University of Texas at San Antonio
University of Texas at San Antonio is partnering with Verbit as it embarks on its journey to make its live events more 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, which Verbit provides, have been critical.
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, this team needed accessibility guidance and an agile partner to offer them with peace of mind so they could focus on other conference matters. With more events being hosted virtually and to account for the varying needs of different viewers and participants, UTSA leaders needed to enlist a partner they could rely on regularly.
“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.”
Full support and guidance with an agile team, 24/7 help desk and Zendesk articles
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
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 in 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.”
– A. Rey Villanueva, M.A., Teaching and Learning Consultant, Teaching and Learning Services, University of Texas at San Antonio
