In today’s digital landscape, effective accessibility is crucial, especially during webinars and high-profile events. One of the most effective ways to enhance communication in these settings is through captioning. While Zoom offers integrated automated captioning, many organizations are turning to high-quality human captioning, also known as CART, for a more accurate and engaging experience.
This guide will give you an overview on how to integrate human realtime captioning into your Zoom events, ensuring that your audience receives a top-notch live captioning experience.
Why Choose Human Captioning?
At TCG, we never use automatic speech recognition or AI tech to produce realtime captions. Captioning created by a human captioner provides a more reliable, comprehensive, readable, and accurate representation of the spoken content. High-quality human captioning provides several advantages over automated options.
Reliable, Accurate Live Events
- Equal Access: Captioning serves multiple audiences. Whether viewers tune in from a noisy environment, want or need to keep the volume low, or simply learn and process information better through visual versus audio, quality captioning increases accessibility for all.
- Accuracy: AI tech aims for verbatim. This isn’t enough for viewers that rely on captioning. Verbatim can lack tone and context that leads to a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the words. Human captioners are better than verbatim!
- Decision-making: Human captioners can understand context, jargon, and nuances better than automated systems, leading to more precise captions. They are not confused by background noises or multiple speakers and can adjust the captions as needed to keep up with speakers.
Quality Evergreen Materials
After an event, TCG can send over a high-quality script, lightly edited realtime transcript. You can add captioning to videos to create an accessible video archive, use on social media, adapt to articles, news updates, and more.
A quick turnaround and boutique captioning production that understands your unique needs can make processes of accessibility smooth for any organization to implement. Given these advantages, investing in human captioning can significantly enhance the quality of your webinars and events.
Key Points to Know for Integrating Human Captioning
When it comes to adding human captioning to your Zoom event, several key factors should be considered for success:
1. Choose a Reputable Captioning Service
Select a captioning service that specializes in realtime CART captioning.
2. Share Pre-Event Details
Before the event, conduct a briefing with the captioning team. Share important details, such as the following:
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- Event Agenda
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- Speaker Information
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- Terminology and Acronyms.
This preparation will help our captioner deliver more accurate captions during the event.
3. Enable Manual Captioning in Zoom
Prior to your event, ensure you have enabled manual captions for all users in the account. This can vary depending on account type, so using Zoom’s FAQ guide an ensure you’re using settings that match your Account type.
4. Invite Captioner as a Panelist
Adding a captioner as a Zoom panelist will give them full access to a webinar. This is most helpful when you want them to enter before the general public to perform a captioning test.
You can invite a captioner as a panelist in advance, or promote them once they’ve joined.
5. (Optional) Test the Setup Before the Event
Finally, an optional step is to run a tech test separate from your actual event. This is a good option if you:
- are new to using human captioning with Zoom and need some extra guidance or time outside of a typical pre-event test
- have a large conference that has multiple tech elements you need to test at once
Invite our captioner to join a rehearsal session to ensure that all technical aspects are working smoothly. Check audio quality, caption visibility, and any potential lag issues.
6. Get Captioning!
Just before the start of the meeting, assign the captioner:
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- Once the host joins, they will see a CC option on the bottom bar. It must be the Host that does this!
- Choose “Assign a participant to type” to open a menu of all participants (this may also say “Open Manage Participants”)
Conclusion
Adding human captioning to your Zoom webinars and customer-facing events is a strategic move that can enhance accessibility and audience engagement. The process may seem overwhelming at first, but choosing a captioning service that guides you through the details can make all the difference.
Make your events memorable and see the difference with inclusive human captioning—because every word counts!
Add captioning to any event!
Request a quote today to learn more about our service offerings.
