's hard to find a time when you want to schedule.
But it always happens.
It's always like you spend the first few minutes seeing
if the other person can hear you.
And you have to sit down.
And when you're on a Skype call, it's
like you're not really doing anything else.
So what they did was they broke that barrier.
And they made it so you could still
have the convenience of just pressing one button to send
a video, while still not being locked into a conversation
and not have the barriers of time
zones and super fast internet connection,
because it's asynchronous.
EMILY GRIFFIN: This March, you'll
be hosting a panel discussion about video accessibility
at SXSW Can you talk about how you
decided to propose that panel and what
you have planned for it?
SARAH SNOW: So it's all the work that I've
been doing with the deaf and hard of hearing community.
And they've inspired me.
I've learned so much from communicating and interacting
with that community over the past year and a half,
and I think that there is a lot of tips
that I could give other marketeers about what
they could do to further engage with that community.
I also think that a lot of marketeers
don't understand how big the audience is
and how many deaf and heard of hearing people there are.
There's over 10% of people in the US are either deaf or hard
of hearing.
So I think that everyone needs to work really
hard to make sure that any content that they put out
is accessible to those people.
But it's not even just the deaf and hard of hearing community.
It's anyone that speaks a different language
or have trouble seeing.
The closed captions can really help a lot of people
out, in different communities.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about that in my panel.
I'm also teaming up with Jules Dameron
who is a deaf film director.
And we're just going to be sharing different insights
that we have about interacting with the deaf community
and what people could do to make their video content more
accessible.
EMILY GRIFFIN: And for those attending
SXSW do you have the details on when and where the panel will
take place?
SARAH SNOW: Yes.
They just released the schedule for it.
It's on Monday, March 14th, at 12:30 PM,
at the Hilton, Hall H, I think.
I hope that's all right.
I think that's the details, but there's more information
on SXSW's website.
And you can check out, our panel is
called "How Video Introduced Me to the Deaf Community."
So anyone that wants to and anyone that's attending
is welcome to come.
It's going to be a really interesting panel.
EMILY GRIFFIN: Awesome.
Well, Sarah, thanks so much for joining me today.
And best of luck at SXSW.
SARAH SNOW: Awesome.
Thank you so much.
This was a lot of fun.
So thank you.