Customer Spotlight
The Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art relies on Verbit to provide accessibility for large-scale events, talks and virtual art shows, with accurate captions and transcription playing a key role in their inclusivity efforts.
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 accessible to a worldwide audience. Verbit’s captioning and transcription are also used to make graduating students’ virtual art shows and courses fully accessible to international students and the general public. The RCA’s shows can garner 500 to 900 diverse viewers, so Verbit’s guaranteed accuracy and human touch have been key to the success of their inclusion efforts.
"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.”
The Challenge
The Royal College of Art needed a reliable solution to make hundreds of annual virtual events and talks 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 clear process for captioning
The Solution
Verbit’s team quickly onboarded The RCA and equipped the school with an automated process to handle transcription and captioning of its live, virtual events and classes seamlessly. It’s allowing all The RCA video to be fully accessible to international audiences and students with dyslexia, hearing loss and other disabilities. Verbit’s accuracy, technology and professional human editing have been critical to The RCA leaders to ensure the hundreds of viewers consuming its content are offered the best possible experience, especially while remote.
The Results
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.”
Meeting accessibility needs
“We have a large number of users with additional learning needs. We have a number of students with loss of hearing enrolled in 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.”
"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 make that a lot more accessible to them, especially where English is a second language.”
About The Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art is the world’s most influential postgraduate institution of art and design with three campuses in London. It offers postgraduate degrees in art and design to students from over 60 countries.