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Accessible Technology

Live captions

Overview

Captions for live online meetings, classes, and events are called live captions or real-time captions. These can be provided either of two ways:

  1. Automated live captions – Most online meeting platforms, including Zoom and Microsoft Teams, include the ability to caption spoken text live during the meeting using automatic speech recognition (ASR). This feature should be enabled for all meetings, and is sufficient unless one or more participants have requested captions as an accommodation (in which case, human live captions are required).
  2. Human live captions – Live captions must be provided by a captioning service (i.e., humans, not machines) if captions are needed as an accommodation for audience members from the Deaf or Hard of Hearing community. At the UW, these services are coordinated through Disability Resources for Students on behalf of matriculated students who require accommodations, or through the Disability Services Office for employees or visitors to UW functions. Please contact either of these offices to learn how to request these services.

If you are organizing a large event, it is important to include language in the event announcement and, if applicable, on the registration form, informing people of how to request accommodations. For additional information, including recommended language, see the Access Statements page on the Office of the ADA Coordinator website.

For information about captioning recorded video, see our Captions page.

Techniques

The techniques in this section describe how to enable live captions in various online meeting platforms.

Techniques

Zoom supports live captioning during meetings and webinars. This is available as an automated service using automatic speech recognition technology (Zoom refers to this as “live transcription”). This is now enabled by default for all UW Zoom meeting hosts. However, hosts need to enable it for individual meetings. To do so, simply click the “CC” button in Zoom, and select “Enable Auto-Transcription.”

Screenshot of captions popup menu in Zoom

For additional information on this feature, see Live Captioning (Machine Generated) in IT Connect or  Closed Captioning and Live Transcription in the Zoom Help Center.

Note that automatic captions are not currently accurate enough to serve as an accommodation for people who depend on captions. For people who require an accommodation, captions can be typed directly into Zoom or can be added to Zoom via an integration with a third-party software or service. Either of these options can be selected from the popup menu shown above.  For additional details, see Getting Started with Closed Captioning in the Zoom Help Center.

Third party captioning services can be arranged on behalf of faculty, staff, and students with disabilities by contacting either the UW Disability Services Office or Disability Resources for Students. For additional instructions on arranging for live captions as an accommodation, see the Outsourcing Live Captions section of our Live captions page.

For information about enabling live captions in Teams, see the following Microsoft help page:

Captions can be added to live streams in YouTube. For more information, see either of the following resources:

WCAG 2.1 success criteria

The issues described on this page, and associated Techniques pages, map to the following success criteria in the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1: