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When you’re hosting an event, you want to be sure that everyone attending that event has a great experience. You worry about every detail – the food, the lodging, the venue, the content, the exhibitors – to ensure that nothing is left to chance. But what about accessibility in your education sessions?
An inclusive event is one in which every single attendee feels welcome, and the experience is seamless – regardless of something such as a hearing impairment. Live event captioning is just one component of accessibility, but it’s a hugely important one. 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.
The team at Diversified is always looking for ways to provide great experiences for attendees. That’s what led them to explore providing live event captioning not just on their main stage, but across 9 additional breakout rooms. The goal – to ensure that every educational session at the Administrative Professionals Conference would be accessible, inclusive, and engaging for all.
We worked with the event organizers and the event venue to display live in-room captions in each of these spaces. The captions needed to be able to accurately capture audio from the microphones the presenters were using on stage, as well as any content played from presenters’ computers during their sessions.
Based on accessibility best practices, we were asked to display captions above presenters’ slides on screens in each of the rooms. This allows for clear visibility, even for attendees further back in the room.
Live event captioning seems simple enough – take the words being said on stage and display them on the screen. The proliferation of live captioning in tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and other video conferencing tools bring us a version of this day in and day out. 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 worked with on-location A/V to set up and pressure test internet bandwidth to ensure that there was enough available bandwidth to support all nine rooms running simultaneously.
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.
All told, we provided live event captioning for more than 155 cumulative hours of content across the event. Our team managed the setup of nine hardware encoders, as well as the corresponding software instances and video switchers. We worked in concert with the on-location A/V and IT teams, as well as event organizers, to respond to attendee feedback in real-time and keep things running smoothly.
Are you planning an event? Do you want to provide an experience like this one to your attendees? 5 Tool Productions can help! Schedule a demo with us today to learn how we can make live event captioning a reality at your next event.
