Providing Captions for Live Online Events

All events, whether live or recorded, fall under the same requirements as all other ICT Resources, as per Section 3 of the ICT Accessibility Regulation. If the resource is available to a group where the functional limitations of all of the users are not known, then captioning must be provided. This includes, but is not limited to resources available to the public.

If the functional limitations of everyone in the group that has access to the resource is known, captioning only has to be provided as part of an accommodation for a qualified person with a disability.

Live Event Captioning Procedures

Live events can be captioned by someone either being present at the actual presentation or they can, in the case of a Webinar, connect in remotely. For remote captioning follow these procedures.

  1. Arrange for a remote transcription service to provide live captioning. A list of transcription providers can be obtained by emailing accessibility@ncsu.edu. Costs can range from $100-$200 per hour.
  2. The transcription provider will assign an individual (a “writer”) to monitor your event remotely.
  3. Ensure the writer has access to the audio portion of the event, either through a phone line or online. It is fine if they have access to the video portion too, but it is not required.
  4. The transcription provider will give you a URL where the live captions will be published.
    1. If you are using a system which supports live captioning within the user interface, such as Zoom, the captions can be published there instead.
  5. Share this URL with anyone attending your presentation who needs the captions, or in the case of captions within the user interface, provide instructions to the users for how to access the captions.
  6. If you are recording your event, after it is over you can get the text transcript from the caption provider. This can often be used to create captions embedded within the recording. The transcript will not be 100% accurate. Many transcription companies offer services to further edit the transcript to make it more accurate, however this service will incur an extra fee.
  7. After obtaining the transcript you can follow the steps in the Captioning Guide for Creating the Time Stamped Transcript and Incorporating The Caption File into the Multimedia.