Is Your Video Content Legally Accessible? What the EU and Kenya Now Require

Short version: as of 2025, both the EU and Kenya have real, binding laws that require video content to be accessible - and both specifically call out captions that are accurate and synchronized, not just "auto-generated." If you publish video for EU or Kenyan audiences, this affects you, and machine-only subtitles likely don't meet the bar on their own.

What the EU Accessibility Act actually requires

The European Accessibility Act - formally Directive (EU) 2019/882 - has been enforceable since 28 June 2025. It covers a range of products and services, including audiovisual media. For video specifically, the requirement isn't just "have captions somewhere" - captions and audio descriptions need to be synchronized, accurate, and user-controllable. A rough auto-generated caption track that garbles names, misses speaker changes, or drifts out of sync with the audio is exactly the kind of thing the Act is written to rule out.

Obligations phase in by organization size - larger entities face an additional deadline of 28 April 2026 - but the direction is the same for everyone publishing into the EU market: quality and accuracy are now a legal property of your captions, not just a nice-to-have.

What Kenya's Persons with Disabilities Act, 2025 requires

Kenya replaced its 2003 disability law with the new Persons with Disabilities Act, 2025, which commenced on 27 May 2025. Public summaries of the Act describe a specific broadcast requirement: television stations must provide a Kenya Sign Language inset and closed captioning on newscasts, educational programs, and programs covering events of national and international significance. Telecommunications providers are also expected to support text and caption-based relay services for people with hearing disabilities.

If your organization broadcasts or publishes video into Kenya - news, education, public-interest content - this is now the actual law you're working against, not the 2003 Act many older compliance checklists still reference.

Why "auto-generated" alone doesn't clear the bar

Kauli exists because of one specific gap: speech-recognition and machine translation are fast, but they aren't accurate enough on their own for Swahili and Kikuyu content, particularly with accents, code-switching between languages, and local terminology. That's exactly the failure mode both laws are written to catch - a caption track that exists but doesn't actually represent what was said.

Our answer is the same for every order regardless of service level: AI drafts a first pass in minutes, then a real human editor checks it word-by-word before anything is marked ready. See our How it works page for the actual four-step process.

What this means if you publish video for Kenyan or EU audiences

• Captions need to be genuinely accurate, not just present - both laws care about quality, not a checkbox.
• Accessibility is a language requirement too - an EU or Kenyan audience needs captions they can actually read in a language they understand, which for a lot of Kenyan content means Swahili or Kikuyu, not just English.
• A human review step isn't a luxury add-on - it's the difference between captions that hold up and captions that create real legal exposure.

FAQ

Does the EU Accessibility Act apply to a Kenyan company?

It applies based on the market you're serving, not where you're incorporated. If you publish video content that reaches EU audiences - a streaming platform, an e-learning course sold into the EU, a public-facing service - the Act's requirements are about the product/service reaching that market, not your company's home country.

Do auto-generated YouTube captions count as compliant?

Not reliably. Both laws describe accuracy and synchronization as real requirements, and unreviewed machine captions are well known to make errors on names, terminology, and overlapping speech - especially in Swahili and Kikuyu, where general-purpose speech models have less training data to draw on.

What's the fastest way to check if my content is at risk?

Compare a few minutes of your current captions against the actual audio, line by line. If you find errors a viewer would notice, that's a real signal, not just a formality - talk to us and we'll tell you honestly whether a human-verified pass is worth it for your situation.