Key Pointers from Two UK University Leaders Getting Accessibility ‘Right’

Copy link

It should come as no surprise that the topic of accessibility is growing in importance in the UK. New rules recently created stricter accessibility standards, making captions, for example, which are ‘nothing new,’ even more in demand.

However, most professionals at higher education institutions report that they often find delivering access challenging or overwhelming. Verbit gathered Maria Kaffa and Emma Guilbert, two experts from City, University of London, to offer new insights and inspire those working to improve access at UK universities.

Here are some tips to help you better support students in the UK.

1. Understand the legal component at play

The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR) created captioning requirements for British universities in 2018. The standards went into effect in September 2020 and stated that all new content had to be accessible.

“We needed to have workable solutions for making all multimedia accessible moving forward,” said Maria Kaffa, Assistant Educational Technologist, City, University of London.

As you can imagine, there was a lot of captioning for universities to prioritize. Neglecting to meet the standards isn’t an option. Addressing this need requires coordination between administrators, accessibility offices and your lecturers involved in the process. Also, the government is holding universities accountable. However, it’s often up to lecturers to take the right steps. It’s therefore important to educate your lecturers on what is needed.

Who is responsible	Who is liable
It’s often up to the lecturers to make sure course content is accessible and captioned, but many educators lack the technical know-how to take on this task.	While lecturers should be captioning their course content, it’s the universities that face consequences if they neglect the task or provide inadequate solutions. Universities need to develop a process to tackle this issue head-on.

2. Save time & resources by scaling your efforts

UK institutional leaders no longer have time or the bandwidth to remediate items or solve issues one by one. Finding ways to scale efforts when delivering access can be key to a university’s success. For example, there are several options for providing captions. For universities, the sheer volume of content that needs captions can be overwhelming.

Here are some of the ways universities are tackling their captioning efforts, some of which are better poised for scaling.

Captioning options	Benefits	Drawbacks
ASR	ASR is easy to use and comes at low or no costs	ASR, especially the free versions, often produce inaccurate and even unintelligible captions
Internal, manual captioners	Manual captioning can improve accuracy, especially if the captioner is familiar with the local accents, idioms and names	This process can be extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming
ASR with student review	This option is faster and can boost accuracy without taking as long as manually captioning content	It can be nearly impossible to have students correct captions at the scale necessary to offer this solution for all courses
Professional captioners	These captioners are fast and efficient and have methods for handling accents or niche language	This solution can be costly and not fit into the budget of many public institutions
Captioning partners like Verbit that leverage technology	Fast, cost-effective and able to scale, with methods for addressing niche language, names or accents	More costly than free ASR or student captioners

Kaffa said that when PSBAR went into effect, City’s first attempt to meet the demand was to use ASR.

“We quickly realized that the accuracy was not always at the level we had expected,” they said. To address the inaccuracies, Kaffa explained that they found “a small team of student digital assistants to help us correct captions. It was effective but not scalable at an institutional level.”

City leaders ultimately decided that the best option was to find a professional accessibility partner. Taking this path was easier, allowed for scalability and increased the chances that the institution could meet its students’ needs. Also, City’s professionals now have a proven method through Verbit to address common challenges, including hard-to-interpret niche terminology or diverse regional accents.

3. Find ways to accommodate for accents and errors

“Here in the UK, in the British Isles, we have a wealth of beautiful regional accents, but sometimes they’re not always picked up,” said Emma Guilbert, Assistant Educational Technologist, City, University of London. The university’s lecturers represent many of those accents, making it challenging to produce accurate captions. For instance, Emma said, “We have a lecturer from Belfast, in Northern Ireland, who with that accent to the word flyer is often mistaken for flower.”

Additionally, when lecturers reference local places, captioners are much more likely to misinterpret unfamiliar names or terms.

Examples of likely captioning challenges to be aware of

Challenge	Example
Accents	A lecturer with a heavy accent says “flyer” but it sounds to the captioner like “flower”
Homonyms	“overdo” as in doing too much versus “overdue” as past the due date
Names and places	“Gray’s Inn” versus “grazing” or “graze in”

City is finding ways to get accurate results, even with these challenges. One solution Verbit presents is to prepare the captioners and the AI ahead of time. City keeps lists of terms that caused issues and maintains a glossary, which it sends to Verbit in advance of sessions or events. This proactive approach helps City to improve its captioning results. As a result, it minimizes any edits or corrections that may seem trivial, but that can be tedious manual tasks to make on their team’s end.

Offering equal chances, equal opportunities & equal access

While City’s leaders spent most of their time with us deep-diving into captions, captions are just one of many accessibility solutions that UK universities need to adopt to support their students. For example, audio description, which supports students who are blind or have low vision, is another accommodation being implemented in learning environments.

Plus, aside from just the solutions and technologies themselves, UK institutions must now take a hard look at how they’re proving accessibility beyond the classroom. If we go back to the example of captions, university leaders are now extending captions outside of just lectures and educational video content. They’re implementing them to provide more equitable experiences for graduation ceremonies, orientations, guest lectures, sporting events and much more.

UK institutions are also likely to encounter situations where students may also need unique solutions that fit their individual needs and be unsure how to meet them. Verbit’s expert team members in the realm of accessibility and education are helping to support those efforts and work with institutions to determine what they need. We’re excited to see the amazing work being done to create more inclusive student experiences across the UK. Reach out to us to learn more about how we’re working with City and can assist you in your ongoing efforts.