With the ADA Title II expansion deadline rapidly approaching on April 24, higher education institutions are facing a mountain of video content that requires compliance. While many universities have established workflows for student accommodations, the scale of campus-wide compliance presents a brand-new set of challenges, specifically around visibility, volume, and budget.

In our recent webinar, “Meet Pulse: The New Standard for Video Accessibility Monitoring“, 3Play Media’s co-CEO and co-founder Chris Antunes and Chief Growth Officer Lily Bond introduced Pulse, a groundbreaking solution designed to help institutions audit, score, and remediate their entire video libraries at scale.

If you missed the live session, here is a breakdown of how Pulse is setting a new standard for video accessibility.

Key Takeaways

• Scale for Title II: Pulse enables institutions to transition from individual accommodations to campus-wide compliance by auditing massive video libraries at scale.
• Data-Driven Quality: The tool eliminates accessibility blind spots by automatically scoring AI accuracy and flagging high-risk content for human remediation.
• Strategic Budgeting: Administrators can leverage centralized dashboards and tiered service levels to meet federal mandates without the unsustainable cost of manual review.

The Scale of the Challenge: Moving Beyond Accommodations

For years, universities have operated on an ad hoc, accommodation-based model. If a student in a specific course needed captions, those captions were produced. However, under the new Title II regulations, the scope has shifted.

Now, all public-facing and ongoing web content, including vast archives of lecture captures and department videos, must be accessible.

ADA Title II Update: The Shift to Proactive Compliance

The update to ADA Title II mandates that public institutions ensure their web content and mobile apps are accessible by April 2026. This isn’t just about new uploads; it includes a significant portion of backlog content.

For video, this requires accurate captions, audio descriptions (when necessary to describe important on-screen visuals), and transcripts for all pre-recorded material. The law moves universities away from the “wait-and-see” model of student requests toward a “proactive-by-default” standard where content must be accessible from the moment it is posted.

This regulatory expansion removes the flexibility of choosing which videos to prioritize based on current enrollment.

If the content is available to the public or the student body at large, it is covered. Consequently, universities are now responsible for the accessibility of every lecture, departmental update, and archived webinar, creating a massive remediation task that traditional, manual workflows simply cannot handle within the required timeframe.

Why Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) is Not a “Set it and Forget it” Solution

Watch Lily break down the challenge many universities are facing when it comes to ASR:

One of the things that we’ve seen as a challenge as schools are approaching Title II compliance is that everyone is looking for auditing solutions and web accessibility checking solutions. And those tools are fantastic for web compliance, but they have a blind spot, which is video. Many of the universities we’re talking to are facing the need to make millions of minutes of content accessible and often millions of minutes per year accessible. This is every single lecture happening across the university going into their lecture capture system that suddenly needs compliance at scale. And manual review of this content is simply impossible at that level. A lot of people will use auto captions on content and hope that that makes it accessible. But the problem is that even if automatic speech recognition or ASR is on average ninety percent accurate. You may have a video that’s ninety five percent accurate, but you may have a video that’s sixty percent accurate. And being able to identify which one is which and where the risk lies in your organization is a huge gap. And of course, the kind of final part of the equation is cost. With traditional solutions for captioning and audio description for millions of minutes of content, this is very quickly a multi million dollar task, and no school has the budget to achieve that.

Many institutions hope that ASR will solve the problem automatically. However, ASR accuracy is an average, not a guarantee. While a clear studio recording might hit 95% accuracy, a recording with poor audio quality and multiple speakers talking over one another might dip as low as 30% accuracy.

At professional human-captioning rates, that scale of content would cost tens of millions of dollars; a budget no university realistically has. Pulse was built to bridge this gap by providing a strategic way to manage risk without breaking the bank.

What is Pulse?

Pulse is an automated auditing and monitoring tool that provides a comprehensive view of your university’s video accessibility health. Instead of guessing which videos are “good enough” or which ones need urgent human intervention, Pulse gives you the data to make informed decisions.

How it Works: Connect, Score, Remediate, Monitor

Watch Lily explain how Pulse works:

Pulse will audit your entire video library. Anywhere you can ingest video from, we will audit that content both for backlog and on an ongoing basis every time new video is added. And every video is going to get scored automatically. That means that we will assign a, for captioning, an accuracy score. How accurate are we predicting the ASR is? Is it 60% accurate or is it 95% accurate? For audio description, we’re going to tell you whether we think the video needs audio description at all. And then if it does, how comprehensive the AI audio description solution is compared to what a human would generate. And you can set your thresholds in accordance with your own university’s comfort level for risk management. We will then remediate and route content in a smart way so that anything above your threshold, the AI solution gets posted back, and anything below the threshold will be routed for human remediation, allowing you to get a comprehensive compliance solution for your university with no manual oversight.

1. Connect: Pulse integrates directly with your video platforms (Panopto, YouTube, Kaltura, etc.) to ingest your entire library, both backlog and new content.
2. Score: Every video is automatically audited. For captions, Pulse provides an accuracy score (predicting the quality of the ASR). For audio description (AD), it identifies if a video needs AD at all and scores the comprehensiveness of the AI-generated description.
3. Remediate: Based on thresholds you set, content is routed automatically. Low-risk content can remain as AI-drafted, while high-risk content (falling below your quality threshold) is routed for professional human remediation.
4. Monitor: This is a continuous process. As new videos are uploaded, Pulse audits them in real-time.

Connecting Your Video Ecosystem

In this video, Chris explains how universities can connect to all their video content to centralize accessibility governance:

We understand that at universities, there’s video everywhere. Sometimes in one video platform, sometimes split across video platforms. We’ve dealt with universities that have a hundred or more different YouTube accounts that are individually owned, the video is is sort of split across them. Our goal is to make getting the video into the 3Play ecosystem so we can apply this Pulse solution simple, scalable, and frictionless. Again, we’ve worked with universities for 18+ years and even at accommodation level scale, workflow has been important. So we have integrations with all these and many more video platforms that aren’t on here.

3Play Media understands the logistical nightmare universities face with video content scattered across multiple platforms, often including hundreds of individually owned YouTube accounts.

To solve this, 3Play leverages its 18 years of higher ed experience to provide a simple, frictionless way to centralize that content. Through robust integrations with major video platforms, they bring all fragmented video into the 3Play ecosystem so the Pulse solution can be applied at a scalable, enterprise level.

Decades of Data in Every Score

While Pulse is a new product, the technology behind it isn’t. 3Play Media has been using this internal scoring model for 18 years to manage their own workflows.

“We need to know for every AI draft we produce if it’s good or not… we need to know how much work it will take to get it to a compliant state,” Chris Antunes noted. Pulse essentially takes the “battle-tested” technology 3Play uses to pay its contractors and puts it in the hands of university administrators.

Watch Chris explain how 3Play has been utilizing this technology internally for years:

We’ve been using this exact model. We are a customer of Pulse and we’ve been using this exact model for eighteen years. So I’ll give you an example. In the case of captioning, if we have a video and it’s a single speaker and it’s professionally recorded in a studio, that AI draft might be 97%, 96% accurate, and the captioner needs to do just a little bit of work to get it above that 99%+ threshold that we’re aiming for. And so it might take them an hour to review that file if it’s an hour long and make those final changes. On the other hand, we’ve done work, and this is not this is a real example where we were transcribing a focus group and, the microphone was hidden in a plant somewhere, and there were ten speakers shouting over each other. And that ASR draft or AI draft might be thirty percent accurate. And that transcriber or captioner, it might take them seven or eight hours to clean up that hour. And obviously, we need to pay that that second case a lot more. And I think the light bulb went off as we were having these hundreds and hundreds of conversations with these universities around Title II and the challenge they face, where at the at the root of it, they want to get these captions and descriptions to a certain level of quality, and they just don’t know where to start or how to allocate budget, and this model allows them to do that.

A Strategic Approach to Budget and Risk

One of the most significant features of Pulse is that it isn’t just a quality tool; it’s a budget strategy. By scoring every video, Pulse allows you to identify risky content.

If a lecture capture has an AI caption accuracy of 96%, you might decide that it meets your risk tolerance for that specific type of content. However, if a high-profile video (e.g., a commencement speech) scores 70%, Pulse flags it immediately for human review.

The Power of “Audit Only” vs. “Audit and Remediate”

To meet different institutional needs, Pulse is offered in two tiers:

• Audit Only: Provides the dashboard, scoring, and risk visibility. This is perfect for institutions that need to report compliance health to a board or leadership.
• Audit and Remediate: Provides the audit plus the automated routing to human experts for any content that fails to meet your quality standards.

See a full feature breakdown of 3Play’s Higher Ed solutions.

Centralized Governance for CIOs and ADA Coordinators

For leadership, the Pulse dashboard provides a “single source of truth.” Instead of hunting through a hundred different YouTube accounts or various departments, administrators can see their entire campus’s compliance status in one place.

As Lily mentions, one CIO at a major university found the dashboard to be a “huge time saver” for reporting to his board, providing a clean, data-driven way to show that the university is responsibly managing its Title II obligations.

Case Study: How the University of Florida Scales Compliance

The University of Florida (UF) serves as a prime example of an institution using Pulse to transform accessibility from an ad-hoc expense into a sustainable budget strategy.

Facing the daunting task of achieving full campus-wide compliance under Title II, UF leveraged Pulse to audit and score their massive video library. This data-driven approach allowed them to move away from treating all content the same, instead focusing their resources on remediating high-risk files.

By using Pulse’s automated scoring, UF gained the visibility needed to manage millions of minutes of content efficiently. As their team noted, Pulse serves as the essential link between identifying a compliance gap and executing a cost-effective solution.

“[Pulse] isn’t just a caption quality tool, it’s a budget strategy,” stated Brian Smith, IT Manager for UF. “It ensures we invest human review where it’s actually needed, while giving faculty confidence that every video they upload meets a dependable accuracy baseline.”

Audio Description: A Nuanced Approach

Watch Chris explain how Pulse evaluates AD quality and determines remediation priority:

On the audio description side, what is a score? What does audit mean? Well it starts with do you need to describe it all? Is there enough space in the video? Is there enough like sort of empty space that you could fit a description in it? Yes? No? Is there on screen text maybe in the video that’s not represented in the transcript already? So that’s critical information that would need to be described. But if there’s none of that, maybe not as important. And ultimately, is there high priority visual elements? And so we have models that can detect that. So start with of the video you have, does it need to be described? And then after that, there’s another decision you make, which is how comprehensive is the AI audio description. We have a low, medium, high risk, which maps to comprehensive, somewhat, or not. So certainly, the video needs to be described and the AI draft is not comprehensive, that’s an area where you’re going to want to consider an upgrade.

Unlike captions, which have a “definitive truth” (the spoken word), Audio Description is more subjective. Pulse uses sophisticated models to ask:

• Does this video have enough “empty space” to fit a description?
• Is there on-screen text that isn’t in the transcript?
• Would this description benefit materially from a professional human describer?

Getting Started

The deadline is coming, but compliance doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing, multi-million dollar mystery. Pulse offers a way to be responsible, responsive, and realistic about your video accessibility.

New to 3Play: You can request a demo to see how Pulse can audit your specific video platforms.

Existing 3Play Customers: You can see a Pulse Preview in your account dashboard right now to get a feel for the data.

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