Contributed by Stephen Polacek, IT Accessibility Evaluator
A recent push by hearing health advocates, along with a public petition, has led to Zoom promising to provide closed captioning to all free accounts by the fall of 2021. With the ongoing pandemic, services such as Zoom have come to the forefront of both work and home life. One of the main challenges though was captioning services were only available to paid accounts. The petition had pushed Microsoft and Google to switch their automatic captioning services to free use but Zoom wasn’t making the transition until now.
While Zoom won’t roll out the feature until the fall, they have created a form that can be used to request captioning for those with hearing disabilities. That form is available through their press announcement: https://blog.zoom.us/update-on-live-transcription-for-free-accounts/. The Google form is available here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSccQQ2W-K8naaltkBIbuv6BfJvisy0NZS2qWIKd0gSMUWGGpQ/viewform.
To enable closed captioning, first check your account settings. In the “In Meeting (Advanced)” section, there will be an option to enable Closed Captioning. Under it will be the checkbox for Live Transcription, which is the free automated version.
Live Transcript checkbox under Closed Captioning
Once it’s been enabled, any meeting you start should have the option enabled on the bottom menu. Simply click it and select LiveTranscript and your captions should be enabled. For a more step-by-step guide, please check Zoom’s Help Center – Closed Captioning Article: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207279736-Closed-captioning-and-live-transcription.
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