26 posts tagged with "Video Accessibility"

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.

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.

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.

A question we hear constantly from organizations managing large video libraries: "We need a way to measure the accuracy and consistency of captions across our library of training videos. They've been created by folks across the organization, so quality varies. Does anyone use a tool for this?"

The short answer: yes, and Recap has it built in. Here's how Word Error Rate tooling works and why it matters when caption quality varies across your team.

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.

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.

Starting August 17, 2026, the FCC requires manufacturers of covered apparatus and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to make closed captioning display settings "readily accessible" to individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing. The rule, codified at 47 CFR 79.103(e), defines "readily accessible" through four specific factors and applies to a broad range of devices, from televisions and set-top boxes to smartphones, tablets, and computers.

This guide covers the full scope of the requirement: what the regulation says, who must comply, what display settings must be supported, how the FCC will evaluate compliance, and what organizations that produce or distribute video content should do before the deadline.

Government entities are responsible for making their social media videos accessible under ADA Title II, even when the platform itself does not offer built-in caption support. We have added a new export option to Recap that lets you burn captions directly into the video frames, producing a file with permanently visible (open) captions that works on any platform.

The DOJ's ADA Title II final rule requires state and local government web content, including video, to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. But not every video a government entity has ever published must be made accessible by the compliance deadline. The rule defines five specific exceptions, plus additional provisions for fundamental alteration, undue burden, and minimal-impact noncompliance.

This article explains each exception, how it applies to video content, and what obligations remain even when an exception applies.

When a city posts a video to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or X, that video is government web content. Under the DOJ's ADA Title II final rule, it must meet the same WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standards as content on the city's own website. The rule does not distinguish between a formal council meeting recording embedded on a .gov site and a 30-second community event clip posted to Instagram Reels.

This article covers what the rule requires for social media video, which posts are exempt and which are not, what accessible social media video looks like in practice, and how the platform-versus-content distinction works.

Your city posts a 90-second video to Facebook announcing a new recycling program. It shows an infographic with collection schedules, a map of service zones, and text overlays with phone numbers and dates. It gets shared 400 times. It has no captions, no transcript, and no audio description. Under the DOJ's ADA Title II rule, that video is a compliance gap, and it is one that cities create dozens of times per month across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, X, and their own websites.

This article is for the city clerk, communications director, or media team member who already knows their city needs to make social media video accessible, but needs a practical solution they can present to a supervisor or budget director for final approval.

When your video content crosses into broadcast television, OTT streaming, or international distribution, caption format choices matter. SMPTE-TT and EBU-TT are two advanced XML-based caption formats derived from the W3C's Timed Text Markup Language (TTML). Both serve broadcast and professional streaming workflows but target different regional standards. This guide explains the technical differences, use cases, and compliance implications so you can select the right format for your workflow.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has adopted new rules requiring manufacturers of covered apparatus and multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to make closed captioning display settings readily accessible to individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing. These requirements implement the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA) and take effect in August 2026. If your organization produces, distributes, or displays video content, understanding these requirements now will help you plan for compliance.

Procurement officers and accessibility coordinators evaluating captioning vendors often see claims of "99% accuracy" or "WER under 1%." But caption quality involves more than word-level accuracy. Formatted Error Rate (FER) and Word Error Rate (WER) measure different aspects of caption quality. Understanding both metrics helps you specify the right quality requirements in RFPs and evaluate vendor performance. This guide explains the technical definitions, when each metric applies, and what to request from vendors.

When procurement officers and IT administrators evaluate video accessibility platforms for colleges, universities, and government agencies, single sign-on (SSO) via SAML 2.0 often appears on the requirements checklist. Institutional identity management is a security imperative: users should authenticate through the organization's identity provider (IdP) rather than managing separate credentials for each application. This guide explains why SAML SSO matters for video accessibility, what to look for in a vendor, and how Recap Innovations supports SAML SSO for higher education and government clients.

State university systems, community college consortia, and state agencies increasingly use statewide or multi-institutional contracts for video captioning and accessibility services. A single master agreement can serve dozens of campuses, streamline procurement, and deliver consistent quality at volume pricing. This guide explains how statewide captioning contracts work, what procurement officers should consider, and how Recap Innovations supports multi-institutional deployments.

Not all educational videos are the same, and the way you audio describe them should not be the same either. A screencast with code scrolling across the screen presents completely different challenges than a chemistry lab demonstration or a talking head over a slide deck. For example, typical reccomendations of describing all on-screen text don't work well when the entire screen is covered in code and rapidly shifts between opened files in an IDE. The visual information that matters, the pacing, and the level of detail required all change depending on the format.

This guide breaks down the most common educational video formats and explains what to prioritize, what you can safely omit, and whether standard or extended audio descriptions are the better fit. Whether you are producing descriptions manually or reviewing AI-generated output, these format-specific techniques from Recap Innovations will help you create descriptions that are accurate, useful, and well-timed.