60 posts tagged with "Accessibility"

County and municipal PEG access channels sit at the center of public meeting video in Colorado. You simulcast council and board sessions to cable, your website, and YouTube. Cities and school districts ask your station for guidance on accessible broadcasts. And when budget season arrives, directors need a defensible story for how live captioning, archived captions, and audio descriptions get funded.

This guide is written for Colorado PEG and access channel directors, franchise administrators, and AV staff evaluating captioning vendors. It covers the legal landscape, how PEG funding may apply, and a practical procurement workflow that starts with measuring your gap before you commit.

CART captions in Microsoft Teams refer to professional human-powered real-time transcription displayed during a meeting, distinct from Teams' built-in automatic live captions. Teams' native "live captions" use AI speech recognition, while CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) delivers 99%+ accuracy from a trained captioner for accommodation requests, legal proceedings, and high-stakes events. Teams also exposes "caption options" settings for language, profanity filtering, and speaker attribution on its built-in captions.

You can auto-generate dual-language captions for e-learning modules by uploading your module video to a captioning platform, selecting the spoken languages (or primary plus translation language), running AI transcription, and exporting synchronized caption files in SRT or WebVTT format for your LMS or authoring tool. Recap supports dual-language content in a single file with side-by-side transcript viewing, so you do not need to re-upload separate videos for each language.

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) requires companies selling products and services in the EU market to make digital content, including video, accessible to people with disabilities. Enforcement began in June 2025 for most covered sectors. Video accessibility under the EAA aligns with EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which means prerecorded video needs captions, meaningful visual content needs audio description, and live services need real-time text alternatives where applicable.

Closed captioning is required by law in many situations, though the specific law depends on who you are and where your video is published. Public entities, federally funded organizations, broadcasters, streaming platforms, and businesses selling digital services in the EU all face captioning requirements under different frameworks. The short answer: if you publish video to the public, employees, or students, you likely need captions.

Yes. Recap can transform meeting recordings into searchable transcripts and AI-powered summaries. Upload a recording or connect Zoom, Google Meet, or your video platform, and Recap automatically generates a timestamped transcript with speaker identification, a concise summary, key topics, and action items you can search across your entire meeting library.

State government video must meet Section 508 accessibility standards when the agency is a federal agency, a state agency subject to state-level Section 508 adoption, or any entity developing ICT with federal funding. In practice, that means prerecorded video needs synchronized captions, live events need real-time captions where feasible, and meaningful visual content needs audio description, all aligned with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. These obligations apply on their own timeline and are not replaced by ADA Title II deadline extensions.

A caption file is a text document that pairs written words with specific moments in a video. Each line of text includes a start time and end time so the words appear on screen in sync with the audio. Caption files do not contain the video itself; they are uploaded alongside the video (or embedded into it) so viewers can read what is being said.

Recap Innovations is pleased to announce our new Wistia integration, bringing AI-powered captioning and audio description workflows and automated caption audits directly to the video platform marketing teams, training organizations, and institutions already rely on. Connect your Wistia account once, browse your media library inside Recap, generate audio descriptions in standard and extended modes, publish professional captions with AI, and run compliance audits across a single video, an entire folder, or your full account.

California Senate Bill 707 is the most significant update to the state's open meeting law in decades. Signed by Governor Newsom on October 3, 2025, SB 707 amends the Ralph M. Brown Act to require public agencies across California to offer hybrid meetings with two-way remote participation, activate real-time captioning on video platforms, translate meeting agendas into languages spoken by significant portions of the local population, and take concrete steps to encourage participation from underrepresented communities. The law took effect on January 1, 2026, with enhanced requirements for larger agencies kicking in on July 1, 2026.

Every summer, cities across the country host parades, fireworks shows, festivals, and outdoor ceremonies. A grandstand announcer calls out each float, marching band, and community group as they pass. But that speaker system only carries 2 to 3 blocks. Anyone watching from further down the route, sitting in a lawn chair around the corner, or standing across a noisy intersection hears nothing.

For attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, the announcer was never accessible in the first place. Recap changes that for both groups: live captions and text-to-speech voiceover turn any outdoor event into one that every attendee can follow, from anywhere, on their own phone.

Live captioning for public meetings, lectures, and broadcasts depends entirely on the speech recognition engine running behind the scenes. If that engine goes down, captions stop. For organizations with accessibility obligations under ADA Title II or WCAG 2.1 AA, an outage during a city council session or commencement ceremony is not just inconvenient; it is a compliance gap.

Recap now supports three live speech recognition providers: Deepgram, ElevenLabs, and Google. When one provider experiences errors, Recap automatically fails over to the next, keeping captions running without manual intervention.

Caption timing is one of the most tedious parts of post-production accessibility work. Editors typically guess at timestamps, play back repeatedly, and manually type corrections measured in milliseconds. Recap's new waveform timestamp editor changes that workflow entirely by making audio visible directly within the caption editor.

Speech-to-text alone does not produce professional captions. When a video shows a door slam, a siren in the distance, or background music that sets the tone, viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing miss that information unless captions describe it. Professional captioning standards treat these descriptive sound cues as essential, not optional.

Recap now adds descriptive sound cues automatically during transcription. When you upload a video or re-transcribe an existing file, you can turn this on with a single checkbox (on by default). The result is bracketed, lowercased sound descriptions inline in your captions, editable in the transcript editor, and exported in every caption format you publish.

We recently heard from an organization evaluating live captioning for a single employee who is deaf and participates in 25-30 hours of virtual meetings per week. Their primary platform is Microsoft Teams, but they also use Zoom and occasionally Webex. They had straightforward questions: What does it cost? How accurate is it? Does it work with Teams? Are transcripts available after the meeting? Is the data secure? Can we try it first?

This is one of the most common inquiries we receive, and the answers are not always easy to find from other vendors. Here is what HR, disability services, and IT teams should know when evaluating live captioning for an employee accommodation.

When public meetings are recorded and posted online, cities check the transparency box. But transparency is not the same as accessibility. A 4-hour video recording that no one watches is technically public but practically invisible. Searchable meeting transcripts change the equation entirely.

Across school districts, high school television stations, and student-run media programs, communicators are asking the same questions in public forums: How do we caption live concerts, student-led home-room broadcasts, and games and competitions when nothing is scripted? How do we keep up in post-production on the Monday after when students and advisers are already stretched thin? Is “upload to YouTube later” enough? How do real teams balance accessibility expectations against staffing?

This article answers those questions directly and explains how Recap Innovations supports each concern in one platform, from the live encoder to the archived episode on your website.

Update: HHS extended the compliance dates (May 2026)​

On May 7, 2026, HHS announced that the Office for Civil Rights issued an interim final rule extending Section 504 web, mobile app, and kiosk accessibility compliance dates by one year. Recipients with 15 or more employees must now conform by May 11, 2027 (previously May 11, 2026). Smaller recipients have until May 10, 2028 (previously May 10, 2027). See the official HHS announcement.

The sections below explain what the underlying 2024 rule requires for video and kiosks; deadline references in this article reflect the revised 2027 and 2028 dates above unless clearly marked as historical.

On May 9, 2024, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a final rule updating Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. The rule requires recipients of HHS federal funding to make their web content, mobile applications, and kiosks accessible to people with disabilities by conforming to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. After the May 2026 extension, larger recipients (15 or more employees) must comply by May 11, 2027, and smaller recipients by May 10, 2028.

The DOJ also extended ADA Title II web accessibility compliance dates by a year. Many organizations must plan for both schedules: a public entity may get extra time under Title II for some digital properties while HHS-funded programs still follow the Section 504 dates in the Update section above.

On April 20, 2026, the Department of Justice published an interim final rule extending the compliance dates for web content and mobile application accessibility under ADA Title II. The WCAG 2.1 Level AA requirements adopted in April 2024 are unchanged; only the enforcement calendar has moved.

Recap Innovations, the leading turn-key vendor for video accessibility services, is pleased to announce that we have been awarded a contract by the Wisconsin Technical Colleges Purchasing Consortium (WTCPC) to provide media captioning, transcription, and audio description services. We were awarded all six bid packages under RFB 26-006AM, making Recap Innovations a comprehensive accessibility vendor for the consortium's member institutions and their cooperative purchasing partners.