To: The Academic Senate Faculty
From: Jan Mullen, Steve Schermerhorn, and Ted Wattenberg
Subject: Closed captioning
Date: November 20, 2002
 
Ted Wattenberg, who teaches the use of adaptive technology in the Disabled Student Program and Services area, Steve Schermerhorn and I are here this afternoon to talk about our campus closed captioning project.

 


A. What is closed captioning?
 

 
For anyone who might not know what closed captioning is, it’s the display of visible text for spoken audio, most often seen on the bottom of your television screen.


B. What are we doing now?
 

 
We are currently charged with the responsibility of captioning our entire video collection of 2,755 titles by end of 2006. At the present time, only 12 percent or 335 videos are captioned in the collection. These are identified by the subject heading “Video recordings for the hearing impaired.”


C. Why are we undergoing this process?
 

    
For three reasons:
1. To assist the hearing-impaired, the learning disabled, ESL students and the elderly.
2. To be in compliance with the law:
-Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act
-Title II of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act
The Office of Civil Rights is in charge of enforcing the above mentioned laws
3. To carry out our college administration’s policy of compliance with the law.


D. How are we going about it?
 

    
Since the date of compliance for having our entire collection captioned is 2006,
1. We are no longer purchasing non-captioned videos
2. Secondly, for the last 1 ˝ years, Steve Schermerhorn has been overseeing the captioning of our existing collection based on the expressed need of specific students or on the basis of circulation statistics for the most heavily used videos.
The funding for captioning is coming from a six year grant from the Chancellor’s Office. The funding will stop as of 2006.


E. Where do we stand right now?
 

     
So far, this year, we’ve been able to purchase 15 closed captioned videos based on faculty requests.
We are continuing to retrospectively caption non-captioned videos already in the collection.
Meanwhile, we were strongly encouraged by the Chancellor’s Office both in August and again at the end of October to seek legal counsel locally to guide us in the process of retrospective captioning and to have a plan in place locally to accomplish compliance by 2006.
One of the big issues involved is determining whether or not we have to seek permission from the original copyright holder in order to add captioning. So, among other things, we’ve asked our local legal counsel to determine, in their view, whether or not DSPS is a legalized entity exempt from having to seek copyright permission and, if not, is Delta College exempt from having to seek permission under “fair use” guidelines.
At this point we are awaiting a response from our legal counsel.


F. How much audiovisual material is available with closed captioning?
 

  
At the present time, there are still many educational videos that are not captioned. It’s a question of time before the producers and distributors recognize that to stay competitive in business, they are going to have to offer captioned material. Many are already including closed captioning now.
Meanwhile, we know that some faculty will be disappointed at not being able to have access to non-captioned material. We’ve put together a brief handout indicating how to identify captioned material in audiovisual catalogs and some of the best resources for captioned material already in place. As collection development librarian, I am more than willing to assist you with determining whether or not a particular video is captioned and, if not, I will attempt as best I can to locate an alternative program that meets your needs.