In an effort to meet ADA Title II accessibility requirements, Seattle-based King County TV has adopted an automated audio description workflow for its council and committee meeting coverage. The government TV station is using MediaScribe Narrate, an audio description tool for pre-recorded and on-demand video from Tightrope Media Systems.
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Produced by a small AV and communications team, up to six council and committee meetings are covered each week by King County TV. As the team worked through the steps of bringing its government meeting video into compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines, it faced the challenge of how to avoid adding a labor-intensive accessibility workflow to an already full production schedule for their small team.
Three things about MediaScribe stood out to the team. It runs entirely in the cloud, so adding audio description didn't mean installing any additional hardware. It holds up against multi-hour meeting files, not just short clips. And it leaves the station with an editable, human reviewable output rather than a finished, unchangeable track.
MediaScribe also integrates directly with the Cablecast Automation environment King County TV already uses to publish its meeting video, so audio description became a small step inside an existing workflow rather than a separate system to manage.
"The integration with Cablecast is really good," said Brian Starr, AV technology manager for King County TV. "Once it's done and we publish it, it goes to the web. It's pretty seamless."
Not every station facing the same requirement has reached for automation. Starr said colleagues at other stations have told him they plan to have staff describe meetings themselves rather than adopt a dedicated tool. King County TV took a partial run at that path too, building accessible PowerPoint templates, adapted from the University of Washington's accessibility resources, so meeting slides carry their own accessible text for screen readers. That solved part of the problem, but not the volume of a 10-12 hour meeting week.
"Describing hours of meeting content well takes real storytelling skill, and staff reports aren't exactly built for that," Starr said. "Automating it means we get consistent audio description without asking our team to become professional narrators on top of everything else."
MediaScribe takes on the majority of the cognitive load for small teams by doing the work of detecting gaps, analyzing the video, and filing them with right-sized descriptions that staff can review, easily correct if needed, and publish. MediaScribe is tuned to recognize common events in a government meeting, adding extra efficiency for teams reviewing very long recordings.
"Our video-on-demand page is live and accessible before other public channels even have the meeting posted," Starr said. "When residents or staff ask where to find a meeting, we send them our link, because it's WCAG compliant and available right away."
