Instructional Technology: Video Accessibility Guidelines

For captioning of live streaming events, contact Greg Dillingham (gregd@unca.edu) for assistance.

UNC Asheville is committed to compliance with the American Disabilites Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (Section 504).  Creating an accessible environment, a shared responsibility between the institution and the content creator, includes ensuring that technology is accessible to all students, including video.

Creating accessible video involves both creating captions for your video and delivering your video through an accessible interface. 

Creating captions for recorded video is a three-step process:

• Create a text transcript of the audio portion of the multimedia.
• Add time stamps into the transcript to set when each text snippet will display on the screen. 
• Incorporate the time-stamped transcript back into the multimedia. 

Each of these steps is a time-consuming process, so time should be allowed for planning for captioning. 

Planning Considerations

• All content should be made accessible when delivered to a group where the functional limitations are not known, or someone in the group needs an accessible version.
• Planning for accessibility from the beginning is easier, both in terms of time and money, than after the fact. Please keep this in mind for videos that may be used in the future with potential future accessibility requirements.
• It is the responsibility of the content creator to design accessible content.

Video production services can assist with either creation of transcription and captioning through either in-house production or through outsourcing.  Depending on the complexity of the captioning project, not all transcription and captioning can be done in-house and any charges related to outsourcing is the responsibility of the requestor.  Type of captioning assistance and outsourcing costs will be handled on a case-by-case basis.  Contact Kent Thompson at thompson@unca.edu for assistance.

Faculty members may submit captioning requests at any time during the semester; however it can take up to six weeks to complete a film of 1-2 hours in length.  Before making a request for a captioned copy to be made of a film, faculty should confirm that a captioned version of the videotape does not exist. 

All videos that are captioned are considered a supplement to the orignial videotape and should not be thought of as a second copy of the original.  These supplemental, closed-captioned videos are only circulated for use by and for students with a registered accommodation with the UNCA Office of Academic Accessibility.

Video Production Services:  Kent Thompson
 (thompson@unca.edu)

TLTR Accessibility:  Laurie Miles (lmiles@unca.edu)

University Librarian:  Leah Dunn (dunn@unca.edu