COVID-19 forced the world to rely on virtual communication and for many of the 466 million people who are deaf and hard of hearing, this sudden change multiplied existing inequities in everyday interactions—video calls aren’t accommodating to sign language, and masks make lip reading impossible. But, with the help of assistive technologies like Live Caption and Captioning in Google Meet, people could connect in ways that weren’t possible before.

Accessibility stories are rarely told in advertising, often taking a back seat to ads focused on gender and racial equity. This was an incredible opportunity to showcase the need for, and Google’s commitment to, accessibility tech while telling a truly intersectional story—one of an Asian American family in the disability community in a climate where representation of these communities is critical. “A CODA Story” launched on Oscars Night as the first-ever commercial on accessibility to air on broadcast television.

“A CODA Story” tells the true story of Googler Tony Lee, a CODA (“Child of Deaf Adults”), and his family who found ways to connect during a pandemic with the help of automatic captioning. Tony’s story brought to light the impact and importance of Google’s accessible technologies in times of crisis, but also in the everyday moments that are often taken for granted.

To further emphasize the need for—and Google’s commitment to building—accessible and inclusive tech, we partnered with ABC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to sponsor closed captions and, for the first time, audio descriptions for deaf, blind, and low vision viewers. These additional accessibility features made the 2021 ceremony the most accessible Oscars night to date.

The pandemic only exacerbated existing inequities in the accessibility space, while also bringing new and profound barriers to communication—especially so for those in the deaf and hard of hearing communities. With this in mind, we wanted to demonstrate Google’s positive impact by telling a real story in which our products and innovations in assistive technology are helping to make the world a more accessible place, both in extraordinary times and the everyday.

“A CODA Story” launched during the broadcast of the Academy Awards and sponsored the closed captioning and audio descriptions for the show, making it the most accessible Oscars in its 93 years. Alongside our broadcast efforts launched on 4/25/21, we supported “A CODA Story” with digital video on YouTube, and then paid social efforts across Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram.

In addition to telling this story in paid media, we worked with Deaf artist and advocate Jessica Marie Flores who illustrated and animated ASL hand gestures to help teach our audience ASL phrases that were trending in Search. We featured Jessica’s animations on our social and digital channels.

We received 380M paid digital impressions, and 154.5M combined views across YouTube, Social, FEP, and Programmatic marketing. Additionally,”A CODA Story” was incredibly well-received by media outlets, and even named the 6th best moment of Oscar night by The Today Show.

Aside from quantifiable metrics, we received an outpouring of tweets and mentions from audience members sharing their personal reactions to the film—many of whom were part of the deaf and hard of hearing community and were seeing themselves represented on screen for the very first time.