Digital accessibility guide

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.

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).

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:

• Start by uploading your media to MediaSpace
• One you have uploaded your media to MediaSpace, you can edit auto generated captions using Kaltura Reach on MediaSpace
• Finally, add your multimedia to Moodle.

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

Three steps to accessible recordings of live media:

• Try recording a presentation in PowerPoint with real-time, automatic captions or subtitles 
• Once you have uploaded your media to MediaSpace, create and edit captions using Kaltura Reach on MediaSpace

• You can integrate Zoom and Echo360, allowing you to automatically copy your Zoom Cloud recordings to Echo360

  • This will make your online lecture recordings available to students in a consistent location on the relevant Moodle module. An automated transcript will be uploaded from Zoom. Captions will be automatically applied to recordings copied to Zoom from Friday 4th November 2022. For earlier Zoom recordings, follow our guidance on applying your transcripts as closed captions.

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)