University News
EOA Office Calling for Video Captioning Volunteers
November 22, 2013
MACOMB, IL – Have some time on your hands and willing to serve? If so, the Western Illinois University Office of Equal Opportunity and Access (EOA) is calling for volunteers to help out with captioning videos produced by any department or unit at Western Illinois University. Per the Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act (IITAA), video captioning is required for all WIU videos uploaded to the web for public consumption, as well as for any web-based video used for educational purposes. (The captions provide individuals with hearing or visual disabilities access to the video content.)
According to EOA Program Assistant Karen Trusley, the EOA Office trains and coordinates a pool of volunteers, whose efforts help the University comply with the IITAA law.
"The captioning pool is a group of individuals who caption all videos that go on WIU's YouTube channel. After videos are captioned on YouTube, they can be embedded in web pages on Western's website or shared via the University's various social media," Trusley explained. "Anyone can volunteer to become a part of the captioning pool. We encourage faculty, staff, students, as well as members of the community, to volunteer for the pool."
To facilitate Western's compliance with the IITAA, the EOA Office trains volunteers, and once trained, assigns videos to volunteers to be captioned.
"This service is vital in order to comply with the web accessibility law in Illinois. All videos posted online for public viewing must be captioned in order to be accessible to those with vision or hearing impairments," added Assistant Equal Opportunity Officer Tami McCoy. "At this time, there are seven active members in the captioning pool. We would like to have at least 25 active members to assist with our captioning."
Training sessions are set up individually through the EOA Office. To volunteer, contact McCoy at (309) 298-1977, via email at TK-McCoy@wiu.edu or fill out the volunteer form at www.wiu.edu/accessibility/captionpool.php.
Posted By: University Communications (U-Communications@wiu.edu)
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