Tyron Woolfe: Is there a better video survey platform for deaf people than videoask.com? (BSL)

To watch Tyron signing his article, click play below, or scroll down to read on in English

For a project I am doing as a research consultant, it was my determination that our survey would include a two-way functionality; questions being asked in both BSL and English should ALSO be answered in both/either BSL or English depending on respondents’ preferences.

Many surveys out there ask questions with BSL, but do not enable Deaf BSL users to reply in BSL. Have a look, or think back to previous surveys you may have done. Typeform, Survey Monkey etc, they all have the ability to insert a BSL video clip of questions being asked, but no ability to reply in BSL.

I approached Calum Medlock, a friend for advice here, given his technological knowledge. He is such a techy-guy to go to! We worked at Deafness Cognition and Language (University College London) for a few years. Calum did some research and told me excitedly about www.VideoAsk.com as an ideal survey tool.

I had a look online and could see the potential visually, but I needed to understand more. We went for a lunch meeting where Calum showed me how it could be done. Sometimes tech savvy people just assume you know what something is by sending you a link, unfortunately I’m one of those people who tends to reply with something like a gif asking people to ‘explain it to me like I’m a 5 year old.’

Calum and I sat down with our nachos, burgers and chips, and we looked at VideoAsk via a laptop (is it any wonder that more and more people work at home nowadays?!)

He demonstrated a few things and we were able to see the following:

• We could ask questions in BSL easily; upload a video for each question created.
• We could have text too, but frustratingly only as an “overlay” above the video, with the option of extra small, small, medium and large size font only, which would limit how much text is written in English.
• Respondents could reply either in text, audio or video. You can also amend this option to only one or two or all 3 (I turned off audio for obvious reasons!)
• You can also limit how long a video reply is, depending on the package purchased
• It would of course cost money to use this tool. VideoAsk has packages you can purchase which then in turn affect how much data/video data you can receive. It is best to look at their website to know current prices. At the time of this article, I thought it was a fair price for the project.

Despite all of our efforts, especially after wiping clean the greasy chips n ketchup(!), we could not see how to accompany questions with better visual text, e.g. like captions below a video. I later went on their website and asked this question as a formal query.

VideoAsk replied, saying it was not something they offered; but their product development team would consider it for future.

This was frustrating – as here we were with an ideal platform to ask questions and receive answers in either BSL or English and to get the data extracted as an .xls file etc for analysis.

But there was nothing better insofar. One colleague researched all over the web and suggested using Typeform and asking people to a) create a gmail account and b) upload their video replies into a G-Drive folder, but this would be too complicated for a large survey and it would not be possible to extract all the videos by specific questions.

I worked with a fantastic signer, Mischa Cooke, across the whole rainy Bank Holiday weekend and got all the clips I needed for the intended survey.

But I was uncomfortable, thinking we would have to accept the unideal, limited overlay text function. Along with feedback from a friend who is Deaf-Blind, and additional suggestions from Philippa Wynne, Head of Communication at SignHealth, I worked with Mischa redid all the videos in portrait orientation for good visibility, and then using I-MOVIE, added in captions with black background and white font at the top of each video. Hey presto! We now had good BSL clips with good captions! My Deaf-blind friend was impressed.

I also realised during the build that sometimes, for “branching logic”, you had to follow a simple “yes or no” with the (somewhat redundant) function of “tell us”. You can’t go from “yes or no” straight to video, you have to have a “tell us” after selecting “Yes”.

For example:

Question: Do you have anything more to tell us? Yes No
Next Q if clicked Yes: Tell us

Another frustration: ReCapitcha – where a simple question is typically asked, e.g. how many motorbikes, what is 2×6 – is used to stop SpamBots infiltrating your survey. ReCapitcha is not available in VideoAsk but is available in Typeform. And Typeform owns VideoAsk!! After a lot of thinking, I created two simple maths questions in the survey as an alternative but ideally should ask questions at random to avoid SpamBots further. We will have to see – don’t spam me please!

And one final learning point to share – an earlier version of the survey starts with nine introductory video-clips, which all have to be clicked one by one (click continue…) User-feedback told me that people found this part off-putting, however I was limited because of the captioning and video length issues.

I called Philippa at SignHealth again for some friendly advice and feedback. I had heard they were also intending to use VideoAsk as one of their projects. Philippa suggested I create a webpage with the introductory clips merged into one long clip and then people can choose to go straight into the survey’s first proper question afterwards; “Please confirm you are ok to continue …”

This was a good suggestion, and I have seen more entries since. Meanwhile hopefully VideoAsk will create more functionality suitable for Deaf-related surveys as its Product team continually develops the tool.

I wondered if anyone knows anything better as a survey tool which allows respondents to reply in BSL and/or English? Please do let me know.

If anyone is interested in looking at our current survey, you can visit:

The original videoask with several introductory clips – https://www.videoask.com/fwavz8szm
Or here, where the introductory clips were merged and people can go straight to the survey. https://rb.gy/7egv2h

Additional pic – what the full survey with branching logic looks like!