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). The University 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 2024 to 2025: 

• 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 St George's (Clerkenwell and Moorgate campuses) 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 hosted on MediaSpace
• Confirm your videos are set as Unlisted on Media Space
• Note any important deadlines (please note that we cannot guarantee any dates of delivery)
• If not currently hosted on MediaSpace, please add a note to the request form

Automated speech recognition can be inaccurate. Captions or transcripts of your recordings may contain words incorrectly transcribed as profanities e.g. swear words or inappropriate words. Alternatively, you might find that the captions or transcripts on your recordings are censoring words with a row of asterisks which means that students relying on captions are missing key information.

LEaD are gathering information on the impact of profanities and censorship in recordings. If you find any examples, please raise a ticket with us via the LEaD General Request Form on IT Self Service Portal. 

Please include as much information as possible, including system used - Lecture Capture, Teams, Zoom, links to the recordings on Moodle and timecodes.  

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.

There is excellent guidance on making your pre-recorded audio and video media accessible on the W3 website.

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)