Lily a third-year Sociology with Quantitative Research student at the University of Kent has been working with Kent Television (KTV), the student-run television and film station, to help them be more accessible, for hard of hearing audience members – as she is one.

Eddie Thomas, the Distributions Supervisor explained to Lily why he felt it necessary to do this: ‘KTV grows every day and so does our audience. We understand the importance of making our content accessible to all members of our audience, hence why we are now making closed captioning and subtitling a main policy with our releases.’

Following discussions with Eddie, the distributions supervisor, KTV have agreed to turn closed captions on all of their content, at the point of release, and they are also endeavouring to backlog all their content and ensure that following this, the new procedures include turning captions on at the point of release.

Lily says, ‘I’m thrilled that my concerns were listened to by a student society and would like this to continue and be a university-wide policy: all videos to be captioned all the time. I’ve found that often, procedures to improve accessibility are also beneficial to others. Captions benefit; the deaf and hard of hearing, students for whom English isn’t their first language, and a wide variety of learners. In fact, everyone benefits when access is made easy for the widest group of people because, as the Government Digital Service say, ‘accessible design is good design’.

To find out more about what Lily is doing to make the University more accessible please visit their web page or contact:opera@kent.ac.uk.