1.2 Legal requirements and accessibility components in video recordings

Realising accessibility to the best of our abilities is not an optional extra, but a statutory requirement expected of German universities as public education institutes:

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was ratified by Germany in 2009 and has since then been in the process of being transposed into German legislation. It guarantees people with disabilities equal participation in all areas of public life, and this also applies to the field of education through Article 24.
In the digital environment, statutory requirements are derived from BITV 2.0 (Barrierefreie-Informationstechnik-Verordnung, German directive for accessible information technology), the EU Directive 2016/2102 and the EU standard EN 301 549, which among other things invoke the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
The European Directive was transposed at a national level into the German Act on Equal Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities (Behindertengleichstellungsgesetz, BGG). The BGG and BITV 2.0 apply to Federal Government bodies. At a federal state level, there are some individual equality laws and orders. The
BIK-für-Alle project website offers an overview of the legal position in each federal state in German.

This legal position means that digital products that are available online (e.g. study material, PDFs, videos, etc.) and technical systems (e.g. websites, study management systems) should ideally from the beginning be arranged so that everyone can participate. Consequently, accessibility should proactively be arranged and realised in all areas of teaching and learning. There is an overview of the legal framework and control mechanisms in Germany in the Leitfaden zur Digitalen Barrierefreiheit im Hochschulkontext.

Graphic depiction: A Venn diagram consisting of 5 circles of different sizes that illustrates the interplay of digital accessibility laws, regulations, norms and standards. The largest, outer circle mostly encompasses the other circles completely. It symbolizes the BGG. The BGG law: defines accessibility and regulates accessible IT of public agencies of the federal government. Included in the BGG is the circle BITV 2.0. The legal regulation BITV 2.0: refers to the harmonized EU standard as the relevant collection of criteria and contains requirements for the accessibility statement as well as for easy language and sign language videos. Included in the BGG and BITV2.0 is the EN301 549 circle. The standard EN301 549 defines: Requirements for software, hardware, web pages and non-web documents, among others, and refers to WCAG 2.1. The following small circle symbolizes the standard WCAG 2.1 as: international standard for accessible design of internet content in different levels A, AA and AAA. WCAG 2.1 with Level A and AA are figuratively included in the circle of the EN 301 549 standard, as well as BITV 2.0 and BGG. Level AAA of WCAG 2.1 is outside the other circles. The smallest circle for the PDF/UA standard intersects with the BGG, BITV 2.0 and EN 301 549 circles, but for the most part remains outside the other circles. The PDF/UA standard: contains requirements for PDF documents.

Diagram 1: Depiction of digital accessibility standards and regulations

The international WCAG standards define requirements depending on type of medium. The following components arise for a video recording with spoken and visual information:

Subtitling is lines of text that convert spoken content into written text. English differentiates between captions and subtitles: captions give both spoken and non-speech audio content. Subtitles give speech translated into other languages. Each of these terms is explained in greater detail in Barrierefreie Audio- und Videoinhalte erstellen by the Hochschulforum Digitalisierung.
Audio description (AD) is the spoken description of visual content that is important to comprehension of a video. This can be inserted into existing or planned pauses in speech or integrated by interrupting the video track.
Sign language translation reproduces the spoken information in the video in the sign language of that country (e.g. German Sign Language (DGS) in Germany, American Sign Language (ASL) in the USA).
(Descriptive) transcriptions convert audio content into written text. Descriptive transcriptions additionally contain text versions of visual information.

All these ways of preparing content should be considered from the beginning when producing teaching videos. This should include checking which components are necessary for the actual video that is being planned, because these accessibility components are only necessary if the video does not already overcome barriers as expressed in the two-senses principle. For instance, AD is not necessary if the video does not contain any visual information relevant to the content, or if care has been taken to integrate this descriptively in the spoken text.