What That Means in Practice
You will have to create:
• Audio descriptions for ALL pre-recorded video
• Live captions for streamed classes and events
• Captions for all pre-recorded video
• Transcripts for audio-only content
• Accessible navigation and design across your digital ecosystem
These requirements apply to public-facing pages and behind-login course content, including materials delivered through vendors.
What Are Audio Descriptions? (the most time consuming part)
Most folks know captions. Audio descriptions ARE NOT CAPTIONS, they are an extra narration track that describes important visual information—actions, on-screen text, charts, scene changes—so blind/low-vision viewers don’t miss meaning.
Here’s a great example using the movie Frozen to illustrate what audio descriptions are.
For an education sample, consider this:
Without audio descriptions: an instructor pauses on a chart and lets students look.
With audio descriptions, somebody has to say: “Bar chart shows graduation rates increasing from 2018 to 2024.”
Think of it this way: captions make audio visible; audio descriptions make visuals audible. Say that ten times fast.
This Will Be Hard
Audio descriptions are time consuming and expensive to create and video is becoming more prevalent everywhere. This is especially problematic in areas that Harmonize controls because we handle all of the student and instructor generated video inside the LMS as part of our collaboration tool. With the constant pressure of ai written content, more instructors are turning to video as an assessment mechanism and are trying to support UDL principles as well. With already overworked instructors, we expect compliance on this to be low or non-existent.
We’ll cover what our plan is below to take care of this piece for you.
Why This Matters Now
Accessibility is important but it’s always a long process. We doubt that the Department of Education will have the staff to proactively guide or nudge every institution toward compliance as has happened in the past. In the past, as long as you were working on progress, the Department of Ed was pretty forgiving.
In this new vacuum, our concern is that lawsuits will become the primary enforcement mechanism, catching campuses flat-footed and causing expensive legal fees. In the most expensive case, lawyers are gathering together lawsuits now to be filed on April 24th. This is pure conjecture of course, but illustrates the threat. Remember that audio captions didn’t become real until several large lawsuits were filed which made institutions take notice.
The Cost Question (and what we’re doing)
Professional audio description can run anywhere from $4–$8+ per minute of video, depending on turnaround time, quality level, and whether extended description is needed. That adds up quickly at scale. 3 Play Media is one of the big players in this space for per-minute charges. We’ve heard that Kaltura, Panopto and YuJa are adding an AI toolset to help institutions with audio descriptions. We haven’t heard anything about prices of those (hit us up if you want to tell us what those cost increases will be!).
If you’re using Harmonize, we’re working on using AI to generate the audio descriptions for you at a fraction of those costs. We’ll share pricing details as soon as they’re finalized. I can say that they won’t be anywhere near those per-minute costs listed above as that feels usurious since AI can do a lot of the lifting for us now.
We’re not currently intending to handle your non-LMS content for you as that’s outside of our core competence.
Next Steps: Get Educated and Spread the Word
In my survey of customers, very few people have a practical plan to achieve this. We need to raise awareness of what this is and that schools need to budget for solutions asap. So share this blog and educate everyone so we can get ahead of this!
Thanks for Listening!
Marcus Popetz
CEO/Founder
