Repost: USM Accessibility in Action - February 2026 Issue
February 2026 Issue
Brought to you by the USM Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation and the
USM Digital Accessibility Work Group
Multimedia Accessibility At-a-Glance
Multimedia accessibility ensures that all learners can engage with video and audio content through captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions, creating an inclusive environment for students with sensory disabilities and those learning in noisy, distracting, or low-bandwidth environments.
What's Inside
Multimedia accessibility removes sensory barriers that prevent students, faculty, staff, and community members who are Deaf, Hard of Hearing, blind, or have low vision from fully engaging with video and audio content. Captions ensure that spoken information is accessible to people who cannot hear it, while audio descriptions make visual demonstrations, on-screen text, and non-verbal cues accessible to people who cannot see them. Transcripts provide an alternative format that benefits everyone, allowing users to search for specific content, review material at their own pace, or access information in low-bandwidth situations.
Beyond addressing sensory disabilities, multimedia accessibility supports Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles that benefit all students. Non-native English speakers can follow along more easily with captions, students in noisy environments (like commuter trains or shared living spaces) can engage with content without audio, and students with attention or cognitive processing differences can pause and review transcripts to reinforce understanding. When you make multimedia content accessible, you create a more inclusive and effective learning environment for all users.
Navigating the requirements for video and audio content doesn't have to be overwhelming. Our Multimedia Accessibility Quick Fix Guide uses a simple decision tree to help you identify exactly what your multimedia content needs, whether it's captions, transcripts, audio descriptions, or a combination of those, and provides step-by-step instructions for the free tools that can get the job done efficiently.
You don't need to be a video editing expert to make your multimedia content accessible. However, it's important to understand that AI-based auto-generated captions provided by popular platforms like Zoom, Panopto, YouTube, and Vimeo do not, by themselves, meet WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards for accuracy. WCAG requires captions to be "fully accurate" so that Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing viewers have an equivalent experience. Because AI often struggles with technical jargon, proper nouns, and diverse accents, these auto-generated captions are only a starting point for meeting accessibility standards. You must edit your captions before distributing your multimedia content. Focusing on "easy wins" can significantly reduce the time you spend on remediation while maximizing the impact for users.
Tips for Improving Caption Accuracy from the Start
Work from a Script: The easiest way to ensure accuracy is to prepare a script beforehand and stick to it during recording. If you upload your script to platforms like YouTube as a transcript file, the AI can sync your exact words to the audio, giving you near-perfect accuracy with minimal manual editing.
Better Audio Input: AI accuracy improves significantly with clear audio. Use an external microphone and intentionally enunciate complex vocabulary, technical terms, and proper nouns to reduce the number of errors the AI makes.
Speak Clearly and Pause: When recording, speak at a moderate pace and pause briefly between major ideas or sections to help the AI segment your speech more accurately.
Pre-Record Key Terms: At the beginning of your recording (which you can edit out later), slowly and clearly say any technical terms, names, or jargon you'll be using. Some AI systems learn from context within the same recording, improving accuracy for those terms throughout.
Where to Find Your Caption Editors
Once you've used our Quick Fix Guide to determine what you need to remediate, here's where to access the editing tools in popular platforms:
Zoom:
Settings > Recording > Advanced > Enable "Audio Transcript." After recording, access and edit captions: Recordings & Transcripts > Play Video (captions appear on side panel) > use the edit pencil icon to edit and save, which automatically saves to your transcript file.
Panopto:
Upload or record your video > Captions > Request Automatic Captions. After recording, edit directly in Panopto's caption editor: Open video > Open in Editor > Captions > Type directly into text boxes > Apply to save and update transcript
YouTube:
YouTube Studio > Subtitles > Select your video > Auto-generated > Click "Edit" to open the caption editor
Easy Wins for Editing Captions & Transcripts
When you access your platform's caption editor, the editing process is straightforward; most platforms allow you to click directly on text to make corrections, with changes saving automatically. Here are a few strategies to save you the most time:
The "Find and Replace" Strategy: Use the "Find and Replace" function to instantly fix recurring technical jargon, discipline-specific terms, or name misspellings across your entire transcript. Instead of correcting "poly merase" 15 times manually, fix it once and apply it everywhere.
Clean Captions for Cognitive Load: For non-native speakers and students with cognitive processing differences, an easy win is removing excessive filler words (e.g., um, uh, you know) from your captions. This creates a cleaner, more readable experience without losing the authentic tone of your lecture. This approach, called "clean verbatim," is the standard for educational captions and fully complies with WCAG requirements, which focus on substantive accuracy rather than preserving every utterance.
The Accuracy Standard: Aim for 99% accuracy to meet compliance standards for quality multimedia content!
Featured Tools
Audio Description: If you use YouTube videos in your course, YouDescribe is a free web-based tool that allows you to add audio descriptions to existing videos without re-editing the original file. Simply record your voice describing the visual content during natural pauses, and YouDescribe syncs it with the video timeline. This is perfect for making demonstrations, experiments, or visual lectures accessible to students with visual impairments.
Captions and Audio Description: CADET (Caption and Description Editing Tool) is a free, downloadable tool from GBH (formerly WGBH, Boston-based public broadcasting organization) that allows you to create high-quality captions and audio descriptions on your local computer. Great for offline work or sensitive content.
To truly understand the necessity of accessible multimedia, we must look beyond the technical requirements and see how these features function in practice. The following videos demonstrate why accuracy and description are vital for an equitable learning experience. First, a video from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights illustrates why relying solely on auto-captions is insufficient, showcasing several "auto-caption fails" that can lead to significant misunderstandings of educational content. Second, the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) video highlights the critical role of audio description for users who are blind or have low vision. While their examples draw from television and film, the lesson translates directly to our academic environment: whether you are demonstrating a lab experiment or presenting complex charts and graphs on a slide, providing audio descriptions ensures that all users can fully access and understand the visual components of your instruction.
Our Digital Accessibility Spring Cleaning event on January 8-9, 2026, marked a major milestone in our system-wide effort toward inclusive excellence. The response was overwhelming, with more than 1,500 faculty and staff registering for our virtual sessions and many more joining local activities hosted across our campuses. This incredible turnout underscores a shared commitment across the system to ensure our digital course materials are accessible to every student ahead of the 2026 deadline.
The two-day event kicked off with inspiring remarks from faculty and staff leadership, followed by a series of practical, hands-on sessions. Participants tackled everything from "low-hanging fruit" accessibility fixes to complex remediation in STEM, Art, and Music. Beyond the numbers, the event fostered a true sense of community; through our interactions with participants, we've seen hundreds of documents improved and a significant boost in faculty and staff confidence. This collective effort has turned a daunting task into a celebrated success, setting up a strong foundation for our ongoing accessibility work moving forward.
Find your top 5 documents with multimedia content and apply our Quick Fix Guide to add edited captions, provide an accompanying transcript, and/or add audio descriptions.
We want to celebrate the accessibility work happening across the USM! Whether you've made an accessibility improvement yourself or witnessed a colleague's great work, we want to hear about it. Share your own win or nominate someone else whose accessibility efforts deserve recognition. We'll feature selected stories on the USM Digital Accessibility Hub and on LinkedIn to highlight the excellent work happening across the System.
Share or Nominate an Accessibility Win
As part of the USM's accessibility support, the Kirwin Center for Academic Innovation is offering monthly remediation sprints for faculty and staff across the state of Maryland. These sprints will focus on one of the Six Essential Steps each month. The Zoom remediation sprints will include a few minutes of overview content and then active work time for you to remediate your own documents and ask any questions you may have. You can register for each sprint using the links below.
Monday, February 9, 2-3 pm: Multimedia Sprint, Register for the Sprint
Monday, March 9, 2-3 pm: Sprint to Finish, Register for the Sprint
This document is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0] International license. Users are welcome to distribute, adapt, remix, and build upon the material in any medium or format provided they give attribution to the USM Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Per the Creative Commons stipulations, users may provide this information in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the Kirwan Center, as licensor, endorses them or their use. Users must also abide by the following stipulations: They must not use the material for
commercial purposes, and if they remix, transform, or build upon the material, they must distribute their contributions under the same CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. This license does not extend to materials that are linked to this document.
Our mailing address is:
University System of Maryland, 3300 Metzerott Road, Adelphi, MD 20783
Repost from the USM Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation:
Dear Colleagues,
The USM Digital Accessibility Spring Cleaning is almost here! Join us Thursday, January 8, and Friday, January 9, to make your digital content accessible.
Let's take some time to assess and remediate your course materials and workplace documents. Whether you're a faculty member preparing courses or a staff member managing shared resources, Spring Cleaning offers the perfect opportunity to ensure your digital content is accessible to everyone.
What We're Offering:
- System-wide webinars via Zoom—open to all Maryland faculty and staff
- Campus-specific workshops tailored to your institution's tools
- Drop-in office hours for personalized support both days
- Self-paced resources available anytime
- Celebration session to share successes and stay motivated
System-wide Events Schedule:
Thursday, January 8
10:00-10:45 AM ET: Let's Get Cleaning! (Welcome & Overview) | Register
11:00 AM-12:00 PM ET: Digital Accessibility 101 | Register
11:00 AM-2:00 PM ET: Drop-In Zoom Office Hours (no registration required) | Join Here
3:00-4:00 PM ET: Digital Accessibility in STEM: Practical Fixes for Spring | Register
3:00-4:00 PM ET: Digital Accessibility in Arts & Music: Practical Fixes for Spring | Register
4:15-5:00 PM ET: Rethinking PDFs: The Accessibility Shortcut You Need | Register
Friday, January 9
9:00-10:00 AM ET: Accessibility Audit & Action Planning | Register
10:30-11:30 AM ET: Document Remediation Lab | Register
12:00-1:30 PM ET: Sparkle On: Celebrating Our Wins & Next Steps | Register
1:30-3:30 PM ET: Drop-In Zoom Office Hours (no registration required) | Join Here
Plus: Campus-specific virtual and in-person workshops—View the complete schedule with campus events.
Can't Attend Live?
Access our self-paced Spring Cleaning guide with step-by-step resources for remediating your content on your own timeline.
Beyond Course Content:
This event isn't just for course materials! Whether you're in an academic department, student affairs, admin and finance, a student organization, or another part of campus, you can apply accessibility principles to presentations, shared drives, templates, reports, and any other digital materials you create or share.
Let's work together to create a more accessible university system—one document, one slide, one course at a time.
Questions? Contact cai@usmd.edu
Brought to you by:
USM Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation (KCAI) | USM Council for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL) | USM Digital Accessibility Work Group (DAWG)
We look forward to engaging with you at Spring Cleaning!
Dear UMBC Community,
As we continue to rely on digital platforms for teaching, learning, and administrative functions, digital accessibility has been a core component of that commitment. UMBC has been dedicated to making our information technology and digital content accessible so that everyone has the opportunity to make use of the university's knowledge, ideas, and resources.
We are updating and expanding our digital accessibility initiatives to meet new federal requirements. On April 24, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) finalized a new rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), defining clear technical standards for digital accessibility to follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level A (minimum) and Level AA (enhanced) for images, sound, video, documents, and text. As content for courses, research, and the public is constantly created, this will be an ongoing effort requiring everyone to do their part for the benefit of others.
To support this ongoing effort, UMBC has launched the Digital Accessibility Steering Committee (DASC) led by vice presidents Tanyka Barber and Jack Suess. This group is charged with developing, tracking, and evolving our compliance efforts by focusing our resources on the efforts that can achieve the greatest impact.
The DASC has started meeting and will begin reaching out to campus departments and constituencies to communicate and seek feedback on our plans and efforts that are underway. This work affirms our university's deep and ongoing commitment to creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community for all our members. Together, we can use this effort to create a more accessible digital environment that truly works for all members of our community.
Additional digital accessibility information and resources are available on both the UMBC Digital Accessibility website and the USM Digital Accessibility website.
Sincerely,
Manfred H. M. van Dulmen
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
Tanyka M. Barber
Vice President for Institutional Equity and Chief Diversity Officer
Jack Suess
Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer
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Dear UMBC Community, As we continue to rely on digital platforms for teaching, learning, and administrative functions, digital accessibility has been a core component of that commitment. UMBC has...
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Alternative Formats: Empower Student Choice with Anthology Ally and Connect Formats to Learning Needs
Three ways to leverage Ally’s alt formats for all learners
In today's diverse college classrooms, providing students with options for how they engage with course materials is not just a convenience - it's a critical component of effective teaching. By proactively incorporating alternative formats that support diverse learning needs, we can create a more inclusive environment that fosters success for all students.
Leverage Ally's Alternative Formats
An effective tool for utilizing alternative formats is Anthology Ally, available in Blackboard, which automatically transforms course content into a variety of accessible formats. By using Ally, instructors can provide students with the power to choose the format that best suits their learning style, device, or situation.
Ally can generate alternative versions of PDFs, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files, and even content created within the learning management system's editor. These alternative formats include:
- Audio (MP3): Great for students who learn best by listening, or those who want to review content while commuting or performing other tasks.
- Mobile-Friendly HTML and ePub: Perfect for students accessing content on a smartphone or tablet, as the text adapts to the screen size, eliminating the need to zoom in and out.
- Immersive Reader and BeeLine Reader: These formats use features like color gradients and improved spacing to enhance focus and readability, which can be a game-changer for students with dyslexia, have other reading-related challenges, or want to reduce eye fatigue.
Three Ways to Integrate Ally into Your Course
1. Let Students Know This Option Exists
Many students are unaware of the alternative formats available to them. Make it a point to highlight this feature early and often.
- Syllabus Statement: Include a brief section in your syllabus explaining what Ally is and how to access its features. Include a tutorial video or student guide.
- Course Announcement: Post an announcement at the beginning of the term and periodically remind students about the options, especially before heavy reading weeks.
- Point it Out: When uploading files, make a note in the description to draw attention to the Ally "A" icon, helping students make a visual connection to the tool.
2. Connect Formats to Learning Needs
In addition to pointing out Ally to your students, explain how different formats can support different learning styles. For example, suggest the audio format for auditory learners or highlight the HTML version for students who prefer to read on their phone. This helps students recognize how these options can benefit their preferred learning styles.
3. Encourage Students to Choose for Their Situation
Frame alternative formats as a flexible tool for everyone, not just for those with official accommodations. A student might choose to listen to an audio file while preparing dinner, or they might prefer a mobile-friendly version for reading on the bus. This approach helps destigmatize the use of accessibility features and reinforces the idea that learning is not a one-size-fits-all process.
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In today's diverse college classrooms, providing students with options for how they engage with course materials is not just a convenience - it's a critical component of effective teaching. By...
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August Ultra update delivers smarter image descriptions, captioned video announcements, and table of contents for learning modules
Get back-to-school ready with new Ultra design features
This month’s Ultra update makes it easier than to generate meaningful descriptions for complex images. August also brings new tools for recording video announcements, styling course materials, and helping students stay organized with improved module navigation.
The newest enhancement to Ally’s AI-powered Alt Text Assistant brings advanced support for describing complex images -- including charts, diagrams, graphs, and even handwritten notes. Instructors can continue using the same one-click workflow to generate alt text for images embedded in Blackboard-created content. This upgrade is especially valuable for STEM, social science, or data-rich courses where traditional alt text tools fall short, helping faculty meet accessibility standards while saving time and improving the learning experience for all students.
Image 1. Instructors can generate descriptions for complex images using Ally's AI Alt Text Assistant.
With the new video announcement feature, instructors can record short videos (up to 5 minutes) directly into course announcements. Each video includes automatic captions and transcripts, ensuring compliance with accessibility standards while offering a more personal and engaging way to communicate with students. Whether you’re introducing a new unit, clarifying expectations, or just adding a human touch, video announcements help strengthen instructor presence and build rapport, especially in fully online or asynchronous courses.
Image 2: The announcement screen where instructors can record or upload video and audio.
The redesigned Learning Module Table of Contents introduces a collapsible sidebar that helps students orient themselves, track their progress, and move through content more efficiently. Students can check off items as they complete them and choose to navigate via the sidebar or previous/next buttons. Assessments now open in a full panel, creating a more consistent and less fragmented experience. This streamlined structure helps reduce cognitive load, supports self-regulated learning, and improves the overall usability of content-heavy modules.
Image 3. Learning Modules now contain a Table of Contents panel to orient students within Learning Modules for their courses.
Instructors can now apply content styling to blocks within Ultra Documents, adding visual structure and emphasis to text with just a few clicks. Style options like “question,” “tip,” “key points,” “next steps,” and “highlight” feature icons and color coding to distinguish them from standard content. These simple formatting tools help draw attention to important information, scaffold learning more clearly, and make your content more engaging for students. Update Aug 8: This feature is postponed to September.
Image 4. Instructors can select styling options from a dropdown menu that appears in Edit mode on all block types.
Finally, instructors can select and copy individual LTI tool links. Some tools may function immediately after copying, while others might require manual relinking or configuration to work properly in the new course.
To learn more about these updates, and more, please join our What's New in Ultra for Teaching & Learning session on August 14.
When you can expect the update
Faculty should see the latest updates in their Ultra courses around August 7-8 2025. UPDATE: The release will be installed around August 19-20. The next update to our Ultra test environment will take place on August 12, 2025; release notes are posted to the What's New in Ultra that same week. Faculty who are interested in test driving new features before they are released to production should open an RT ticket to request early access. Please watch the FAQs, including the What's New with Ultra page, and myUMBC for additional information about Ultra.
Connect with Instructional Technology
As always, if you have any questions about teaching, learning, and technology at UMBC, please consider the following options:
Thumbnail-image: New to Ultra [decorative]
