Title II Video Accessibility Compliance 101: What You Need to Know

NOAH PEARSON: Thank you all for joining today's session, "Title II Video Accessibility Compliance 101-- What You Need to Know." My name is Noah Pearson, and I'm on the marketing team here at 3Play Media. And I will be moderating today's webinar. And I use he/him pronouns.

This is the first webinar in our "Countdown to Compliance" webinar series. For this series, we'll have one webinar every month prior to the initial ADA Title II deadline in April of 2026-- so next year. We'll be covering everything from building a budget and tackling backlog content to how to implement audio description and much more.

And with all of that out of the way, I'd like to introduce today's speaker, Erik Ducker. Erik is the senior director of product marketing here at 3Play. And he'll be breaking down everything you need to know about Title II video accessibility compliance. So Erik, I will turn it over to you.

ERIK DUCKER: Awesome. Thank you, Noah. Excited to be here. As Noah mentioned, I'm Erik Ducker. I use he/him pronouns. And I'm actually based in Minnesota, just like Noah, even though 3Play is based in Boston, for the most part. Lucky us.

We are excited to be here. And this is a culmination of really a year-long process that we kicked off, basically, about a year ago. We interviewed about 30 different universities across the country about Title II and where they were headed, what they were doing. And since then, we've talked to at least a couple hundred institutions across the United States. And we felt it was really important for us to all get on this journey together for the next six months as we get to that first important date in the Title II video compliance journey on April 26 of 2026.

But you're going to hear a lot from me today. And you're going to hopefully hear a lot less of me in subsequent webinars, when we bring in the actual practitioners to talk about how they're applying their strategies to accomplish Title II compliance. So more to come on that topic. But today, we're going to be really diving into just some of the basics.

I've scanned the attendee list before. I know that there's some people who are actually relatively new to this topic. And then there's, of course, people who have been attending webinars, likely presented with me, many, many times over over the last nine months here.

We're going to be really diving into the video compliance basics and then talking a little bit about the exceptions and the responsibilities that we all have in the-- as a public institution. And we'll have a little bit of time at the end for questions and answers.

This is a series. And so we want to make sure that we can tackle questions and answers throughout, especially with the actual practitioners in front of you. So I might not have all the answers today. But by the end of this journey together, hopefully, everything will be really neat and buttoned up for everyone involved.

So let's dive into the 101, ADA Title II. The scope of this ruling specifies that digital content, including video, must meet WCAG, or W-C-A-G, 2.1 AA standards for accessibility. WCAG is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines structure that's internationally recognized. That basically outlines what are the minimum requirements to maintain a digital accessible experience.

And I want to comment on this particular scope real quick. This isn't novel. This isn't new. This is a clarification. So the ADA law has been in place for decades. But it predates the internet and predates digital communication and predates our ability to assemble online in a space of public accommodation.

So we've had decades of lawsuits and case law that have helped us define what's required for digital accessibility. And so this is really just a clarification of what we know to be true and should provide a much more clear, black and white perspective on what institutions are expected to comply with.

So key deadlines are important. So large entities are really the first ones up to bat. This is going to be April 26-- sorry April 24, 2026. And this is defined by not the-- say, for example, the student population at a university, but the actual jurisdiction. So if an institution resides in the city, the city is used as the population of qualifying for a large entity.

Smaller entities, below 50,000, will have an extra year to finish compliance and get up to date. But this also applies across all US states and localities, not just the federally funded programs.

Effectively, any digital content that's intended for public use-- and we'll talk a little bit about that throughout the session today-- such as websites, mobile apps, and videos, are required to be accessible.

Your new content is going to be required. So after these dates, respectively, for each entity, any new content is going to be covered by this law going forward. Same with your existing published content. So you have until this date to, effectively, update your published content and be ready for this deadline.

But there's also an opportunity, and we'll talk about this throughout, as well, of archiving content. So you can unpublish content that's not relevant anymore. You shouldn't hold yourself accountable to accidentally have something published that's not meant to be published. So it's an opportunity to actually deprioritize content that's not relevant anymore and make sure that you're not exposed.

Ultimately, the too long, didn't-- if you didn't read, accessibility is required whenever content affects an individual's ability to participate in programs or receive services. So this includes things like a student accessing content through an LMS. Just because it's a firewall and there's a password doesn't mean it's not public. It is intended for public use within a student environment, much like students accessing content inside a classroom. So that's a really important distinction that has evolved from this rule than in prior instances.

So diving more into just the video side of this, the WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines cover the minimum requirements for closed captioning, audio description, and live captioning requirements. So we'll dive into each one of these. But before we get to that, there's always questions about this. And I think it's fair to ask these questions. We hear these questions.

But given our existing political environment and just the stark change from where we were prior to this administration and now, the question on a lot of people's mind is, is the current administration really going to enforce this law? And we can't predict the future. We can't predict anything. We have to look back at what it is and remember that the United States is a litigious environment.

So what the law is really telling us is on April 24, 2026, this goes into action and enforcement. And it becomes a very easy way for someone who can bring-- anyone in the United States who has standing-- and that's a legal term that I will let you guys look up-- who have standing can bring a lawsuit and basically refer to this new rule that's being enforced.

It's not strictly reserved for the judicial department of the United States to enforce this. United States has got a long history of individual citizens and others have the ability to also bring legal action, not just the United States. So it's not really a question of, is this current administration really going to enforce the law? It's really understanding what happens on April 24, what changes in the ability for-- or what happens in your responsibility.

So key terminology as we move forward-- and this is going to be important because we're going to throw these acronyms out in different terms throughout the next six months together. So when we refer to closed captions, we're really referring to something specific. Closed captions specifically assume the viewer can't hear the audio. They're also referred to as subtitles, oftentimes outside the United States. But ultimately in the United States, captions are time-synchronized text that reflect the audio track. Not just the dialogue, but the audio track, everything that is potentially happening. So if I clap my hands, that's audio, not just dialogue. So it can be read while watching the visual content. And it needs to be time-synchronized.

Audio Description, or AD for short, assumes the viewer can't see the video content, also known as descriptive video. So you'll see that I'm trying to read as much of the text on the slides, which we've all learned, don't do that. But from an accessibility perspective, it's actually really valuable to make sure that you only put words that are relevant on your PowerPoints so that you can have the opportunity to call attention to that, so that you're not leaving someone who's not able to see and participate in that way from consuming the content.

So AD is the verbal depiction, or narration track, of key visual elements in media, and also in live productions. For this particular guideline or WCAG level of AA, we won't need to provide audio description in live environments. It will only be associated with post-production content.

Transcripts are basically a catch-all term of basically representation of text of the audio. It doesn't necessarily need to be timecoded. It can be. But we might hear that especially in the verb of transcription, for example.

Live captions, we're going to refer to as live captions. People may be like, no, we're talking about CART, we're talking about captions, they're different. Totally understand. For sake of being less nuanced and more broadly speaking, we'll likely use these interchangeably with real-time captioning, or CART. But ultimately the goal there is there is an accommodation of making sure that there's a real-time text feed for a user in a live environment.

And then ASR, or Automatic Speech Recognition, will show up a lot as an opportunity for lower costs for compliance, is the process of a computer transcribing audio into text. And we'll talk more about that in subsequent webinars here.

Cool. Just to round this out, closed captions are provided for all pre-recorded audio content. So this is direct from the website, which is what's being referred to in the new rulemaking. So this is the text that lawyers are really paying attention to in terms of interpretation of what is required.

I'm not a lawyer. No one that is presenting today is a lawyer. We do have a lawyer joining us, Lainey Feingold, in December to do a state of accessibility legal update for us. I think that's going to be available in the chat. So you can register for that. And they can talk about potential legal advice from a lawyer. But I am not.

Ultimately, why this matters, why closed captions, is captions assume the viewer can't hear the audio. And that is a critical accommodation for a deaf and hard of hearing individual. And specifically, what are defined as closed captions in these guidelines? They must be time-synchronized. So they have to be accurate in terms of when the words show up, am I speaking at the same time, those words?

Usually they're going to be found as a Closed Caption icon, CC icon, in the video player. We're so used to closed captions today. Social media is so used to open captions. And we can all debate whether the pop-on one word at a time is useful or not for different people. I've heard all sorts of complaints about, there's a reason why we have defined user experiences for closed captions. And it's oftentimes because it's really helpful for specific individuals.

This must include non-speech elements. Once again, that clap off-screen-- if that's relevant to the information that's being provided, it needs to be captioned, including speaker IDs. So in a classroom environment where you have one camera on the professor and then there's a discussion between two students, how are you supposed to follow that if you can't figure out who's speaking? And so speaker IDs are really important. They don't necessarily need to name the student. But they need to distinguish that two different people are talking to provide relevant context.

And then absolutely important is this word, "accurate." And unfortunately, the world does not like percentages. They don't like measurements in specific percentage terms. But we do have this word called "accurate" in the definition.

We don't have it as 99-plus percent. We've seen the industry decide that 99-plus percent is considered accurate and compliant. And in the judicial system, we have seen complaints against companies that have not provided accurate enough captions, and then referring to services like 3Play Media as the gold standard for accurate closed captions.

So moving along, audio description is an alternative for time-based media, or audio description of the pre-recorded video content is provided for synchronized media, except when the media is a media alternative for text and is clearly labeled as such. So just a reminder-- just because you provide video as an alternative doesn't mean it now becomes-- also, you don't need to do the circle of like, hey, now I have an audio version of this article, I need to caption the audio version. No, you have the text there. This is an accommodation. Those things are separate.

But audio description assumes the viewer can't see the video content-- once again, extremely important for blind or visually impaired individuals. We'll show a couple examples to give you an idea of what this looks like. But ultimately, provide a description of essential visual content, relevant actions, scene changes, on-screen text, so on and so forth.

This can be outputted with standard or extended options. So standard audio description tries to fit in the extra narration between natural pauses in the dialogue and maintain the original time of the video. An extended audio description narration track can actually pause the original video and extend past the original time, allowing for more description, especially in environments like a classroom, where you have rich text in graphs and PowerPoints with someone like me just constantly speaking. And then once again, this is an optional user-level feature in the video player when it's available, indicated by an AD icon.

So let's do a couple things here. Does it need audio description? So I want to show a couple of examples, because this is a common question that we get. What do I need to do? This isn't as black and white as captions. I need captions because I have dialogue in my video, or I have noise in my video. But what do I need? So we're going to play a sample.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- And here we have the Mount Lyell shrew doing the one behavior that it does best, eating.

- So this is the first ever footage of a Mount Lyell shrew alive. And we captured it just last fall.

[END PLAYBACK]

ERIK DUCKER: OK. So what do we think, yes or no? Does this require audio description? I know I just played the first 16 seconds. So I'm going to say yes. And that's because there's no direct dialogue of the on-screen text. And there's a pretty big gap in audio.

So you wouldn't necessarily know that there's an additional caption, basically, in this video that's describing what the two UC Berkeley students made the first images. You wouldn't have known that directly from the dialogue so far. Maybe you could make an argument that there was enough description from the dialogue. But arguably, this has the makings of the common needs of audio description.

So I'm going to play another one.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- OK, so something more cheerful-- the US states. The states are an important part of the framework. And the states do their own thing. The map shows the states, 50 states of the United States, by color to represent-- by different colors to represent they all have different laws.

[END PLAYBACK]

ERIK DUCKER: So what do we think, yes or no? Do we think this is-- maybe does this particular clip really need an audio description? So I think Lainey did a great job of explaining the visual, especially a map to explain what is being shown on screen. I'm sure there's a little bit more context. So it's a little bit hard to do it in these small clips. But ultimately, she makes a really, really important effort to describe the visual images of this map and this video in her slide deck. And so we would consider that that particular clip likely does not need an additional audio description track to help a low-vision or blind user.

So still, though, we hear this a lot. Is audio description really necessary? I'm not even sure we have a blind student on campus. And this is a really common reality that disabled individuals deal with. There's this assumption that you have to be visible to be real, to actually get help. And so the whole point of this rulemaking is not to make it harder, or make it possible for people to raise their hand and say, I need an accommodation. We already have those laws in place. And we already have those workflows in place.

This is really to make a proactive effort and say, hey, we don't know what every single person is currently dealing with. It could be a temporary issue with low vision. It could be a temporary issue with hard of hearing.

This is assuming we're making inclusive experiences and accessible experiences out of the gate, so that we don't force someone to have to raise their hand every single time to actually participate in a digital environment. So that's really the core of this issue.

Now, we know that there's going to be some budget concerns. And we're going to talk about that throughout this series and talk about how schools are taking different approaches to help make sure that they can try to make things more compliant. But I understand there's some real challenges with audio description, both as a technical medium, but then also a budget medium. So we'll talk about that in the future, but not today, for example.

And then finally, live captioning, which we're pretty familiar with. We're doing live captioning, as we mentioned, for this event and, actually, live interpretation. Captions are provided for all live audio content in synchronized media. Once again, this is for deaf and hard of hearing people in order for them to understand the audio in real-time video content.

This is synchronized text. And I put quotation marks in here with regards to video is a fundamentally very-- or live video is very different. There's no real time codes in live video. And so when we think about synchronized text here, we're really thinking about as close to zero latency as possible. And that might be a few seconds. And that might be a few milliseconds, depending on your environment and the tools that you get to use.

But ultimately, still the same rules apply in terms of what's considered a good closed caption. We need non-speech elements like speaker IDs and sound effects captured. And the accuracy must remain high. And so we're continuing to see humans be a powerful partner here to make live content continue to be accessible whether you're still watching the World Series, which was an amazing, by the way, seven-game series.

The live captioners there had to be up for six hours on that event when it went to 18 innings. And guess what? They're doing a wonderful job. And they're doing it in a way that currently, we're seeing limitations with machines, especially around speaker IDs and sound effects that are important.

So what are we hearing? At the end of the day, this is probably the most interesting comment, which is, I could just not publish my video content anymore, or I could just not do video anymore. And that's a fair ask. It's a fair question.

I think part of this is an opportunity to look at your library and say, what don't I need to publish anymore? I don't want to be liable for something that doesn't get a lot of eyeballs. And so we're seeing schools implement strategies.

I'm going to butcher this a little bit. I think it's the three R's, but I only remember the first two R's. But it's Remove, Remediate. So look at your content. Remove the content that's not relevant to the educational experience anymore.

And then for the content that you want to remain, remediate. Let's make sure that that content is accessible. And so that's a policy that a lot of schools are taking. And that's OK. What we don't want to see happen is that literally video content is no longer available-- is not the answer because video is still an incredibly powerful medium for education, both in on-campus experiences, where people have to study outside the classroom, and for, obviously, remote learning opportunities.

So just a few exceptions that we kind of catalog these exceptions for everyone. Archive content, we've talked about, is not required to be made accessible. So if this is not meant for public consumption, it's not under the law here.

Internal content is the same thing. So if I'm sending a video to my colleague, I'm not being held accountable for making that video accessible. Now if my colleague happens to be deaf or hard of hearing, I better make that accessible. But that's for a different set of laws and reasons.

You mentioned the alternative format. So if you're using video or audio as an alternative format already, you don't need to make that accessible. And then user-generated content-- so if I have students uploading their own personal videos into, say, an LMS, that content isn't required to-- that's not covered content, in this case.

But ultimately, the responsibility lies with public entities. They're fully responsible for all video content, whether it's produced by them or they're effectively contracting a third party to deliver that content for them. So this is where you have to work with procurement and make sure that the vendors that you're working with are adhering to these accessibility laws so that you, ultimately, are bearing that responsibility.

And then remember, ADA Title II requires effective communication and program services and activities. So content that impacts participation in these programs is subject to accessibility obligations.

So I'm going to wrap real quick with just a few key takeaways. Remember, video is an essential component of compliance. New ruling specifies standards for accessibility. WCAG 2.1 AA is going to help clarify most of the concerns you might have. Public entities are going to be held responsible, whether it's through the US Department of Justice or individuals with standing. And that deadline is coming up quick and fast. And we're here to help. And that's, really, the end for today.

We have our next webinar scheduled for December. And we're going to be talking with our friends at University of Florida and doing a fireside chat where we'll talk about how they built their budget around the solutions that they've used and deployed for Title II compliance in closed captioning across campus. So feel free to register for that as soon as possible. We'll definitely email this group with followup information for that webinar as well. Otherwise, you can stay in touch and ask questions with me.

I think we have a couple minutes, Noah. But we should probably have to let people go since we promised 30 minutes.

NOAH PEARSON: Absolutely. Well, we can get to at least one question here from one of our attendees. It's related to accuracy. Speaking of percentages, we have had many instructors ask us what the threshold will be. Is there a standard to say approximately what accessibility score will be considered safe? Our default answer is, of course, 100%. But is there a stated percentage as we race toward this April deadline?

ERIK DUCKER: Yeah. The reality is the 99% to 100% compliant accuracy is going to give you that full protection because, once again, at the end of the day, if no one notices that you didn't do captions, there's no consequences. So you're really just trying to de-risk as much as possible.

And so there might be a spectrum of which some of your content you may say-- you only need 90% accurate. And maybe AI is going to be perfect for that. But for important content with lots of eyeballs, with highly critical learning information, that's where you're going to want to prioritize your budget.

There's a spectrum here that we have to be cognizant of. Obviously, we'd love to be able to have everything be 100% compliant with closed captions down to the letter of the law in terms of the "accurate" statement in WCAG guidelines. We know that that's likely not a possibility with the budgets that we have.

NOAH PEARSON: All right, awesome. Thank you, Erik. Unfortunately, we are at time. So I will wrap it up here. Thanks again, for sharing such great information. And thank you so much to our audience for joining and asking some great questions, even though we only got to answer one of them. So thank you all so much again. And I hope you have a great rest of your day.