#43185
Speaker(s)
- Madison Ellis, Accessibility Specialist, UC Berkeley
- Joshua Chang, Applications Programmer, UC Berkeley
Session Details
- Length of Session: 1-hr
- Format: Lecture
- Expertise Level: All Levels
- Type of session: General Conference
Summary
Under the 2022 Consent Decree between the US Department of Justice and UC Berkeley, all publicly available videos were required to have accurate captions by 2025. Learn how UC Berkeley rapidly scaled accessibility campus support by using a combination of individualized outreach, third party caption vendors, and a free, automated caption tracking pipeline built with Google Apps Script, the YouTube API, and Google Sheets to ensure all campus videos were accurately captioned.
Abstract
Under the 2022 Consent Decree between the US Department of Justice and UC Berkeley, campus was provided with direct requirements for video content that must have accurate captions by December 2, 2025. UC Berkeley rapidly scaled its captioning support for publicly available UC Berkeley YouTube channels to meet this requirement, building the UC Berkeley Multi-Channel YouTube Network. Partnering with YouTube, campus worked to identify, connect with, and ‘onboard’ UC Berkeley owned and managed YouTube channels into this Network. This gave the campus accessibility team, the Digital Accessibility Program (DAP), direct access to YouTube channels in order to caption content on channel owner’s behalf. But having access to content only helped so much; campus also needed insight into which videos were eligible for captioning support, how much progress had been made toward this goal, and the total estimated cost for captioning. In order to gain insight into these needed metrics, work was completed using Google App Scripts to integrate information from YouTube API. This integration scanned every known channel on a schedule, pulled the current caption status from Youtube, and wrote the results to the project management platform ‘monday.com’ dashboard and Google Sheets. This process allowed for identification of out of compliance videos, which could then be reviewed with content owners and processed though third party caption vendors, like 3Play Media and Echo Labs. These captions would then be added directly back to UC Berkeley YouTube channel. This workflow allowed DAP to build a centralized, systemic process for streamlining captioning for older video content, taking pressure off of campus content owners to independently complete this accessibility work. Ultimately, this improved both the experience of faculty and staff who managed this content, as well as the accessibility of the materials themselves.
Keypoints
- Centralized captioning workflows reduce burden on content owners and improve institutional compliance.
- Free tools like Google Apps Script and the YouTube API can automate caption tracking across an entire campus.
- Individualized outreach to university content owners improves accessibility conformance.
Disability Areas
All Areas
Topic Areas
Campus & System-wide initiatives, Captioning/Transcription, Uncategorized
Speaker Bio(s)
Madison Ellis
Madison is a Digital Content Accessibility Specialist in UC Berkeley’s Digital Accessibility Program. She holds an MA in Technical Writing from UA Little Rock, as well as IAAP’s CPACC and ADS certifications.
Joshua Chang
Joshua is an Applications Programmer on UC Berkeley’s Digital Accessibility Program. He started there as a student employee, graduated with his degree in Data Science, and continues with the team today.