Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2018

Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

In honor of the efforts to make today’s content accessible to everyone, we’re running some of the results of a survey we conducted last fall. We reached out to Kaltura education customers around the globe and asked them to share what they’re doing, and how they think about video accessibility. We received 339 responses. Here’s a few of the things they had to say.

Roughly what percentage of your course-related videos (lecture captures, supplemental videos, etc.) do you caption?

While over a third of surveyed schools caption the majority of their content, this practice is far more common among larger schools. Small schools are still more likely to caption none or very little of their content.

Roughly what percentage of public-facing videos (campus tours, sports events, alumni outreach, university news, homepage videos, blog posts, etc.) do you caption?

Slightly more schools overall caption the majority of their public-facing videos vs course content (38% vs 34%). This tendency is even stronger for larger schools (46% vs 38%).

It’s not surprising. Public-facing content is what has incurred lawsuits in the past, and it’s impossible to know who will interact with it. With courses, schools can caption only those classes needed by people who have identified as requiring accommodations, so the overall percentage captioned can be lower.

What level of accuracy are you considering acceptable?

44% of respondents believe captions need to be 99% accurate to be acceptable; 83% want at least 95% accuracy.

The accessibility guidelines of the FCC in the US require 99% accuracy.

One important side note: most automatic speech recognition (ASR) software return captions that are about 70-85% accurate. After training, the best can sometimes make it as high as 90%. To get to acceptable levels, captions need to either be done by machine and then hand-corrected (usually by the professors or by student workers) or they need to be done by human transcribers to begin with. Fortunately, even if the transcription can’t be done completely by machine, it’s possible to automate the process of ordering, obtaining, and uploading the video captions.

A more accessible world

Fortunately, technology creates new ways of finding information, which can make it easier for many people to access the content they need. It’s up to all of us to make sure that we keep accessibility in mind, to help everyone.

Want to improve your accessibility awareness and know more about the survey results? Read the report.