In late 2020, UC San Diego's service desk received a ticket from a concerned professor indicating that a machine captioning system had incorrectly transcribed multiple instances of profanity or offensive words from a Zoom-based lecture. What began as a technical investigation quickly turned into a broader discussion of censorship, academic freedom, and the ultimate impracticality of educational institutions being able to meet basic accessibility standards for multimedia. In this talk we'll discuss this and other similar incidents at UC San Diego, offer ideas for how schools can realistically approach meeting WCAG AA accessibility standards, and invite participants to provide solutions of their own.
By the end of this session, you should be able to:
- Identify challenges higher institutions encounter with meeting multimedia accessibility standards
- Summarize how Zoom and Kaltura's profanity filters work
- Explain how profanity filtering and academic freedom are at odds
- Devise possible solutions for higher education institutions meeting WCAG AA accessibility standards
