RIT Beefs Up Video Captioning Service for Hard of Hearing Students

Students at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) now have access to improved course video captioning, a service that is particularly important for the students of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), one of RIT's colleges.

RIT already had CaptionSync technology from Automatic Sync Technologies (AST) in place to generate captions for its videos, but it's now integrated into the Ensemble Video platform to better meet the accessibility and learning requirements of students at RIT, according to information released by the institute.

Ensemble Video is a video content management platform that enables organizations to manage, coordinate, and syndicate their videos and images. Ensemble Video mapped its platform to the RIT workflow while incorporating the university's AST CaptionSync tools.

According to information released by the company, the new service "exceeds general accessibility standards, accommodating special requirements that boost comprehension, such as high-level font and display using specialized color, sizes, and background."

"There is no corner cutting here, and the fact that Ensemble developed the custom integration with AST and streamlined the platform to handle our high volume of captioning is a massive time saver for us," said J. Ian Webber, senior manager of Academic Technology and Media Services at RIT. "We have used AST for many years because of their high quality and speed. To have CaptionSync integrated into our system is an enormous benefit."

Rochester Institute of Technology in New York serves more than 17,600 undergraduate and graduate students, including more than 1,300 who are deaf or hard of hearing. The National Technical Institute for the Deaf is one of a dozen colleges, institutes, and centers at RIT, and is the world's first and largest technological institute for the deaf and hard of hearing.

Further information about AST CaptionSync and the Ensemble Video platform is available at the companies' sites.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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