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Digital accessibility guide

Explore how to create, design and structure your content to ensure that is is accessible to your students.

City's captioning approach

Video and audio content counts as “time-based media” under the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (PSBAR). City has a legal requirement and responsibility to do what we can to provide corrected captions for all such media.

Below is our approach for our educational platforms for the academic year 2023 to 2024: 

  • Provide a caption correction service to address reasonable adjustment needs. We will work with the Disability and Neurodiversity Support team to provide an integrated service for students who may require captioning as part of a reasonable adjustment.  
  • We will recommend correcting captions on pre-recorded media for learning e.g., screencast lectures. LEaD will provide a caption correction service which is accessed via the IT Self Service Portal
  • For recordings of all live teaching on campus and online, we aim to provide automated speech recognition (ASR) captions and transcripts, which are not human corrected. These are in place for Teams, Zoom, and Echo360 Lecture Capture.  
  • In August 2022, City completed a disproportionate burden assessment regarding correcting captions on all stored lecture recordings. Unique to the higher education context, there can be approximately 15,000 hours of recording per academic year.  
  • Captions on live meetings can be accessed in Teams and Zoom and their use is recommended. Echo360 Lecture Capture currently does not have this feature and we have raised this with the supplier.

Request caption correction

You can request caption correction for MediaSpace videos on the IT Self Service Portal.

You will need to provide the following information to help the team process your request.

  • Links to videos (must be hosted on MediaSpace)
  • Confirm your videos are either set as Published or Unlisted
  • Note any important deadlines (please note that we cannot guarantee any dates of delivery).

Captioning multimedia

Recorded multimedia generally falls into two categories:

  • pre-recorded media (eg: screencasts) 
  • recordings of live media (eg: online lecture recordings on Lecture Capture)

We recommend uploading all video and audio content to Kaltura MediaSpace (or MyMedia within Moodle) and then linking your resources to your modules. If you need further information on this, here is our guide to adding multimedia to Moodle. This will allow students to stream your media resources whilst also being able to view captions.

All media uploaded unto Kaltura mediaspace will have auto generated captions. As these captions are autogenerated, they may contain mistakes and will need reviewing. 

Pre-recorded media (e.g. screencasts)

Three steps to accessible pre-recorded media:

Recordings of live media (e.g. online lecture recordings on Lecture Capture)

Three steps to accessible recordings of live media:

References

Lexdis (n.d.) ‘PSBAR Scope’ in Accessible Technology for Learning [online] Available from: https://www.lexdis.org.uk/digital-accessibility/digital-accessibility-regulations/psbar-scope/ (Accessed: 12.08.2020)

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