New Webcast Captioning Makes NYSenate.gov Even More Accessible

The New York State Senate is now providing closed captioning for live webcasts of Senate events. Currently, captioning is legally required only for televised Senate proceedings but we believe that captioning should provided whenever possible, including on web videos, in order to help ensure that hundreds of thousands of deaf or severely hearing-impaired New Yorkers have more equal access to the Senate’s proceedings and business.  In the near future, captioning of online webcasts, and the publication of the “XML” format data that results will also enable citizens to search for specific keywords within the Senate’s archived videos, increasing the transparency and accessibility of Senate’s work.