Captions and Beyond: Scaling Media Accessibility Audits for Title II Compliance

With new Title II requirements around WCAG 2.2 AA standards looming, government and higher-ed institutions face a massive task: ensuring every piece of media—from lecture captures to background banners—is accessible. When managing a library of 400+ legacy videos across fragmented departments, manual audits simply don’t scale and leave institutions vulnerable to compliance gaps.

We’ll explore a "crawl and scrape" strategy that turned a mountain of content, the entirety of the UC San Francisco (UCSF) main site into a manageable punch list. I’ll share my development-driven approach using scripted yt-dlp metadata extraction and custom crawlers and point out some other useful tools like Siteimprove for inventory and the UCSB-created Digital Asset Inventory module. We’ll also discuss how an aggressive archiving project can simplify your footprint before the audit even begins.

Moving beyond basic captions, we’ll dive into the technical hurdles of providing Audio Description (AD) within the YouTube/Vimeo ecosystems, including the added complexity of 'Enhanced AD' requirements. We will also explore Drupal structural solutions for 'non-synchronized' media, such as background video and scientific illustrations, and ensure sites respect 'reduced motion' preferences. Whether you’re remediating legacy content or building new media pipelines, learn how to make university-scale compliance both approachable and automated.