In April 2024, the DOJ published a new set of accessibility guidelines under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). These guidelines have left some educators, and the software companies they rely on, scrambling to catch up.

While Title II guidelines for online content accessibility were previously broad, the new mandate now requires educators and organizations to follow more specific rules to support all students.

For most institutions, the new requirements go into effect in April 2026. One of these requirements is the addition of audio descriptions, or alternate audio tracks that narrate visual elements throughout the video.

In this blog post, I’ll share a behind-the-scenes look at how we implemented audio descriptions and the careful considerations we made to ensure they get the job done.

So what do audio descriptions actually sound like?

You may not be familiar with audio descriptions. But you can think of them as an audio guide to what’s happening on screen. During natural pauses, a narrator describes key visual elements to help people who are blind or have low vision follow along with the full context of the video.

Below is a side-by-side example showing a video without audio descriptions and the same video with them. Play it to hear the difference!

Meeting the 2026 Title II deadline meant adding audio descriptions

At Soomo, we’ve always designed our webtexts with accessibility in mind. All our materials are developed to meet the WCAG 2.2 AA standards. We add alt text for images, transcripts for videos, long descriptions for tables and charts, and more. When we learned that the new Title II requirements made audio descriptions mandatory, we immediately set out to create them for every video we’ve produced.

Ensuring we had audio descriptions by the April 2026 deadline was no small task. It required recording, editing, and publishing audio-described videos for the hundreds of videos falculty may wish to use. It was up to us to do the heavy lifting and give professors this peace of mind. Here’s how we did it.

Building an audio description library for hundreds of videos

After taking inventory of every video used in our webtexts, we began the process of recording audio descriptions. This required a few key considerations:

• Long pauses in dialogue or noise needed to be filled in with descriptive audio to ensure users could enjoy the original video while also getting auditory descriptions of the visuals.
• The descriptions had to be clearly spoken and concise.
• Original audio would not be silenced or removed; the descriptions had to work with what was there before.
• Third-party videos in our webtexts would need coordination with content creators to offer audio descriptions.

Overall, we aimed to make each description sound natural and contextual, as if we were explaining what was happening on-screen to a friend. This required some balance: too slow, and we would get less information into the pauses; too fast, and the audio description could be difficult to understand.

For me, this project involved a trip down memory lane. As the video editor here at Soomo, it was wonderful to review much of my past work!

Clear, well-paced speech has always been one of my top priorities in our content, so inserting descriptions in between pauses proved simple for much of the content. More fast-paced videos required some creative thinking and carefully-timed audio editing.

How to access audio descriptions in Soomo webtexts

Audio descriptions can be accessed within each video’s player by clicking the Settings icon, selecting Audio, and then choosing “English (Audio Descriptions)” in the menu that appears.

Every webtext video hosted on Soomo’s Vimeo has been updated with audio descriptions, and no previous links have been changed, so if you could access any of these videos before, you already have access to the audio description tracks.

Continuing our commitment to accessibility

Faculty can rest assured that Soomo has placed these enhanced videos in our webtexts ahead of the Title II deadline. Accessibility is such an important aspect of video creation. Audio descriptions give us an extra tool in our set to keep all modes of instruction in Soomo webtexts as accessible as possible for all students.

We’ll continue to add audio descriptions to any new Soomo videos we add to our webtexts. We’ll also pace our screencasts with both general audiences and new audio descriptions in mind, ensuring this higher level of accessibility for our videos!

If you’d like to read more about our commitment to accessibility, check out our accessibility page on our site or request a full Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) for any of our webtexts.

And if you’d like to explore any of our webtexts on your own, simply click “Request educator access” on any page in our catalog.