Automated Live Captions

Captions are a key component of accessible videos – and with the increase in use of video recordings and live virtual events that our campus has experienced over the past year, captions are more important than ever.

While captions for recorded video can be created with relative ease by someone without much experience, providing real-time captioning for live events requires an advanced skill set. As a result, if you need accurate live captioning created by a human, you will generally have to purchase live captioning services from a vendor. This can be cost-prohibitive in cases where live captions aren’t required by campus policy but would still be nice to have to improve the accessibility of the meeting or event.

This is where automated live captions come in. Automated captions are created by an algorithm called “automatic speech recognition” or ASR. Some ASR systems are more accurate than others, but all automated captions should be assumed to be less accurate than human captioning. Automated captions are a good way to provide mostly-accurate captions in cases where no one requires live captions to access the content.

Providing captions even when it’s not essential for access still benefits many people with and without disabilities. Captions can be beneficial for people with ADD/ADHD, people with auditory processing disorders, people for whom English is not their first language, people who learn better by reading than listening, and many more.

Automated Live Captioning Tools

Until earlier this year, the best free automated tools for live captioning a presentation were the ASR captions in Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint. However, a key limitation of these tools is that they generally only caption the speech of the presenter, and not the speech of audience members or other presenters.

However, as of this February, Zoom now offers automated live captions that you can enable for any meetings hosted by your CU Boulder Zoom account. To do so, you will need to log into the Zoom desktop site to adjust your account settings. Once the feature is enabled on your Zoom account, you will also have to turn on live transcription in the meeting that you wish to use it in. Once that is turned on, all attendees will then receive a notification that live captions are available. The captions are generally pretty accurate, though not more accurate than a human would be. Please consult our Zoom automated captions tutorial for support with enabling the feature for your Zoom account.

(Please note: These captions are generated from a service called Otter.ai, which also offers 600 minutes of free transcription each month to anyone who creates an account on their site. If you like the quality of the Zoom automated captions and have other transcription needs in your work, Otter’s free transcription service may be a helpful tool to check out.)

Automated Captioning Limitations

The most important thing to remember about automated captions is that they should not be used to provide a captioning accommodation. If a person with a disability has requested live captioning as an accommodation, please contact the ADA Office (or Disability Services if it’s for a current student) to arrange for a live captioner to attend your meeting or event and provide real-time captions.

Additionally, automated live captions shouldn’t be used for public-facing events that are required to have accurate live captions available. If you have questions about whether captions are required for your event, please contact captioning@colorado.edu.

March Challenges

  • If you haven’t, enable live captions on your Zoom account.
  • Try turning live captions on during a meeting. Do you personally find them helpful? Ask your attendees if they found them helpful, and if so, why. We’d love to hear about the responses you get!

Learn More

Your Thoughts

We want to hear from you about any questions or issues you run into while trying out this accessibility practice this month! Please send us your thoughts on this month’s topic.

If you have questions or comments, or would like support with accessibility, please contact us at DigitalAccessibility@Colorado.edu.