From description key to practice: Advancing audio description in higher education

With the Title II compliance deadline now behind us, many universities prepared for captions and document accessibility. But what about video audio description (AD)? AD has quickly become one of the most complex and least prepared-for areas of accessibility.

A working group at Penn State is developing a decision tree and workflow model to guide when AD is required, how to triage legacy content and how to approach the logistics of creating AD. Penn State has partnered with the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP), whose Description Key standards, training resources and authoring tools provide a strong foundation for producing high-quality AD.

Together, we will explore how the Description Key supports best practices in writing AD and demonstrate how DCMP’s tool enables institutions to create and export described video for platforms such as Kaltura.

Rather than presenting a finished solution, this session shares a developing institutional model supported by national expertise and invites cross-institutional dialogue around scalable AD implementation in higher education.