King County TV, the government television station serving King County, Washington, has adopted automated audio description technology from Tightrope Media Systems as part of an effort to make its coverage of public meetings more accessible to viewers with disabilities.
The station is using MediaScribe Narrate, a cloud-based service that generates audio descriptions for recorded video, including council and committee meetings. The technology is intended to help the station meet accessibility requirements under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
King County TV typically covers four to six government meetings each week, producing between 10 and 12 hours of video. The station operates with a small audiovisual and communications staff, making the additional work required to produce accessible programming a challenge. The station selected MediaScribe Narrate because it can process lengthy meeting recordings without additional hardware and allows employees to review and edit descriptions before publishing the finished videos.
The technology also integrates with Cablecast, the video automation and publishing system King County TV already uses to distribute its programming.
“The integration with Cablecast is really good,” Brian Starr, the AV Technology Manager for King County TV, said in a statement last week. “Once it’s done and we publish it, it goes to the web. It’s pretty seamless.”
MediaScribe analyzes recorded video to identify portions that require descriptions of visual information. It then generates narration that can be reviewed and corrected by station employees. The system is designed to recognize common activities during government meetings, reducing the amount of manual review required for lengthy recordings.
Once a recording has been reviewed, MediaScribe can produce video files containing the original audio and an additional description track, standalone audio files and text transcripts that include descriptions of visual content. Those files can be distributed through King County TV’s existing video-on-demand service and made available for public download.
Before selecting the technology, station employees consulted with other Washington government television operations, including those in Yakima and Tacoma. They also worked with Rooted in Rights, a Washington nonprofit focused on accessible media, and reviewed educational materials provided by Tightrope.
“Tightrope webinars on audio description were some of the only real education on video accessibility available anywhere,” Kimberly Hill, the Station Manager for King County TV, said. “That guidance made a real difference for us.”
The station also developed accessible PowerPoint templates using resources from the University of Washington, allowing text from meeting presentations to be read by screen readers. Starr said those efforts addressed some accessibility concerns but did not eliminate the work involved in describing hours of meeting footage.
“Automating it means we get consistent audio description without asking our team to become professional narrators on top of everything else,” Starr noted.
King County TV said its accessible meeting recordings are now available through its video-on-demand platform shortly after processing and review, providing residents with another way to follow local government proceedings.
