Tips on Navigating the Maze of Video Accessibility Regulations

On any given day, 82 million Americans watch 1.6 billion videos. College-age students (ages 18-24) are the biggest online video consumers, in fact the average 18-24 old watches almost 400 videos per month. This generation grew up in an online world where video is available on-demand, on every device, and they expect to experience the same in their learning environment.

Universities and colleges are leveraging video to transform the way students learn, communicate and collaborate. Whether it is remote or online learning, lecture capture, “flipped classroom” or massive open online course (MOOC), video is at the center of every growing trend in the education sector.

It’s estimated that one in three higher education students are taking at least one course online and that number continues to grow. As the amount of educational video content grows, so do the challenges that institutions are facing in complying with accessibility guidelines and regulations. These challenges recently took center stage in the educational sector when Harvard and MIT were sued over the lack of closed captions online.

Most public and private institutions of higher education are required by law to provide closed captions to students who are deaf or hard of hearing. The following section summarizes the different regulations that affect online video and closed captions:

The Rehabilitation Act: Covers federal agencies and any organization that receives federal funding:

• Section 508: “All training and informational video and multimedia productions ... that contain speech or other audio information necessary for the comprehension of the content, shall be open or closed captioned...”
• Section 504: “No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States ... shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance...”

The Americans with Disability Act (ADA):

Title II mandates that state and local governments:

• May not refuse to allow a person with a disability to participate in a service, program, or activity simply because the person has a disability.
• Must provide programs and services in an integrated setting, unless separate or different measures are necessary to ensure equal opportunity.

Title III covers public accommodations and private entities:

• Must eliminate unnecessary eligibility standards or rules that deny individuals with disabilities an equal opportunity to enjoy the goods and services of a place of public accommodation.
• Must furnish auxiliary aids when necessary to ensure effective communication, unless an undue burden or fundamental alteration would result.

While the suit by the National Association for the Deaf against Harvard and MIT has just gotten underway, a recent settlement shows how the U.S. Department of Education views video captioning requirements. In December 2014, the agency’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced a “resolution agreement” with the University of Cincinnati over an investigation into the accessibility of the University's website to people with disabilities. Among the compliance violations OCR identified was the lack of captions on videos.

OCR wrote that "Captioning for the audio portion of a video is important, as individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing may not be able to hear the auditory content. Synchronized captioning is also necessary so that a person reading captions can watch the speakers on a video and associate relevant body language and actions with the speech...Numerous videos on the University’s website lack captions and audio descriptions."

While the need for equal access to education is increasing, there is no easy solution or single workflow that allows universities to address this growing need.

Questions we often hear from our customers in the educational space include: When is captioning required? Do you need to caption every single video before anyone asks to do so? In the following section we’ll share some of best practices and approaches we learned from our customers that can help you comply with regulations while working within existing budgets.

When is captioning required?

If the uncaptioned video is an essential instructional material and creates a barrier for a student with a documented disability that would be accommodated by captioning, it must be captioned. If the video is available in an unrestricted way and you can’t be sure that students requiring captioning cannot access it, you should also caption the video.

When is captioning recommended?

Captioning of online video is recommended for any video which will be used in the future for an undefined audience. For example, a video that is repeatedly used in the same course every semester, like a class introduction video or explanation of the syllabus.

When is captioning not required?

Before coming to the conclusion that captioning of a video is not required, ask yourself the following questions: Is this video essential to the course curriculum? Can I ensure that no one with a disability that requires captions will ever access this video?

What is the process you have in place to caption videos? Are you proactively captioning every video, or do students need to request captions for individual videos? Each university will have different procedures in place to comply with regulations. We’ll conclude by defining some of the most common procedures we see with our customers:

Reactive captioning:

Provide students with the ability to “request captioning” for a video. This will typically be in the form of a button next to the video that does not have captions. This does allow the student to request the inaccessible content to be captioned, but is still a disadvantage since the student will typically need to wait a few days until the caption is ready and he/she can watch the video.

Proactive captioning:

Order captioning for all videos in courses that have at least one student with documented disabilities that can be addressed using captions. This approach allows universities to be more proactive in addressing the students special needs and pre-caption the content by following registration patterns in the school.

If your university leverages video as part of online learning, we can help you to better understand how to comply with regulations and leverage captions and transcripts for additional benefits in learning. Contact one of our transcription specialists for a free consultation and trial to see how SpeakerText can provide you with ultra-fast, highly accurate and affordable captions.