Customer Spotlight
University of Texas at San Antonio
The University of Texas at San Antonio leans on Verbit for accurate captions and reliable transcription of high-profile live events to boost accessibility for virtual attendees.
In a Nutshell
University of Texas at San Antonio is partnering with Verbit to ensure its live events are accessible to all audiences and hundreds of virtual attendees. With high-profile events featuring the likes of the chancellor of the UT System and leading professors from eight universities, accurate captions and reliable transcription are critical.
"With Verbit, there’s a lot of bells and whistles. Those bells and whistles do cool things, so ask for a demo. It makes life easier in ways that you would not expect often... There’s nothing that I’ve asked for of Verbit that they’ve not been able to offer.”
The Challenge
The Teaching and Learning Services team is housed outside of Student Disability Services and is responsible for ensuring university events, including student webinars and faculty virtual events, are accessible and inclusive to participants. With the last-minute nature and finite details which are innate with event production, their team needed accessibility guidance and an agile partner to offer them peace of mind so they could focus on other conference matters.
The Solution
Whether events are to be held on Zoom or other platforms for small groups of students or high-profile university leaders, Verbit’s team has become a trusted resource for UTSA events. Verbit’s solution is supporting the university’s live virtual events with multiple speakers and breakout rooms. UTSA leaders are now able to focus on the events themselves knowing their captioning and accessibility needs are being taken care of. “Your team supported us… and that made my life much easier,” Villanueva said.
Verbit offers:
- Live captions & transcription for accessible live and virtual events to support students and faculty
- Seamless integration with platforms like Zoom, including the capacity to handle multiple breakout rooms
- Full support and guidance with an agile team, 24/7 help desk and Zendesk articles
The Results
Even on short timetables, UTSA’s team can rely on Verbit and its technologies to offer accommodations for high-profile events. UTSA has since been instituting Verbit’s captioning and transcription tools whenever possible and is in the process of adding additional accessibility offerings.
Reliability for high-profile university leaders
“This [event] was going to be with the chancellor of the UT System, like the highest person in a university system. How can we make sure we have good captions for that? Verbit just did an amazing job of assuring me that things were possible.”
Trusted accessibility for live events
“I was working on a conference and herding about 50 faculty to tell us what they were actually going to do during the conference and what they needed for support. Verbit was one of those things that I knew early on that we were going to set up.”
Utilizing a suite of services
“We’ve got the addendum for post-production. We’re definitely interested in using that. We’re getting that set up with our Panopto clients right now and writing Audio Description to another addendum right now.”
Enlisting a proactive approach to inclusion
“We’re trying to be proactive in the community and within the university and say, ‘Hey, have an event? Let’s just put in Verbit for you.’ We kept finding ways to ask, ‘how can we use it differently?’ We want to, if we’re not already, be using everything Verbit has to offer.”
"During the live events, obviously, you want to prioritize captions, but it was the last thing on my mind. Often, we just put the API key into the chat, and then we just start working. It was really only until maybe a week or two later, we actually started to go through the transcripts in detail and thought, ‘this is excellent. Thank God.’ We’ve actually gotten reviews about the captions. Some people commented before, ‘These are really good. These are really accurate.’ I was proud of hearing that for Verbit.”
About UTSA
University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) is a multicultural discovery enterprise institution with more than 34,000 students. It is the largest university in the San Antonio metropolitan region with four campuses across the city.