Award: Bronze

Institution: Montgomery College

Title of Entry: Captioning & Accessibility

About this Entry: Montgomery College and Montgomery College Television (MCTV) are strong proponents of accessibility and have made large strides in captioning and other tools to increase accessibility collegewide. Our 3-year strategy has resulted in: a) new and updated procedures/expectations identified and created for closed and open captioning for live/pre-produced MCTV videos, on videos shown to audiences during live events, videos featured on College webpages https://www.montgomerycollege.edu/, digital signage, and live or pre-produced videos for social media. Recently, live captions are provided during Zoom video presentations and webinars, and for the first time, MC is providing closed captions on all public Board of Trustee meetings. MCTV maintains 100% closed captioning of live and pre-produced original MCTV cable television programming (nearly 200 hours/year) in the language of origin through collaboration with the College’s Office of Community Engagement. This includes English, Spanish, French, Amharic, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean. Recently, translation of English programming into the above six languages were re-shared online and on-air with open captions. MCTV is testing a process for live programs with Spanish captions as an option for shows created in English. Several videos were created featuring American Sign Language (ASL).
In addition to expanding access to videos, MC added telephone call assistance for MC staff to dial on-demand to communicate with the public in myriad languages. Also, MC added a translate function on our website to provide instant translations in top languages in our area.