Nothing super high level this wee. Two weeks ago I mentioned how you need to have captions on your site. If you haven’t read that article yet, take a few minutes and do so.
This week we’re talking about captions in a live scenario. When we consider closed captions on a prerecorded video, we could send the video to a transcriptionist. The transcriptionist would then build our caption file. But what if you are doing a webinar or streaming?
It’s pretty simple. You need to set up a live captioner to cover the meeting. Communication Access Real-time Translation (CART) is the method. Someone will sit in on the meeting and write the captions in real time. As part of the broadcast, you would show those captions on the screen. It’s important to use live captioners for this.
Some tools out there for video calls have automated or AI enhanced captions. Microsoft Teams and Zoom both have it. This is certainly better than having nothing, but it is not an equivalent to having someone typing them. There have been improvements in recent years. However, these automated tools still flub enough words and phrases. In any critical situation, you don’t want to rely on them.
Humans doing the captioning is always better than a machine. They understand inflection, human behavior, and body language better than any machine can. This allows them to properly apply those things to the captions.
As you set up your next webinar, hire two people to be on the call. One should be a real-time captioner. The other should be a sign language interpreter. We’ll talk more on this later.