CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

The Royal College of Art

In a Nutshell

The Royal College of Art is using Verbit to power hundreds of large-scale events and professional talks with high-profile speakers to make them more accessible to a worldwide audience. Verbit’s captioning and transcription is also used to make graduating students’ virtual art shows and its courses accessible to the general public and international students. The RCA’s shows garner 500 to 900 diverse viewers. Verbit’s leading accuracy and human touch with professional editing has been key to the success of its inclusion efforts.

The Challenges

The Royal College of Art needed a reliable solution to make hundreds of annual virtual events and talks more accessible to international audiences. School leaders wanted to provide the best experience possible to viewers and couldn't rely on free tools or manual processes for the amount of events scheduled. With high-profile speakers being interviewed regularly, such as Sir Jony Ive, it needed a partner it could trust for live and accurate captioning and transcription. With a large international student population and students with disabilities enrolled, the RCA also wanted to offer more additional engagement and accessibility tools.

An increased need for live captioning and transcription

An inability to rely on the accuracy of free, automatic tools for high-profile events

A desire to ensure video accessibility to international students and viewers

A high volume of virtual events which required a process for captioning and transcription

Juli MacArthur

Learning Technologist, The Royal College of Art

"We have very large international audiences that attend a lot of these events. Our Jony Ive talk was attended by 88 different countries, and so [Verbit]'s captions makes that a lot more accessible to them, especially where English is a second language."

The Solution

Leading accuracy
Trusted captioning over free tools for full accessibility

Professional services
Effective live tools for high-profile events with international audiences

Automated process
Integration with Zoom & ability to handle a high volume of events

The Results

Helping all audiences engage

“Verbit obviously made a lot of our events far more accessible to users, current students, and for international audiences, especially because of the high-profile nature of those speakers, we want to make sure that’s a priority.”

Ease of use

“We have hundreds of events. Handing over an API key takes two seconds and then it’s done, so Verbit was really easy to set up, especially for those people who required that level of support when we were hosting events.”

Integration with Zoom for on-screen captions

“With a lot of other providers, the captions come up on a separate screen, and so that makes viewing quite cumbersome. [Verbit]’s captions appear on the screen so that people are able to focus on what’s happening, but also read the captions.”

AI with a trusted human touch

“For those large events where you need the human touch, where names and things like that become a little bit more jumbled via AI, Verbit provides that additional stability and so that ensures that the users find that experience a lot better.”

Supporting accessibility needs

“We have a large number of users with additional learning needs. We have a number of students with loss of hearing enrolled on our courses, so having captions there has been really valuable. Within Art and Design, you have a lot of users with dyslexia and other needs, so being able to read those things back later, to be able to track that [with Verbit], enables them to process over again in their own time.”

“When we first joined with Verbit, we had a large number of events that we’d planned. They helped us to rapidly set those up because from signing a contract to things actually going live, I think was like a week. It was really short notice. The guys I worked with there, they were fabulous.”
– Juli MacArthur, Learning Technologist, The Royal College of Art