The California State University System signed a system-wide agreement with Automatic Sync Technologies (AST) to provide transcript and captioning services for the 23 Universities. The California State University System is among the leading systems in the nation committed to and delivering accessible material to students, faculty and the community.

“It is the policy of the CSU to make information technology resources and services accessible to all CSU students, faculty, staff and the general public regardless of disability,” reads the mandate signed by Charles Reed, Chancellor of the California State University System in what is known as “Executive Order #926″. The directive supports government legislation, frequently referred to as “Section 508 and Section 504″, amendments to the Workforce Rehabilitation Act requiring that websites, programs, media and communications are accessible to people with disabilities.

To support the directive, the Chancellor’s office created and funded the Accessibility Technology Initiative (ATI), an organization whose charter is to develop guidelines, implementation strategies, tools and resources for all campuses. As part of this initiative, the ATI evaluated and selected technologies and tools to support the accessibility needs of recorded classes, events, library and instructional materials. Automatic Sync Technologies was selected to provide captioning services in support of these efforts to bring rich, accessible media to the Web. AST was funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education to research more effective ways to deliver fully-captioned media.

“Our 450,000 student population is very diverse,” said Jean Wells, ATI Office, “and by offering fully accessible media, we serve the needs of students with a wide range of abilities and disabilities. Captioning doesn’t just benefit the deaf and hard of hearing, but reinforces language skills for students whose native language is not English, those with Learning Disabilities, senior citizens, and many more.” Studies show that presenting the spoken and written words improves comprehension in students of all ages. Captioning media also serves to make the material searchable, discoverable and meaningful.

Captioning is used across the CSU system for a variety of instructional and communication purposes.

• CSU Northridge example – Teaching with Technology class: At CSU Northridge, a well-renowned center for accessible technology programs, captioning and transcriptions are used in faculty instruction as seen in this Teaching With Technology class example.
• San Jose State University example 1a – captioned recorded events: San Jose State adds captioning to their recorded events and distance learning courses.
• San Jose State University example 1b – captioned recorded events on iTunes: The recorded events are also made available to both students and the public through RSS feeds as Podcasts and as videos on iTunes U.
• San Jose State University example 2 – class transcripts on iTunes: San Jose State Physics professor Beyersdorf now allows students to download the actual transcript of the class through iTunes. Students can subscribe to the class, listen on their iPods or use the transcripts to study.
• Cal Poly San Luis Obispo example – captioned YouTube video: Cal Poly uses captioning in YouTube videos that communicate campus outreach programs.
• San Francisco State University example 1 – captioned class video: SF State has a course portal, called CourseStream, for which they offer a variety of media formats.
• San Francisco State University example 2 – captioned film archive video in DIVA: SF State also has a project archiving films made in the SF Bay Area. These archived videos are captioned and stored in the Digital Information Virtual Archive (DIVA).
• CSU East Bay example – automated caption process for Echo360 lectures: CSU East Bay is using the Echo360 lecture capture program to record their lectures though Blackboard and iTunesU as Podcasts, Vodcasts or movies. Lecture materials are sent to Automatic Sync for transcription and captioning.

AST’s CaptionSync service offers an advanced workflow to expedite the process of creating caption files for a wide variety of media types, delivered though broadcast, the web or on physical media. Although the workflow is automated, AST delivers high quality transcription using human transcription agents, not speech recognition engines.

More and more campuses are delivering captioned video distributed through portals like Blackboard, iTunes U and YouTube’s Education channel, and viewable across a wide range of platforms and devices. The CSU system continues to work with Apple and Google to make the platforms more accessible and caption friendly. With almost 30,000 videos on YouTube’s education channel and 100,000 educational materials on iTunes U, these portals offer an inexpensive way for the CSU system to provide educational materials to students in formats they prefer.