ERIK DUCKER: Thank you for joining today's sessions, Building a Budget for Video Compliance, with the University of Florida. My name is Erik Ducker. You might have seen me from other webinars, especially part of this series of Countdown to Compliance. I use he/him pronouns, and I will be taking a different role today, which is moderating today's webinar, which is new for me. So bear with me if I make any mistakes.
With that taken care of, I'd like to welcome today's speaker, Brian Smith. He comes from University of Florida, a long-time partner with 3Play Media. And we're excited to have you here with us today. So before we dive in about the topic at hand, let's set some context. Can you share a bit about your role at UF and how video accessibility fits into your team's responsibility?
BRIAN SMITH: Sure. Thank you, Erik. And thank you, 3Play Media for having me here. Like Erik said, I'm Brian Smith from the University of Florida. My pronouns are he/him. I have been the manager for Video and Collaboration Services with UFIT for 10 years now. I have worked for the team for going on 25 years, starting as a student. So I have seen many evolutions of video, online streaming, management, accessibility concerns, and all it entails.
My group specifically oversees the Mediasite video management platform at UF. We conduct live streaming and hybrid events across campus. And as far as accessibility, that became a larger role for our team a couple years ago. And we support the captioning of videos within the Mediasite platform. We partner with other faculty and departments across campus to make sure that all video content within Mediasite meets ADA Title II compliance.
ERIK DUCKER: OK, so that sounds like a lot of UF video. Can you walk us through maybe just a step back of, what is the University's overall strategy for budgeting and allocating budget across the various campuses that UF oversees? Is it centralized, decentralized, or a mix of both?
BRIAN SMITH: Sure. UF uses a hybrid model. We provide centralized captioning solutions for all content maintained within Mediasite. So the central UFIT budget, UF budget, covers content in Mediasite. Some individual colleges and units still maintain their own video accessibility budgets, either within Mediasite or using other platforms. Within Mediasite, they may have their own decentralized budget if they want to have faster turnaround times or higher accuracy, always human-edited content, and stuff like that. So yeah, it's definitely a hybrid between centralized and decentralized at UF.
ERIK DUCKER: OK. I'll put a pin in my budget questions for a second around the exchange of cash per se. So obviously, we're here today to talk a little bit about the budget in context of ADA Title II compliance. We started talking almost a year ago around this challenge that you guys had. When you first started, what were some of the biggest questions or uncertainties that you had around budgeting for this challenge?
BRIAN SMITH: Well, early on, the biggest unknown we had was the volume of content that we had to caption. How much legacy video content existed, and how much new content would be produced each year? At this time last year, when we were making our evaluations, we had over 11 million minutes of content stored on Mediasite. And we knew we had to eliminate or archive millions of those minutes before we could even determine what our budget needs were at that point. So that was the biggest thing we did early on, was evaluate how much content we had and predict how much we had to produce in the future.
ERIK DUCKER: So that's really helpful of the volume of the existing. What about, how did you prioritize what needed to be archived? What were you focused on?
BRIAN SMITH: Well, we began with an entire platform-level audit of Mediasite, using the metadata that the platform provides, like viewership, view history, and age of videos. We already had an established content retention policy, but it had only loosely been enforced. So any content that was older than two years that hadn't been viewed in the past year was eligible to be archived, and under our content retention policy, should have been archived.
But there was always various hurdles to accomplishing that. For instance, various colleges and units had their own retention needs that didn't fit within the tight scope that we had. Like, the College of Medicine, for instance, they may need to maintain videos for at least four years for the entire length of a certain cohort. So that's really where we prioritized the beginning of this process. Go ahead.
ERIK DUCKER: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Obviously, the backlog was very large. And there's your pre-established retention policies. Has that transformed nowadays, now that you're producing all this new content? Do any of those things change? Or how are you viewing the difference between what you guys did at the back-- what you're doing with backlog and what you're doing with go-forward captions? Tomorrow's lecture, what's happening tomorrow versus what happened two years ago?
BRIAN SMITH: Right. So anything that's produced from here on forward is going to have captions. So that's just part of the strategy. Any new content is going to get captioned. So it really came down to getting us to a point where we had only the content online that is new enough or will be used in the future.
ERIK DUCKER: That makes sense. So going off that, with the future video production, a little bit more ambiguous in terms of how much you're going to have, what were some of the tactics that you used to predict how much content you're going to be looking at in the future?
BRIAN SMITH: We reviewed the historical data over just the past three years. Going too far back beyond that, we started to hit the COVID skewed numbers. And we actually saw a rather consistent amount of content being produced each year, ranging from about 1.2 to 1.4 million minutes of new content each year. So based on that, we were able to fairly-- hopefully accurately-- estimate the future content being produced this year with a little bit of overhead added on.
ERIK DUCKER: Over the last three years, I'm just curious, did you guys see a trend line of any growth in content? Or was it really at this point, you can't tell.
BRIAN SMITH: It was a very shallow increase. But yeah, I mean, it was rather consistent. But there was a slight increase year over the year.
ERIK DUCKER: And then thinking about the-- I'm sorry. On when you were doing this audit of captions-- or sorry, of video content, did you uncover any hidden creators? I know this is centralized around media sites specifically, but did you uncover any, oh, I didn't know that these people were using Mediasite? What were some of the potential surprises you found?
BRIAN SMITH: Fortunately, I've been very hands-on, in-depth with the Mediasite platform for a long time. So I'm very fairly well in tune to what content creators are on there. We have discovered content creators that aren't using Mediasite, that are uploading videos directly to Canvas. Or they may have a small instance of Kaltura and other video platforms out there. So not necessarily hitting creators within Mediasite, but definitely, pockets of creators in various other places on campus that aren't using Mediasite. And we've done our best to at least educate those other users on the regulations that are forthcoming.
ERIK DUCKER: Yeah. So that's a good quick question, side question, of with this push and centralization of budget, did you try to push for more people to come within, join the Mediasite ecosystem that were not in it? Or was there any kind of conversations of, I guess, increasing the pie of responsibility? I know that's probably not what you really wanted to do, but I'm curious if that type of conversation happened?
BRIAN SMITH: Our focus primarily right now has been to caption what we have and caption what we know we're going to have. But we have seen an increase, as this semester has gone on, with more and more people requesting access to use Mediasite. So just naturally, based on communication and education, we have seen more users come onto Mediasite from other platforms.
ERIK DUCKER: Yeah, OK, that's good. And then not to-- you obviously, have been very clear with Mediasite. Do you know how-- how is the University managing their YouTube content? How is the University managing the non-Mediasite content? Is it truly department specific, or is there other entities that you've been kind of advising on best practices there as well?
BRIAN SMITH: It's very department-dependent on if you're using other platforms. Or it may not even be department specific. It may just be a single faculty member choosing to go off on their own and using another platform like YouTube. But we have various means to communicate with them.
We have a great team on campus, the Accessibility Community of Practice, that meets monthly and with different leaders across campus to help get the word out about the accessibility needs. There are various faculty newsletters that have been touching on the subject for the past few months. So the campus as a whole is doing its best to educate all content creators out there.
ERIK DUCKER: OK. So shifting gears a little bit to the operational aspect of organizing this budget, obviously, your team centered around the source of truth of what was required and what was needed. Who else, though, was involved in evaluating and planning for these budgets across-- whether it's your team or other teams that you had to interface with?
BRIAN SMITH: Primarily, the planning has been done by my team itself. But we absolutely have involved others, such as our Electronic Information Technology and Communication Accessibility officer, EITCA-- it's a mouthful, sorry-- and the leadership within UFIT itself, to determine the budget for this current year. We evaluate various solutions within our own department with input from various content creators and the colleges and instructional designers from UFIT Center for Instructional Teaching and Technology. So we've definitely got input on the tools and how to best go about it. But the budget recommendations came from my team itself.
ERIK DUCKER: OK. And did you have to interface at all with the legal teams or other ancillary administrative roles that oversaw compliance, in general, at the university level?
BRIAN SMITH: Yeah, our EITCA officer does most of the go-between between us and, say, the general counsel's office or the compliance office. So she was our main point of contact as far as any legal regulations or evaluation of what the guidelines were. But we did very in-depth studies on WCAG itself. So our department had a couple, at this point, subject matter experts when it comes to WCAG. So we had a straightforward idea, when we got down to it, of that. If the content was on Mediasite, if it was viewable, it had to be accessible. There was no question about that in our team.
ERIK DUCKER: That's interesting. So I know that today, you haven't budgeted explicitly for audio description in the same way that you have for closed captioning. Was there any discussion this year, this budgeting cycle, around audio description? And maybe I'll come back to that later in the discussion. But, just curious, from these conversations with legal and compliance, what were some of the nuggets around the audio description? And where were you guys in that budgeting cycle for it?
BRIAN SMITH: In agreement with our directors, we decided, as far as the audio description goes, to focus on educating and encouraging faculty to actually do audio description within their teaching. So if they're presenting slides, describe what's on the slides. So any audio description, we're not focusing on adding it to the videos, but incorporating it as it's being created.
ERIK DUCKER: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And that's a very common strategy. And when we talk about where you're headed, I'm going to bring this back up. So we're going to put you a little bit on the spot.
So thinking about how you got to that yes, what were the key partners in that process for you, where you were building the momentum to get to a yes on your budget for this fiscal year, going into the compliance year of 2026?
BRIAN SMITH: For the most part, we try to just make it as seamless as possible for our constituents. That's why we sought automated solutions. We got input from various different colleges that have their own content creators that manage content within Mediasite and got their input on that. They were our main partners, the small handful of-- I like to call them power users of Mediasite, along with our instructional designers in the Center for Instructional Teaching Technology. They were our main partners in all the decision making.
ERIK DUCKER: And then, ultimately, who at the end of the day signed the piece of paper that said, all right, Brian, your team gets this allocation of money for-- I'm sure it was probably a broader budget, but the carve-out of the video accessibility needs that your team needed?
BRIAN SMITH: We were actually very fortunate that we had an existing budget for captioning needs. Like you mentioned at the beginning, we've had a partnership with 3Play for a while. So that budget was mostly used to support accommodation requests, but also, content created for courses that were 80% online and would be reused in future semesters. So that money had a specific captioning purpose.
But with the help of our vendors, we were able to find a solution that would fit into that pre-existing budget and allow us to caption all of our existing content and content we anticipated to be created this year. And once those vendor solutions fell into place, UFIT leadership, at the very top with our CIO, they readily agreed to approve the same funds that we had last year to meet our needs this year.
ERIK DUCKER: So I'm kind of curious. It's December now. I'm sure you're looking at next year already a little bit. What are you gearing up for going into the next budget cycle? Are you looking to see how you can do more with audio description? Are you looking to do more coverage of captioning beyond ASR, in certain cases? What is it that you're looking to gear up for, now that you got the solution in place today?
BRIAN SMITH: We haven't really touched on it too much yet. But, we're making heavy use of 3Play's predicted caption accuracy technology, which allows us to automatically--
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ASR-created content up to a human-edited level. And we've worked closely with 3Play over the past few months to find the right balance of when that changeover happens. So we're hoping that once we get our backlog of content captioned by April, we can focus on maybe improving that threshold and maybe sending more off to human-reviewed captioning just so we can increase our accuracy level across the board. That's going to be probably the main focus for the next year of planning, is where is that balance between accuracy and cost?
ERIK DUCKER: Yeah. So I think that brings me to the next section here of-- and you kind of hinted at the solution. But I'm curious. What was part of the evaluation process of the different captioning tools or vendors? A million-plus minutes was 10x what you were doing today, in the current state. How did you balance the price and the reality of your budget in front of you?
BRIAN SMITH: Well, we knew that no single tool would meet every need. So our evaluation focused on accuracy, turnaround time, integration, scalability, support responsiveness, and cost. All those factors came into play. We ran pilot evaluations with over half a dozen different vendors, sending the same videos across to each of them, so that we could compare the actual outputs.
We knew that balancing price with quality required a tiered strategy rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. So through a combination of automated captioning, human-edited captions, with the help of that predictive caption accuracy tool from 3Play, and the captioning solution provided within Mediasite itself, we were able to find that balance.
ERIK DUCKER: So just for the audience here, the predicted caption accuracy tool basically allows you to measure at the file level what the expected accuracy of the ASR output is. That allows you to dynamically, automatically in this case, make a decision point of, should I upgrade it because it falls below my recommended threshold of accuracy? Or should I keep i because it's above that threshold? How did that conversation go down in terms of justifying that some of your captions will not be compliant, but they will be of certain accuracy minimums at least? What were some of those conversations internally like?
BRIAN SMITH: We knew we had to find a balance. It would be great for us to have 99% accuracy across the board. But with, in the end, about 6.5 million minutes that we had to caption within this calendar year, we knew we had to have a little bit of sacrifice and just do our due diligence and show best effort to meeting the letter of the law. Don't quote me on that. I know this is transcripted and all that.
So what it really came down to was almost trial and error to find the right balance. We went through a few months of that process with 3Play, where we tweaked to find that right level. But for any accommodation request content, we were sending that still to human reviewed off the bat. We weren't making use of any predictive accuracy scores. So that content we were prioritizing.
ERIK DUCKER: So that's a good question. So obviously, student accommodations, like, a hand raiser, that gets sent directly. That makes a lot of sense. And that's what we see pretty much across the board, across the university landscape. Are there any other exceptions that you guys have looked at in terms of it's not necessarily about the quality of the ASR, it's about the importance of this piece of content having really, really compliant and accurate captions?
BRIAN SMITH: Yeah. So one case is any live event we do, we use 3Play for live captioning. So that's automatically already getting a higher level of service. And then a lot of the training videos that we create, the one-off messages from the president, a lot of the stuff that is highly visible is being prioritized with straight to human captions. So we are finding that balance with a few different sources of content.
ERIK DUCKER: So I guess one of the questions I always have is on the faculty side. Obviously, that's a really important partner in this whole ecosystem. What's been the message to faculty with this solution in place? What information are you providing? What's that relationship now versus what you had maybe in the spring, when you didn't have this solution in place? What were some of the changes that you've had with your faculty partners?
BRIAN SMITH: Well, communication has been the biggest difference as far as getting the word out about accessibility. And it's not just about video accessibility necessarily. WCAG includes all forms of digital media that has to be accessible. So it's been a broader message going out to faculty and other constituents on campus.
And as I mentioned before, we have the Accessibility Community of Practice Working Group. We have various faculty newsletters. And we have multiple different departments with web pages. And we've worked with them to make sure that information about accessibility is readily available.
ERIK DUCKER: OK, that makes sense. So a couple more questions, I do want to talk a little bit about audio description, if you don't mind. But so maybe we just start there a little bit. I'm just seeing a few attendee questions. And I think audio description is still a lot on people's minds.
I think the first question is-- I guess, the open question is, what are you guys doing about the backlog for audio description? So obviously, you can't change what the University or the professor already taught and how they taught it. Is there any priority decision around how to make sure that certain pieces of content are adequately accessible, from an audio description perspective? Or what is the University's stance today? And is there some ground roots activity to help figure out how to find funding for that more long term?
BRIAN SMITH: Unfortunately, I do not have a good answer for that, because we are not doing anything with the backlog as far as our audio description goes. It is possible to put audio descriptions to Mediasite videos, but we haven't gone down that road yet. It's been such a daunting task just to get everything captioned. So I'm sure those conversations will come up after the first of the year, but we just haven't got there yet.
ERIK DUCKER: OK. And then there's one other interesting question that's not directly related to audio description, but more of Florida being home to a pretty bilingual population. I'm curious, has there been any push in just making more Spanish content available or localizing more of the English-first content into Spanish for the campus?
BRIAN SMITH: That hasn't necessarily been a huge issue at UF. That probably would be a bigger issue with some of the Southern Florida schools. But with the Mediasite ASR solution, it does auto-detect different languages. So if a course is taught in Spanish or a course is taught in Polish, that tool has been great for us as far as captioning content in native languages.
ERIK DUCKER: Yeah, that makes sense. This is another good question that popped up around the budgeting. Are you aware or is there anything from the government level of Florida that has looked at, how do you find grants to fund some of these activities? There's the federal law, and then there's the, how do we actually get it executed and on the ground level? Has there been any clear path from the-- has there been any indication from the Florida government to support some of these actions? Or is this entirely on UF and its budget to figure out?
BRIAN SMITH: At this point, it's been entirely on UF and its budget. As far as I know, there hasn't been any talk of grants or anything else that could help us with our budget.
ERIK DUCKER: There's a good question here around-- obviously, there's lecture content and the need for audio description. When you get videos from third parties, do you have any kind of stipulations or requirements around making sure that you get audio description as part of that bundle, so that you're at least getting some of the third-party content with proper audio description?
BRIAN SMITH: It really hasn't been a focus for us at all. I mean, other than getting the communication out to the faculty that they should be doing audio description within their newly created content, it just really hasn't been a point of emphasis for us.
ERIK DUCKER: OK. And then I think there's an interest from our audience if there's a link or material of how you are communicating or what material you are using to train faculty on audio description and best practices around universal design. I think that would be super helpful. And we can share that out. If that is publicly available, we can share that out with the audience post-webinar.
BRIAN SMITH: I mean, a good starting point would be just simply our accessibility website. It's accessibility.ufl.edu. So that is a publicly accessible site. So that would be a great starting point. It doesn't focus only on video or only on digital media. But it's a good starting point.
And then there are resources on our website, which is it.ufl.edu/video. I'll type both those links in here in a minute. But that also has resources on accessibility.
ERIK DUCKER: OK. A few more questions for you, on a percentage basis-- are you comfortable sharing just on a percentage basis of how much is video accessibility part of your overall budget in maybe the IT group?
BRIAN SMITH: It's probably very minuscule in the percentage of the entire IT budget. But it's a significant portion of our budget. I mean, for my department, it probably makes up 90% of what we spend in a year.
ERIK DUCKER: So in the grand scheme of things, pretty minuscule, but at the micro level of solving accessibility, it can be a pretty big expense overall, so definitely fair. And then, there's one other question that was interesting from the attendees I wanted to highlight.
So I guess, I mean, at 1.3, 1.4 million minutes, an unexpected spike would be pretty significant amount of content. You mentioned you have a little bit of overhead air cover. Is that the intention, is to cover any kind of unexpected-- someone just uploaded a ton of content unexpectedly this semester?
BRIAN SMITH: Yeah. Like I said, we have a little overhead, probably an extra 100,000, 200,000 minutes of overhead. But as we continue to fine-tune that threshold of the predicted accuracy score, those minutes may or may not be used due to that. So it is a fine line that we're going to be toeing. And we may have to send any unexpected content more towards the Mediasite captioning ASR because that's a more reasonable price point for bulk content. But for the newly created content, we're definitely trying to use the 3Play avenue.
ERIK DUCKER: So with that in mind, going into the next budgeting cycle, you obviously didn't really have this level of data prior. You had some theories and stuff. How much do you think you can use this year's data to influence, hey, if I get x amount more money, we can have this many more files protected against non-compliance captions? What level of granularity do you think is going to be valuable to position in front of your finance teams?
BRIAN SMITH: Oh, I mean, it's amazing. You use the term "granularity," that we have on both the Mediasite and the 3Play side. We've always got great analytics from Mediasite. But we are making heavy use of the reports provided from 3Play at this point that shows us what the accuracy is per video, how many of these videos are being sent off for human editing. So I mean, we just have so much information at our fingertips now that are definitely going to inform our future decisions and budget requests.
ERIK DUCKER: Yeah, that makes sense. So I want to leave it off with this one future looking-- or I guess, advice question. Obviously, UF is one of the larger institutions in the United States for education and honestly, historically, has been a pretty strong advocate of accessibility. They have a really strong Disability Resource Center. I've personally visited. It's a really great service, and there's a lot of care in digital accessibility in the Florida system, or the UF Gainesville campus. What advice would you give other institutions, small or large, trying to build that realistic and defensible budget as they come up against this deadline and making sure that this is incorporated into their go-forward budgets?
BRIAN SMITH: As we just touched on, the most important advice I can give is, build your budget on evidence, not assumptions. The compliance is as much about demonstrating due diligence and institutional intent as the amount of dollars you spend. But make those decisions based on whatever information you have available. That's the best advice I can give.
ERIK DUCKER: Yeah, I think that's so important. We all are in our own little niche world all the time. And then oftentimes, we forget we are just a part of a much bigger pie. And we have to be super, super-- like, in my own job, I have to be extremely on point with data to get someone who's looking at my work 5% of the time of their job to really understand.
And I think that's an important piece, Brian, that you just brought up, which is accessibility is every day for us, but it's not every day for the people that are writing the checks at the end of the day for everyone.
BRIAN SMITH: And I'll repeat a note that just came across the chat. It happens to be from my ETICA officer. "Compliance is cheaper than lawsuits and loss of reputation." So thank you, Ann, for that one.
ERIK DUCKER: Love that. So thank you so much, Brian. I think we had a great conversation, great information. Thank you, everyone, for asking great questions. I hope-- I tried to incorporate as many as I could into the flow of the conversation. So thanks again.
