[Athen] Question about Chafee Amendment and Captioning

[Doug Hayman]

Emma,

Here at the University of Washington we have a bit more leeway than that in
regards to captions.

If a student has an accommodation that would include providing closed
captions for instructional content, then Disability Resources for Students
(for matriculated students) or DSO, for non-matriculated students, would
pay to have the captions created and do those in a timely manner to make
the playing field even.  If those videos were hosted on YouTube and now had
high-quality closed captions integrated with the content, then anyone could
view them with greater accessibility.

Additionally, with Accessible Technology Services, we provide a service to
create captions not covered by the above two groups to encourage closed
captions as a best practice where the content will be reused and/or get
viewed by many.

For content created and owned by internal players we can reach out to
YouTube channel owners and help them make their content more accessible.

It gets a bit more tricky when instructors point at content created and
owned by others external to our institution.  While they could request that
that external YouTube channel owner toggle on the ability to contribute
captions, or offer them the .srt caption file, they can't make them
integrate them with their videos.  A few major caption creation firms offer
up the ability to play those videos with a "skin" that streams that content
while integrating captions.

I've suggested to a few of those top caption firms having a dialogue with
YouTube or Vimeo to feature request something akin to external viewers
being able to offer-up/add professional captions at no cost to the channel
owner.  They argue oddly that they don't want to mess with the "artistic
integrity" of the channel owner.  The default is bad auto-generated
captions, or paying to caption your own videos.  I can't see where a third
choice to approve professional quality captions for free would offend many
channel owners.

Doug Hayman <dhayman at u <dhayman at u.washington.edu>w.edu>
Senior Computer Specialist
DO-IT Program (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, Technology)
UW Technology Services
Box 354842
Seattle, WA 98195
(206) 221-4165
http://www.washington.edu/doit

On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 2:52 PM Emma Steincross <ecsteincross111 at stkate.edu>
wrote:


> Hello,

>

> Our institution has some faculty, staff, and students who utilize ASL

> Interpreting and captioning for videos. Our Interpreter Coordinator said

> that her contact in Academic Technology has told her, the interpreters, and

> the faculty that videos he captions can only be made available to the

> specific student with a disability who requires them, that these "captioned

> videos can't be shown in-class because of the Chafee Amendment".

>

> This has caused some confusion for our office and our UDL mindset. Why

> would an accessible version of a video be limited to only one student,

> instead of the faculty member being able to use this version for all

> students? Can faculty members not request captioned versions of videos to

> show their classes in-general? What if there were students in that class

> with disabilities who have either not yet registered with our office, or

> students for whom English is not their first language, who would also

> benefit for captions? What if this student with a disability doesn't have a

> laptop, so they can't view the captioned version anyway because it won't be

> shown in class?

>

> Sorry for the somewhat-hypothetical, but still relevant, questions. I just

> haven't come across this before and don't know enough about the background

> or this amendment to be able to have helpful contributions. Any help is

> much appreciated!

>

> Thanks,

> Emma

>

> Emma Steincross, M.A.

> Access Consultant, Disability Resources

> O'Neill Center | St. Catherine University

> Phone: 651-690-6706

> Pronouns <https://www.mypronouns.org/>: she, her, hers

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-- 
Doug Hayman <dhayman at u <dhayman at u.washington.edu>w.edu>
Senior Computer Specialist
DO-IT Program (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, Technology)
UW Technology Services
Box 354842
Seattle, WA 98195
(206) 221-4165
http://www.washington.edu/doit
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