AIGA DC: The Professional Association for Design
AIGA DC enhances event inclusivity with Verbit’s live captioning to accurately represent technical design terms and meet Section 508 compliance, fostering engagement for diverse audiences.
In a Nutshell
AIGA DC has turned to Verbit’s live captioning to make its events inclusive for diverse audiences, providing tools for all attendees, including those with hearing loss and disabilities, to engage more effectively. Verbit’s captioning reaches the superior accuracy levels AIGA DC needs. Live captions shown during these events now detect technical design terms accurately, and recordings from events meet Section 508 compliance standards, which is essential when high-profile federal government designers, among others, are speaking.
"Captioning improves events not just for people who need it — it makes everyone’s experiences better."
The Challenge
“The pandemic hit. There were a bunch of new accessibility challenges that we hadn’t had to face before,” said AIGA DC Vice President Nick Fabiani. His team needed an accurate captioning solution it could trust to make its 40 events fully accessible to the community, but as a non-profit, budgets were limited.
AIGA: The Professional Association for Design has more than 70 chapters across the US, and AIGA DC is the second largest of them. Its mission is to advance the field of design in the professional and cultural world. AIGA helps establish global standards and practices for design, offering events, tools and resources to engage designers.
The Solution
Verbit’s live captioning helps AIGA DC ensure full participation and accessibility for their community members. “As a chapter, we have a really deep commitment to inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility,” said Claire Blaustein, AIGA DC President. “For a group that is trying to do as much as we can, having [Verbit] helps us use our programming to reach more people.” With Verbit, AIGA DC’s leaders are providing precise captioning to their audiences, allowing staff to focus their time on crucial efforts to advance the design community.
Verbit offers AIGA DC:
- A cost-effective and straightforward solution
- Live event captioning and real-time editing by professional transcribers
- A dedicated and responsive support team Captioning that identifies niche, specific terms
- Word-for-word transcriptions for attendees to reference
The Results
AIGA DC’s partnership with Verbit meets accessibility needs and also offers event attendees – wherever they are, and in whatever environment and mindset they’re consuming content in the ability to utilize captions if they find them helpful. “We’ve heard both from folks who need the live closed captioning and those who just happen to have it on… that it is really actually quite helpful. This is something that offers a huge benefit to everybody,” said Fabiani.
Live editing in real-time
“For each of our events, we had both the automated service as well as somebody correcting the transcript and captions to ensure accuracy. That was really the decision-maker for us.”
Section 508 compliance
“Section 508 compliance is something we talk about and deal with a lot…Making sure that our [captioning] reflects what we were trying to teach people to do and to be as designers was important to us.”
Dedicated support for multiple events
“We’ve had 35 events over a week. For another conference, we had 30-some odd events in one day, and the support team has been really helpful.”
Cost-efficient captioning
“We’re a non-profit which year to year tries to run at a revenue-neutral spot.” AIGA DC was looking for “the best experience for folks who need live closed captioning, and [Verbit] was the perfect balance of price.”
“For us, it was a question of how do we provide best-in-class accessibility services? [Verbit’s solution] really helped to make all of our programming accessible as possible...It was the perfect balance of price.”