The fastest fix for an overwhelmed accessibility team is fewer vendors

If you run a campus accessibility office or student disability services office, “we’re drowning in requests” probably sounds less like a complaint and more like Tuesday. The instinct is to ask for another hire, and who wouldn’t want that. But budgets rarely stretch that far, and if headcount is the ask, the answer is usually no, which makes finding a different fix essential.

In two separate conversations with universities this month, the actual fix on the table wasn’t more headcount, it was consolidating a pile of disconnected, per-department captioning and accessibility contracts into one platform with one predictable bill. Same symptom, same root cause, different departments each quietly buying their own solution, and fielding student accommodation requests, for years until nobody could see the total cost.

The Real Bottleneck for University Accessibility Offices Isn't Headcount, It's Fragmentation

Demand for accommodations has genuinely grown. At one university, the share of students registered with disability support services doubled between 2019 and 2025, and staff turnover followed as workloads outpaced hiring, before the university eventually addressed it by doubling staff. Not every university or college can just double a department’s headcount, though, and even the institutions that can are treating it as a last resort rather than a first move.

On top of that, ADA Title II regulations and their compliance deadlines are adding a separate, second layer of pressure, pushing digital accessibility and accessible course content from a nice-to-have into a hard requirement with a timeline attached. Content that isn’t accessible today has to become easily accessible before that deadline hits. That’s a different kind of demand than student accommodation requests, but it lands on the same already-stretched office, on the same limited staff.

What’s easier to fix, and what actually explains a lot of the overwhelmed feeling, is how the spend is structured. One department pays per-minute for live captioning during events. Another has a separate contract for post-production video captioning. A third is quietly expensing a note-taking tool nobody centrally tracks. None of it shows up as one number anywhere, so nobody notices the total until someone, usually the person drowning in requests, adds it up to make a budget case.

That fragmentation has a compounding effect that’s easy to miss. Every separate vendor relationship comes with its own invoice cycle, its own point of contact, its own way of handling a rush request, and its own gaps in coverage that the accessibility office ends up patching manually. A single overwhelmed staff member isn’t just processing requests, they’re also the one holding together five vendor relationships that were never designed to work as a system. That coordination work is invisible on an org chart, but it’s real hours, and it’s usually the first thing that gets faster when there’s one contract and one point of contact instead of five.

What ADA Title II Compliance Looks Like When You Consolidate Vendors

In practice, that usually means bringing captioning, transcription, and accessibility work together under one vendor instead of several, so departments across the university are effectively joining forces on the same problem instead of each solving it separately, no more reconciling five departmental budgets just to figure out what education accessibility actually costs the institution.

Campus Complete is built around exactly this kind of consolidation to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the enforceable technical standard behind ADA Title II. For institutions that want a predictable cost, it’s also available as a single flat annual subscription, sized to the institution, replacing per-minute, per-department pricing with one known annual number, no overages, no surprise invoices, though a subscription is one option among a few ways to work with Verbit, not a requirement. It plugs into the systems already in use, Canvas, Blackboard, Kaltura, Panopto, Brightspace, Moodle, D2L, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams, so consolidating the contract doesn’t mean retraining every department on a new workflow.

What’s actually covered under that subscription is broader than captioning alone, which is worth spelling out since it’s the part that usually gets missed:

• Unlimited AI-powered captioning for every lecture, video, and live event, recorded or real time, with no usage limits and no per-minute cost surprises

• Unlimited AI audio description, giving students who are blind or have low vision full access to video content across the library

• Accurate, searchable, screen-reader-compatible transcripts for every recording

• Multilingual translations and subtitles for international students

• Complete accommodations support, so disability services teams have one reliable, scalable way to fulfill captioning and transcription requests, whether it’s a single accommodation or a student’s full course load

That “unlimited” part is worth sitting with for a second, since it’s the direct fix for the per-minute, use-it-carefully pricing that made the original per-department spend so hard to track in the first place.

Consolidation doesn’t mean giving anything up on the AI side either. AI insights and learning tools, summaries, quizzes, keywords, and chapters generated from lecture and event recordings, are already part of what Campus Complete includes. If your institution also relies on dedicated, real-time note-taking, a distinct service from AI-generated summaries, Verbit offers that separately too, worth bringing into the same conversation rather than assuming it needs its own contract. The point of consolidating isn’t narrowing what you have access to, it’s ending the pattern of paying five different ways for the same core captioning and transcription service.

Consolidating the contract also means consolidating who you actually call when something needs attention. Campus Complete comes with a dedicated education specialist and access to Verbit’s higher education accessibility team, people whose focus is ADA Title II and university-specific compliance, not a general support queue that has to be brought up to speed on your institution every time. And for the content where accuracy matters most, public-facing video, formal accommodations, legally sensitive material, the platform isn’t automation alone: it can be upgraded to human-reviewed captions and transcripts, so there’s a person double-checking the highest-stakes work, not just a model.

Making the Budget Case for Campus Accessibility Consolidation

If you’re the one making this case internally, a little preparation goes a long way before you sit down with a CIO or provost. Pulling together one specific number instead of a general sense that spending feels scattered usually takes some legwork, a few conversations across departments, chasing down a contract or two nobody remembers signing, but it tends to be worth the effort. A few things that help:

• Add up what’s actually being spent right now across departments, including the contracts nobody centrally tracks, before you compare anything to a flat quote.

• Get the exact scope in writing: what’s included in a consolidated plan, what isn’t, and which existing tools will still need their own line item. Verbit’s own ADA Title II compliance checklist is a reasonable starting point for laying out what needs to be covered.

• Confirm integration details with your LMS and video platforms in writing before the budget conversation, not after.

• If a committed-hours model doesn’t fit your usage pattern, it’s worth understanding how committed hours and usage-based pricing actually compare before deciding a flat annual subscription is the right structure for your institution specifically.

• Bring the coordination cost into the conversation, not just the dollar figure. A budget owner who only sees “$45,000 a year” is comparing that number to whatever the current invoices add up to. A budget owner who also hears “and this frees up staff time currently spent managing five vendor relationships” is looking at the full picture.

None of this needs to be perfect on the first pass. The universities and colleges moving fastest on this treated it as a live, time-boxed opportunity, gathering the real numbers and getting them in front of a budget owner while the comparison was still fresh, rather than letting it become next year’s project. A specific number attached to a real timeline tends to get further than a general sense that the vendor situation feels messy.

Let Verbit's Higher Education Accessibility Experts Help You

Accommodation demand on most campuses is only going up, and hiring your way out of that trend one request at a time isn’t realistic for most budgets. What tends to help more is removing the friction that makes a fixed-size team feel permanently behind: one contract instead of five, one predictable number instead of a scramble every renewal cycle, and a platform that already talks to the tools your campus uses.

You don’t have to figure out the right structure alone. Verbit’s higher education accessibility team works with institutions to build a plan around what your campus actually needs, whether that ends up being a custom arrangement or the Campus Complete subscription. If your accessibility office is evaluating whether consolidating captioning and accommodations spend makes sense for your institution, book a demo and we’ll walk through the options together.