What You'll Learn

• Why the live-vs-prerecorded audio description distinction can change what you actually owe

• The one-vendor-or-several question that decides whether you get point-solution sprawl

• How to make turnaround and accuracy enforceable instead of aspirational

• What "99% accurate" leaves out, and where the human review belongs

• The documentation to ask for now so a complaint later is survivable

You did the hard part. You looked at accessibility vendors, checked which ones actually work, and picked the ones you trust. Now there's a contract in front of you, and the demo energy has worn off.

This is where the useful questions change. "Are you any good" is behind you. The ones that save you now are smaller and more specific, and they're all a version of the same thing: does this contract actually say what you think it says?

Five are worth asking out loud before you sign. None of them is about whether the vendor is good. They're all about what you're buying.

A quick note on scope. This is about video accessibility: captions, audio description, and translation for your meeting and program video. Telling a real vendor from an overlay that promises to fix your whole website with one line of code is a different problem, and it's one we're assuming you've cleared. You're now staring at terms.

1. Live or prerecorded audio description, and which do you actually need?

Here's a thing most contract checklists miss. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the standard everyone cites, require audio description for prerecorded video. That's Success Criterion 1.2.5, Level AA. They don't require live audio description at all. There's no success criteria for it. Live video sits outside that rule's scope.

That matters in two directions. If a vendor is selling you live audio description, a describer narrating your meetings in real time, ask whether you actually need it. It's a specialized human service, it's genuinely hard to do well, and no standard makes you do it. You might have a good reason to want it, or you might be spending money on something you don't need because you're being upsold.

The other direction is quieter and more common. A vendor who's great at captions may not do audio description at all, and you find that out after you've signed. Captions and audio description are different accommodations for different people. One isn't a version of the other.

Get in writing: does the contract spell out prerecorded description, live description, or both, and does that match your content? A city posting recorded council meetings doesn't need live description. A city livestreaming hearings might, and that's a cost worth deciding on deliberately.

2. One contract, or the first of several?

Captions, translation, and audio description are three different jobs. Some platforms do all three. Plenty of vendors do just one. The alternative is point-solution sprawl: captions from vendor A, description from vendor B, translation from vendor C. That's three contracts, three turnaround clocks, three correction policies, three invoices, and three vendors pointing at each other the day a video needs all three and something breaks.

There's no wrong option here, just preference. The point is to make the decision on purpose, in the contract, instead of discovering the sprawl on the second invoice.

Get in writing: does one contract cover every accommodation your content needs? If not, who owns the integration, and whose service agreement governs the video that needs captions and description and a second language all at once?

3. What does "turnaround" mean in writing, and what happens if they miss it?

"Fast turnaround" is a marketing phrase right up until it's a clause with a number in it.

A real service agreement says how long, names a rush tier, and, the part everyone forgets to check, says what you get when the vendor misses the deadline. Service credits are the standard remedy in service level agreements, a percentage back when a commitment is missed, sometimes with free reprocessing if accuracy comes up short. Whether the number is generous matters less than whether there's a number at all. "We'll apologize" isn't a remedy.

Get in writing, three sub-questions: What's standard turnaround for a file like ours? What happens if you miss it, a service credit or a sorry? And how do corrections work, what's the window to ask, what counts as your error versus ours, and how fast do fixes come back?

4. How is "accurate" defined, and where is the human review?

WCAG tells you what to provide. It doesn't set a numeric accuracy percentage, a latency limit, or a timestamp rule. Those live in your contract's acceptance criteria, which is a polite way of saying they're your job to spell out. If you don't write them down, nobody did. A 99 percent accuracy claim is common in this market, and it means nothing without a definition of how it's measured.

Automated speech recognition is real and useful, and it has limits. The setup that holds up is a hybrid: the machine does the first pass, a human corrects it, and that human pass is a gate that happens every time, including on rush work, not a premium you unlock later. A vendor with no human pass is quietly handing you the proofreading.

Get in writing: how do you define accuracy, how do you measure it, and is there a human quality pass in the workflow, on paper, that still happens when we're in a hurry?

5. What happens if a complaint lands, and what can the vendor show you?

This is the one that buyers learn to ask later than they should. Accountability and documentation were a running theme in our conversation with Don Torrez on the Government Video Podcast, where he walked through how to evaluate an accessibility partner, what red flags look like, and why setting expectations early matters. Torrez is a web accessibility consultant who has helped more than 450 organizations navigate compliance.

Here's our own blunt version of it. Most vendor contracts carry an indemnification clause that says, in plain terms, not our problem. So ask the direct question out loud: if a complaint, investigation, or lawsuit lands, what will you actually do? The good ones won't take on your legal defense, but they'll show up and hand over documentation of exactly what was done, and some will attest to or certify the work. Documentation doesn't make you lawsuit-proof. It makes you a much harder target, because it's the first thing a regulator asks to see.

Two concrete things to ask for. A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), showing the vendor's own product conforms to a named standard, and that goes for connected vendors too, like a payment tool sitting on the same site. And an attestation or documentation of the work performed.

Get in writing: if we get a complaint, what will you do, and will you give us a VPAT and documentation that we can give a regulator? A vendor who can't answer that cleanly is one whose paperwork won't protect you.

Torrez works on websites, not video, which is exactly why the point carries over. The paperwork question is the same whether the accommodation lives on your site or in your council video.

Before you sign

None of these five asks whether the vendor is good. They ask whether the contract says what you think it says, which is a different question, and an easy one to skip. While you're in there, ask for the add-on list too, the things that trigger a new charge, multiple speakers, on-screen text description, a rush, a second language, so the base price is the real price and not the first of several.

A good vendor will have clean answers to all of this ready, because they've been asked before.

MediaScribe answers all five on a single contract: MediaScribe Live for live in-room captions and translation, and MediaScribe Narrate for automated audio description. Book a Call and we'll walk you through exactly what's covered.

FAQ

A vendor says their product is WCAG 2.1 AA conformant. Does that make our agency compliant?

No, and this is an important distinction. A conformance claim describes the vendor's product. Your obligation is about your published video, produced with that product, and the records you keep. A capable platform makes compliance reachable, but the agency is still the accountable party. That is exactly why the contract questions here focus on what is written down and what you can produce later, not on the vendor's marketing badge.

What documentation should we insist on so we can show a good-faith effort if we're ever investigated?

Two things at minimum. A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), showing the vendor's own product conforms to a named standard. And an attestation or documented record of the work performed on your content, ideally an audit trail you can pull on demand. Regulators tend to ask for evidence first. Being able to hand it over quickly is what separates a manageable inquiry from a much harder week.

We already have a captioning vendor. What should the contract say before we add audio description or translation?

Decide, in writing, whether you are consolidating onto one platform or deliberately running specialists side by side. Either is defensible. What you want to avoid is drifting into three contracts with three turnaround clocks and three correction policies by accident, then finding no one owns the video that needs all three at once. If you stay multi-vendor, name who owns the integration and whose service agreement governs the overlapping work.

How do we make turnaround and accuracy actually enforceable rather than aspirational?

Put numbers and consequences into the acceptance criteria. Standard turnaround for your file type, a named rush tier, and a stated remedy when a deadline slips, a service credit, not an apology. For accuracy, require a definition of how it is measured and confirm a human review pass is in the workflow on paper, one that still runs on rush jobs. A percentage with no measurement method behind it is not a commitment you can hold anyone to.

Does the April 2027 deadline change what we should lock into a contract now?

It raises the stakes on getting the terms right, more than changing the terms themselves. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II sets WCAG 2.1 AA expectations for government video, with the deadline for entities serving 50,000 or more people falling on April 26, 2027, and smaller municipalities and special districts following on April 26, 2028. Signing earlier gives you room to implement properly instead of under pressure. The contract questions in this piece are the same either way. The deadline just makes the cost of a vague contract land sooner.

Want to see all five answered on a single contract? Book a Call and we'll walk you through MediaScribe Live for captions and translation, MediaScribe Narrate for audio description, and exactly what's covered.