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Phil DiMartino According to the NIH, Approximately 15% of American adults (37.5 million) ages 18 and over report some trouble hearing. By not providing audio accessibility services, you’re missing out on an opportunity to engage a huge portion of your audience.
Beyond that, captions are useful for attendees without hearing impairments as well. Our attention is increasingly split, and the data around online video usage shows an increasing preference for captions. One study shows that Gen Z uses subtitles in their online videos 73% of the time – the demand for live event captioning is a logical next step in this demand for subtitles on content everywhere.
Event Production is all about creating a consistent, positive, seamless experience. Live Event Captioning is just one small piece of creating an event that your attendees will rave about and want to come back to year after year.
When you’re planning an event, live captions might not be the first, or most exciting thing, that comes to mind. There are a million other things you care about. Whether it’s food for attendees, the seating arrangements for your breakout rooms, or the specific technical needs of your keynote speaker, there are plenty of things to take up your time.
But live captions are an increasingly important and impactful component of every live event. The reality is that it’s becoming more of an expectation that an event will provide them, and less of a pleasant surprise when they’re available.
Every day, your event attendees get real-time captions on social media, in zoom, and on powerpoint – they expect the same from your presentations at an educational conference. And if you’re not delivering live captions at your event, you’ll get left behind.
Live event captioning seems simple enough – take the words being said on stage and display them on the screen. But displaying content accurately in a room of this size requires a few extra steps, and some back-end technical setup.
At 5 Tool Productions, we use a combination of hardware and software to bring it all together. The audio to be captioned is fed through a hardware encoder, which allows the content to be processed in real-time in the cloud by AI-based software. This software parses the spoken word, and returns it as a video feed, again via the cloud, which can then be overlaid over content in the room. Our team works in advance to train AI models with accurate pronunciations of key names and phrases that we expect to hear during presentations. These models can also be updated in real-time, meaning if terms are consistently being used, we can add them in.
The result of using this best-in-class software is a highly accurate, extremely fast delivery of captions across multiple instances for long periods of time.
Since all of the content is being processed through the cloud, our team works with on-location A/V to set up and pressure test internet bandwidth to ensure that there is enough available bandwidth to support captions during an event.
The other layer to this process is a video switcher, which allows different content to be sent to the in-room screens at different times. Between sessions we can send hold slides or videos to the screens, and during the sessions we can display the presenter’s slides with captions. This extra component ensures that there’s always relevant content on the screens in a room, and attendees are always seeing something intentional and useful when they look to the front of the room.
Live captions might not feel like the sexiest topic of conversation at your next event planning session, but it’s absolutely something you and your team should be focused on. Providing this service is becoming the norm – and your attendees will be glad to have this option available to fully participate in your next event. Making your video content accessible is a huge focus of ours – and in-person at an event should be no different.
Need help figuring out where to start? Set a demo with us, and we’ll work with you to figure out how to make live captions and your next in-person event a reality.
