Case Study
How the University of North Florida + Verbit Deliver Access In Numbers
In a Nutshell
“For whatever reason, even though classes have gone back to some in-person, I haven’t really slowed down the number of captioning minutes that are happening, which is great, Wendy Poag said. “I’m happy for that.”
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Summer 2019
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Summer 2021
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Fall 2021
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20% of courses were online 1,088 minutes of video captioned |
100% of courses were online due to COVID 10,000 minutes of video captioned (10x increase) |
Majority of courses were held in person 16,000 minutes of video captioned |
Get Inspired: How to Lead & Promote Access
While accessibility support often stems from OCR complaints, which many universities were hit with recently, UNF leaders are proactively building a community with ongoing training and access to Verbit as a dedicated partner. Here are some of the steps they’re taking to promote an inclusive campus environment.
- Running faculty training development on accessibility
- Hosting three different workshops each month
- Brainstorming with deans & departments for specialized training
- Launching a series of microlearning videos on how faculty can remediate content
- Posting in weekly campus newsletters & faculty updates
- Proactively reaching out to faculty to send helpful materials
- Working with nine instructional designers who are improving and designing courses through QM reviews
"The task can seem overwhelming with hundreds of thousands of pieces of content in our learning management system,” Poag said. “There’s only one of me and one program assistant in a neighboring department. It’s difficult, but Verbit certainly helped with our Deaf and hard of hearing population. The captions are wonderful for all students. Verbit makes it possible."
How Verbit Saves UNF Time
Wendy Poag,Accessibility Coordinator, Center for Instruction and Research Technology, University of North Florida |
“There’s courses that have 60, 70, 80 videos,” Poag said. “That’s something that would take me an entire term to manually caption myself. Whereas now I can spend a few days downloading, uploading, embedding, and it’s done in a matter of days as opposed to the entire term it would take the man-hours for me to do manually by correcting them.” “You know how long it takes to correct captions and go through every minute of video? If it’s a five-minute video, it’s not going to take just five minutes to caption. I cannot even begin to imagine, considering that we may put 10-15,000 minutes of captioning through Verbit. I can’t imagine how long it takes me on my own… It’s not possible to do the volume that we do if we didn’t have Verbit.” |
Additional Benefits to Deliver Access Easily
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Live solutions that make content accessible“Verbit live was great. We had previously used another provider which had its own live captioning service, but it was so very difficult. It was a crapshoot whether it might work or it might not and very unreliable. Verbit Live was 1000x better and far superior.” |
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Top accuracy to avoid manual editing“The speaker identifications are a great thing because it does alleviate all of that correction of spelling… Verbit does a great job of recognizing that. Surprisingly, Verbit without me going in and doing all that preliminary work, does a really good job of getting the spelling most of the time.” |
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24-hour turnaround and 24/7 support“Sometimes our previous service could take a week, since using Verbit we are now at 24 or less turnaround time for nearly every job… The turnaround time is way better. The price is way better. My favorite thing is the little chat bubble. Your live support is fantastic.” |
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Access to a loyal customer success manager“Our account rep is great. With our previous provider, I’m pretty sure we changed reps 1,000x in the last two years. It’s nice to have a little more continuity with Adam [of Verbit] being there month to month, and not every month getting up a new meeting request to meet your new rep. That’s wonderful.” |
An anecdote to explore the impact of delaying access to students who need it:
“Let’s just say for example, a student is in a six-week summer course. If I had to wait a week on those captions to come back, that student is a week behind in a six-week course because they are waiting on an accommodation. Having the ability to get your captions sent back sometimes the same day since Verbit is so good, or at lease within 24 hours, it’s invaluable. It’s something we weren’t getting with our other provider. Students have the right to have equal access, and when they have a week delay in a six-week course, that’s not equal access. Verbit helps us provide that. Verbit helps us strive to be better when it comes to things like that because the last thing we want for a student with a disability is yet another barrier of not having their accommodations met because a vendor is too slow,” Poag said.