As discussed in previous emails, accessibility to content and workflow tools for those with disabilities is a growing market problem in our industry. A large medical association was sued by a medical school for content not being accessible to hearing-impaired students. Accessibility regulations in the EU, US, Canada, and States are growing. The option to provide closed captions on video content is an approach to providing access to those with hearing and sight impairments. While we have had solutions for on-demand recordings, we can now display captions for live streams through video meetings and through the Vimeo service. These live closed-captioning solutions use Artificial Intelligence, meaning that the delay for human-translated text is eliminated, with accuracy close to what human translators can provide. We’ve added a new closed captioning functionality for our video meetings which offers subtitles for participant communications. We’ve also started offering Vimeo live stream translation on cAttendee.
CTI video meeting closed captioning is a “no additional cost” option and is available on the browsers Zoom supports. A presenter can turn on closed captioning during a video call by clicking “Live Transcription” and selecting “Enable Auto-Transcription.” Closed captioning works for all CTI video meetings, including presentations, sessions, booths, and the networking lounge. Make sure your mouse is over the video to view the live transcript. Readers for sight-impaired attendees can “read” captions to those users.
Vimeo closed captioning for live streams has a per-event cost which is based on the size of the event, and is turned on in the streaming set-up.
These enhancements, coupled with the accessibility plug-ins released for cAttendee and PP8, bring the CTI virtual meeting tools into compliance with the current accessibility regulations and are expected to impact our customer’s events positively.