Table of contents
- Success Story: Ad Hoc to Always-On Accessibility
- UCL at a Glance
- A Partnership Driving Campus-Wide Inclusion
- Navigating the Regulatory Landscape
- Accessibility as a Culture, Not a Checklist
- Beyond Captions: The Full Accessibility Toolkit
- Why Accessible Content Is Simply Better Content
- 5 Practical Steps to Add to Your Strategy
- Building a Campus-Wide Accessibility Program
- About UCL, Verbit & Jisc
What Does Accessibility at Scale Actually Look Like?
UCL Offers One Approach
Ben Watson has a deceptively simple way of describing what he does. As Head of Digital Accessibility at University College London, one of the UK’s largest universities with over 50,000 students, he calls his job ‘putting in ramps and lifts to information.’ Behind that phrase is a mission that most higher education institutions will recognise: making digital accessibility for students and staff not a special request, but a baseline expectation.
For the past three years, UCL has been working with Verbit through a framework agreement with Jisc, the UK’s leading digital services provider for education, to bring that mission to life at institutional scale. What started as a conversation about post-production captioning has grown into a broader infrastructure supporting live lecture captions, AI-enhanced transcription, translation, and audio description.
This case study outlines UCL’s approach, key considerations for compliance and procurement, and practical lessons. Watson is now sharing his expertise and recommendations for peer institutions on what it takes to build an education accessibility strategy that sticks.
University College London: At a Glance
| Institution: | University College London (UCL) |
| Location: | London, United Kingdom |
| Size: | 50,000+ students |
| VLE: | Moodle (via Panopto for lecture capture) |
| Partnership: | Verbit solutions delivered via Jisc framework agreement |
| Regulations: | UK PSBAR; WCAG 2.2 AA; European Accessibility Act |
| Solutions: | AI-enhanced ASR captioning, human-quality reviewed captions, transcription, translation, live captions, audio description — delivered as campus-wide accessibility services via Jisc |
From Manual Workarounds to a Campus-Wide Accessibility Strategy
Before working with Verbit, UCL’s approach to captioning lecture recordings was administratively complex and hard to sustain. Postgraduate students were paid to manually edit captions and, like any manual process, it was vulnerable to the realities of a busy institution.
“We did it all by students – paying students to edit the captions or postgraduate students to edit captions. And that was really tricky administratively. People were busy or didn’t turn up. The lectures weren’t recorded effectively. There were lots of things that were really difficult to juggle, and it was almost a full-time job doing that.”
Verbit’s integration with UCL’s existing technology stack changed that. Lecture recordings captured in Panopto flow directly into the Verbit platform, processed and returned within agreed service levels with minimal manual handoffs and reduced administrative overhead. Delivered through Jisc’s procurement framework, UCL could access a consistent, scalable accessibility solution without starting from scratch.
The result is a tiered model that balances quality with scale: students who need higher levels of caption accuracy are served accordingly, while everyone else benefits from Verbit’s AI-enhanced automatic speech recognition, with the option to escalate to a higher tier of quality review at any point.
“Having that as an automated process with a system like Verbit being instantly fed to by our lecture capture solution, which is Panopto, has been extremely helpful… It’s an administrative process you do at the start of the year. You identify all of those modules that are going to get that gold standard of treatment, and then pretty much everything else can get the kind of silver medal standard of the enhanced automatic speech recognition.”
Over three years, the scope has expanded significantly. UCL now uses Verbit for an increasing number of live lectures, translation to support its international student community, and is among the first UK institutions piloting Verbit’s AI-assisted audio description, with AI and human-reviewed outputs compared side by side to understand where each delivers best.
Navigating the Regulatory Landscape
The framework across almost all international digital accessibility legislation to go by is the same: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Watson noted that while most of the international legislation uses the WCAG 2.1, WCAG 2.2 AA is the standard used in the UK. UCL operates under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR) and has contributed to the ‘accessibility passport,’ a shared procurement framework with template contract wording that any institution can adopt to hold commercial suppliers to a consistent accessibility standard.
For US institutions, ADA Title II sets clear digital accessibility standards for higher education. While institutions have been given additional time to achieve compliance, the requirements are unchanged. For institutions everywhere, the convergence of PSBAR, WCAG, the European Accessibility Act, and ADA Title II points to the same conclusion: a campus-wide infrastructure approach, supported by the right technology partner, is the most sustainable way to meet rising expectations.
Accessibility Has to Be a Culture, Not a Checklist
Compliance frameworks matter, but Watson is clear that regulation alone won’t get institutions where they need to be. The missing ingredient is culture and building it requires sustained effort across the institution.
“I love the quote: ‘Accessibility isn’t more work. The work we were doing before wasn’t finished,” Watson says.
This framing cuts to the heart of the challenge. Digital accessibility for students and staff isn’t a new requirement landed on already-stretched people. It’s the completion of work that was always owed. Watson’s team works persistently across UCL’s academic and professional services departments, embedding accessibility into procurement decisions, design templates, module validation, and staff induction.
“It’s about teaching people how to fish – finding ways for people to do what they do brilliantly, the top academics, top teaching staff, great students, great professional service staff, but in the most accessible way and building that into their workflow,” Watson continues.
Progress, not perfection, is Watson’s operating principle. Drawing a line in the sand – committing that everything created from this point forward meets accessibility standards – is a more honest and achievable ambition than trying to immediately remediate years of legacy content. With Verbit automating the delivery of captions and transcripts for new content, that line is easier to hold.
Beyond Captions: Transcription, Translation, and Audio Description
Captions and transcription are often the starting point for a higher education accessibility solution and rightly so. But Watson points to the additional value that Verbit-powered accessible content unlocks well beyond compliance.
“You have a transcript that can be searched or mined – in wider research, data mining, those sorts of things, or just findability. If somebody wants to look for every mention of a topic within an hour-long recording, they don’t want to listen to the whole thing — the dynamic transcript will allow that kind of functionality.”
Translation has become an increasingly important part of UCL’s Verbit-powered offering, serving an international student community that benefits from course content in their native language. And audio description, historically one of the hardest accessibility requirements to fulfil at scale, is now an active area of development.
Creating audio description traditionally requires scripting, voice recording, syncing, and audio mixing: potentially four separate roles for a single piece of content. Working with Verbit, UCL is among the first UK institutions piloting AI-assisted audio description, comparing AI and human-reviewed outputs side by side to understand quality and fit.
“Being able to explore ways to get audio description done at scale — and not universally; no one’s claiming every video we’ve ever done is going to have audio description — but being able to know that there is a mechanism you can use [with Verbit] to create reliable audio description that comes with its own player… that’s been really wonderful.”
UCL’s approach: start with the most-viewed content, run outputs side by side, and build capability from there. The goal isn’t perfection on day one. It’s a reliable, scalable mechanism that grows as institutional confidence and AI accuracy improve together.
Accessible Content Is Simply Better Content
One of Watson’s most consistent arguments is that the case for accessibility doesn’t need to rest on compliance alone. In over 20 years in the field, he has never encountered something designed to meet accessibility standards that wasn’t also more useful and better for everyone.
“I genuinely have never seen an example of something that was designed to be more accessible that wasn’t just better — easier to use, more usable,” he says.
Captions are the clearest illustration. A well-captioned lecture isn’t just accessible to a student who is Deaf or has hearing loss. It helps someone following in a second language, supports students with ADHD or dyslexia, lets anyone review content on a commute without headphones, and creates a searchable, summarized transcript with value far beyond the original recording.
UCL’s Verbit partnership has expanded to reflect this broader view, moving from student-centred provision to institution-wide accessibility. Open days, provost talks, and staff events now fall within scope, recognising that staff with accessibility needs and the institution’s wider audiences deserve the same quality of experience as enrolled students.
“There is an incontrovertible argument that people should just be doing this because it’s better for everyone,” he says.
Starting Your Accessibility Journey: Five Practical Steps
For leaders at institutions earlier in their accessibility journey, or those ready to raise their ambitions, Watson’s guidance is grounded in what has actually worked at UCL.
1. Start with people and culture
Awareness comes before tooling. Accessibility has to be a shared responsibility, embedded into job descriptions, inductions, and approval processes for new courses and content. When everyone understands their piece of the responsibility, the cumulative impact is transformative.
2. Draw a line in the sand on legacy content
The scale of legacy content can make accessibility feel impossible. It isn’t, but it requires prioritisation. Commit that everything created from this point forward will be accessible by design. Address legacy content in order of priority: highest-traffic first, with escalation by request. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
3. Integrate your tools and let them do the heavy lifting.
Manual processes don’t scale. Direct integrations between lecture capture platforms and an accessibility solution like Verbit remove administrative overhead, ensure consistent delivery, and free up your team to focus on strategy rather than logistics. The right connected technology stack is what makes campus-wide accessibility achievable.
4. Don’t dismiss disproportionate burden, but revisit it
The legal concept exists for genuine reasons. But the landscape has changed. AI-assisted captioning, transcription, and audio description have dramatically reduced the cost and time required to meet high accessibility standards at scale. What was once genuinely disproportionate may no longer be.
5. Build feedback loops and treat them as intelligence
Creating easy channels for students and staff to flag accessibility issues is one of the most cost-effective investments an institution can make. Watson describes it as ‘absolute dynamite’: free, real-time intelligence about where the actual barriers are.
Wider Accessibility Is Now Within Reach.
UCL’s journey illustrates what’s possible when accessibility is treated as institutional infrastructure rather than an individual accommodation. A connected, scalable technology partnership with Verbit covering captions, transcription, translation, and audio description is what enables a university of 50,000 students to move from aspiration to consistent delivery.
This model is increasingly how institutions around the world are responding to growing accessibility requirements, whether driven by PSBAR and WCAG in the UK, the European Accessibility Act, ADA Title II for US colleges and universities, or equivalent frameworks elsewhere. The underlying principle is the same: accessible digital content is a baseline expectation, not an optional enhancement.
For UK and European institutions, Verbit’s accessibility solutions are available through established procurement frameworks including Jisc, making it straightforward to get started. For US institutions navigating ADA Title II, Verbit’s Campus Complete plan offers a single, scalable subscription covering captions, transcripts, and audio description campus-wide.
Our campus-wide accessibility solution for US institutions
Verbit’s Campus Complete subscription plan delivers campus-wide captions, transcription, and audio description — built for US colleges and universities meeting ADA Title II requirements.
More Background on UCL, Verbit, and Jisc
About University College London
Founded in 1826, University College London (UCL) is one of the United Kingdom’s largest and most research-intensive universities, with over 50,000 students from more than 150 countries. UCL’s digital accessibility programme is led by Ben Watson, Head of Digital Accessibility, whose team works across the institution to ensure that all digital systems, solutions, and content meet the highest accessibility standards for students, staff, and every member of the UCL community.
About Verbit
Verbit is a leading provider of AI-powered captioning, transcription, translation, and audio description solutions, trusted by hundreds of higher education institutions globally. In the UK, Verbit’s solutions are available through a framework agreement with Jisc, enabling institutions to access best-in-class accessibility solutions through a familiar, low-friction procurement route. Verbit combines proprietary AI technology with expert quality review to deliver the accuracy, reliability, and scale that campus accessibility strategies demand.
About Jisc
Jisc is the UK’s not-for-profit digital, data, and technology agency for higher and further education and research. Jisc provides shared digital infrastructure and services, expert advice, and negotiates sector-wide agreements to help institutions get the best value from technology. Through its procurement frameworks, Jisc enables colleges, universities, and research organisations across the UK to access trusted solutions, including Verbit’s accessibility services, simply, efficiently and at scale.
