Supported by the U.S. Department of Education DCMP is an accessible media content provider, supporting and improving the academic achievement of K-12 students with sensory disabilities. The program offers over 7,000 educational videos to students who are deaf, blind, hard of hearing, visually impaired, or deaf-blind, as well as adult students studying to meet the needs of blind and deaf students.

A World of Education... Without a Map

While DCMP’s educational video library was already audio described and captioned, their navigation page had thousands of thumbnails without descriptions. Since Scribely shares the same vision of democratizing digital content for online education, we were delighted to partner with DCMP on this project.

The project required describing 6,455 video thumbnails in a fast and meticulous manner and at a reading level that would offer the best learning experience for K-12 students. For example, if a digital asset was tagged to grade level 1-3, a simpler, easy-to-understand wording was needed, whereas more sophisticated language was preferred for grade level 10-12.

Check out some of our samples below from DCMP's World Explorers Series: 

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Achieving Accessibility with Precision

To cater to the size and the specific educational requirements of the project, we brought together a unique group of writers and quality assurance (QA) specialists, dividing the project into 3 phases of 2,000 images. A Scribely Project Manager chose to keep the same group of writers for all three phases, creating a separate database for each writer, as well as a master project file to attain maximum speed and quality. The images were provided to writers as image URLs so they could quickly and efficiently navigate to the page containing image, classification, and context.

As soon as the scope and deadlines were approved by the client, writers began working on the first batch of image files, crafting clear, engaging, and reading-level-appropriate descriptions. As the writers completed descriptions, the QA team checked for proficiency, accuracy, and conformance, sharing comments and feedback with the writers. As the writers and QA team advanced through the project, the teams picked up speed in the workflow and delivered consistent high quality descriptions for the second and third phases.

After the QA review for each phase, the Project Manager added the descriptions to the master project file, delivering the completed descriptions to DCMP in phases at each set deadline.

Accessible Education from Start to Finish

Through partnering with Scribely, DCMP was able to provide fully accessible navigation for blind and visually impaired students, delivering on their mission to make educational content accessible to all and satisfy WCAG requirements for Department of Education funding. Furthermore, DCMP accessibility teams now have access to a database structure that streamlines their ongoing image accessibility efforts.