Through a combined effort of the Virginia Higher Education Accessibility Partners' (VHEAP) Captioning Committee, the Virginia Higher Education Procurement Consortium (VHEPC), and the University of Virginia (UVA), a new set of statewide captioning agreements are now in place. Building on the initial work by George Mason University, these agreements offer advantageous pricing to participating state agencies, K-12 schools and districts, and post-secondary institutions.

Captioning vendors, their services, rates/costs, representatives, and signed agreements are listed on the VHEAP Captioning Initiative website. Your department or office can set up an account with any of these captioning vendors under their respective contracts. To sign up for an account, contact the listed vendor representative as well as JMU's Procurement office. Krista McDaniel is the current Procurement contact for these captioning contracts (as of 6/1/23). Make sure to request that your account be governed by the terms and pricing of the VHEAP/UVA contract but with a separate login and invoicing. Invoices should be sent directly to your department. JMU does not have a central account to pay for captioning.

Most vendors have offered a tiered-pricing structure that aggregates minutes used by participating entities to lower the pricing for selected services for all participating entities. The more captioning done, the cheaper it becomes across Virginia.

The Office of Disability Services currently uses Verbit for post-production captioning and Azur for live captioning/CART.

Please note that if you are a faculty member teaching a student with captioning accommodations, the Office of Disability Services will take care of any captioning of media for the related course.