A win for Lecture Accessibility - Elias Blanch

A WIN For Elias Blanch Lecture Accessibility

Automatic Closed Captions and Live Transcripts Are Now Mandatory

In around October of 2021, the Assessment Sub Committee (ASC) started an issue register. The ASC looks over assessment policy brought to them – or raised by members – and endorses what the committee agrees on. On the issue register, I added closed captions for lectures and video course content, and members agreed that this proposal should be in policy, but that it wasn’t something they had control over. A UQ staff member helped me put together a survey that was circulated by the UQ Union to collect input on closed captions and live transcripts for course content at UQ – specifically if even inaccurate ones were wanted. With 200+ respondents it was an overwhelming yes, they were wanted even if they were inaccurate.

This dropped off my radar for a bit and I picked it back up at the start of Semester 2 this year (2022), asking how it was progressing in an ASC meeting. A few emails later, I wrote a proposal and provided it to Digital Learning Sub Committee, asking if I could attend one of their meetings and speak on it.

Quoted from my proposal:

“The reason for a policy change is the majority of teaching staff that I speak to about Student Access Plans defer to UQ’s policy, even if said policy breaches the Disability Discrimination Act. Hence – by making it policy – it ensures that students have something they can point to when their request is ignored, and it standardises the expectation that all course content videos have closed captions, without relying on the culture of a school since accessibility is often an afterthought.

The change proposed will be under “Recording of Teaching UQ” 3.20.5.1 under procedures, the bold and underlined is what is to be added:

“Under normal circumstances, recordings will be made available on the relevant course site within 48 hours of the learning event, with

automatically generated closed captions or live

transcripts enabled.

This change applies to lecture recordings and other video recordings, but not tutorial, laboratory, or practical recordings.

I chose to push for automatic closed captions and automatic live transcripts because most students, who don’t have an auditory processing or hearing related disability, are able to interpret what inaccurate automatic closed captions or live transcripts mean with the context of what they are hearing and context of the topic. For students that need accurate closed captions or live transcripts they can access an SAP [Student Access Plan].

This proposal was endorsed by Digital Learning Sub Committee, approved by Teaching and Learning Committee and Academic Board. It will be in place semester 1 2023, a small but important step to making learning at UQ accessible to all students. We still have a long way to go for accessibility at UQ, but this is a good first step.