Webinars With A Deaf Client

The Rebuilding of Goosebay Sawmill & Lumber Website

By Christy McDougall - NNFP Website HELP Team Member

If you are deaf and want to support yourself by making websites but live in an isolated area of the country, how do you find training? In the case of Betty Burbank of Goosebay Sawmill and Lumber in New Hampshire, you get webinar training with the NNFP HELP Team.

Webinars, the process of having a seminar or meeting online, have proven themselves to be invaluable to the NNFP HELP Team in our work of training small woodworkers across the country to build and maintain their websites. For our work with Betty Burbank, the webinar system is irreplaceable. In a webinar, all the participants go to a certain web address and, through the special webinar software, are able to see the presenter’s computer screen. The webinar leader can share her own computer screen to give explanations and teach, or one of the participants can share his screen and be guided through the process of accomplishing a task. For a regular webinar, all the participants speak to each other by telephone on a conference call or through headsets. We use this system to do user testing on NNFP’s websites by watching people navigate through the site, to get an understanding of what a particular woodworking client wants us to do to his site, and to train another woodworking client in how to maintain his site’s information. In this way we can train woodworkers all over the country without the cost of travel.

For the past month and a half, Sandy Drake and Christy McDougall have been training Betty Burbank for about two hours a week on everything necessary to building a basic website. She does not want to simply maintain a pre-existing website; she wants to learn the skills to help others in her industry have their own websites. As it is one of NNFP’s goals to provide websites and marketing to as many small woodworkers as possible, we were pleased to be able to help her gain those skills.

Betty began with a site that had been created many years ago, and she is completely recreating it to make it more up-to-date and relevant to today’s internet world. As a result of a workshop a couple of months ago in Concord, New Hampshire, sponsored by Sustainable Forest Futures, Nora McDougall-Collins met Betty and taught her how to set up a more elegant table structure for her home page, and she has been using it as a template to remake her other pages. Since then Sandy and Christy have been teaching her to create links, to organize her files, to change colors, to make cascading stylesheets, and to use Google Analytics.

Working with Betty is somewhat more complicated than working with other clients. Betty is deaf and has tunnel vision, so we had to spend some time working out a process by which she could do the work and we could communicate with her long-distance without the use of the telephone. For our first couple of meetings, Betty’s sister Lydia was with her, speaking to us on the phone and communicating with Betty, but after the second webinar, we had all worked out our system and no longer needed her assistance.

Instead of the conference call, we speak to Betty by using the webinar’s chat tool. It took us a while to figure out how to make the chat work with her vision problems, but now we use it smoothly. She uses two computers, one on which she shares her computer screen with us, and one on which she chats to us. We type an instruction into the chat box, she reads it and acknowledges that she has read it, and then she follows the instruction on her other computer while we watch.

I said that working with Betty can be more complicated than working with other clients, but in many ways it is easier, too. Building a website is not at all easy nor very intuitive, but she has a very quick grasp of the kind of work we are doing and can take a single set of instructions and apply it to her whole site without any problems. Sometimes we are still in the process of typing an instruction when she has already grasped what needs to be done and has started to do it. Every week we spend about two hours teaching her how to perform two or three different tasks or techniques, and when we come back the next week, the entire site is updated with those changes. One of the most exciting things is to see our student say joyfully, “I understand!” when we explain something complex.

Betty’s new home page is now in place, replacing the old one, and she is quickly getting her other pages ready to go live. Without our webinar system, this would not have been possible. Someday maybe she will be teaching YOU how to make your website!