Verbit Launches AI Audio Description as ADA Title II Deadline Nears

Verbit has released an AI audio description product aimed at organizations that must scale accessibility compliance and meet ADA Title II requirements. The release arrives as public-facing institutions face mounting pressure to make video content usable for blind and low-vision audiences without multiplying production costs.

Audio description — the narrated translation of visual information into speech during natural pauses in dialogue — has long been the most labor-intensive accessibility format to produce. Human describers must watch content, time their narration to gaps in the audio track, and articulate visual detail — scene changes, on-screen text, gestures — with precision. Organizations with large video libraries have typically managed only a fraction of their catalogs because each hour of described content demands hours of skilled human labor.

What does the release change?

Verbit's tool applies AI to that workflow, and the company positions it as a way to scale description across entire content libraries rather than cherry-picking individual titles. For organizations covered by ADA Title II — state and local government entities, including public universities and municipal agencies — the calculus is straightforward: regulatory obligations apply to broad catalogs, and manual production models cannot keep pace.

The company frames the product around two simultaneous goals:

• Scaling audio description output to match the volume of video content organizations publish
• Meeting ADA Title II requirements, which mandate accessible communications and services from public entities

Why does ADA Title II matter now?

The U.S. Department of Justice finalized its ADA Title II web and mobile accessibility rule in 2024, establishing WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard public entities must meet, with compliance deadlines phasing in from April 2026 for the largest entities and extending to April 2027 for smaller ones. Video content falls under these obligations, and audio description is the established remedy for prerecorded media under WCAG success criterion 1.2.5 (Audio Description, Prerecorded) at Level AA.

That regulatory timeline converts accessibility from a discretionary initiative into a budgeted compliance project. Institutions that previously described video only when sued or when a specific user requested it now face catalog-wide expectations. Vendor tools that automate part of the pipeline — transcription, description drafting, timing, voice synthesis — directly change the cost curve of that work.

How does AI description fit existing workflows?

Verbit already supplies captioning and transcription to sectors with heavy compliance loads, including education, legal, and media organizations. Audio description extends that portfolio deeper into the production stack. AI-generated description promises consistency across large volumes and turnaround measured in automated processing time rather than human scheduling, though organizations must still validate output quality — a described track that misidentifies visual content fails the user regardless of how it was produced.

For accessibility teams, the practical question shifts from "can we describe this video?" to "can we describe all of them?" That reframing is the core of what Verbit is selling: coverage at institutional scale, with compliance documentation to match.

The release signals where the accessibility market is heading — toward AI-assisted production of described media as a default procurement category for public entities, not a specialty service. As the 2026 compliance deadline approaches, expect competing captioning vendors to push similar AI description offerings into the same procurement windows.