OSU becomes leader in providing video accessibility

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Oklahoma State University is now one of the first universities in the world to fully automate captions on all of its lecture videos. OSU this month successfully integrated its automated Docsoft caption server to work with the universities’ VBrick video capture and internet distribution system.

Oklahoma law requires every state agency to caption all videos. OSU now can automatically record and caption all lectures, with no expensive and time-consuming manual labor involved.

“Avoiding manual processes allows us to provide better service and address today’s budget challenges,” said Wade Price, manager of instructional technology. “ Now that the process is automated, the technology does the work at a fraction of the time and cost. Through automation, we have accomplished the impossible.”

Price says the new system is improving OSU’s ability to serve the hearing impaired. He hopes YouTube and other major Internet video sites will look at what is being done and improve the accessibility of their videos.