Voice to text technology continues to improve every year. We are now able to share our thoughts in real-time with an entire room of people using tools that capture speech into text. But did you know that live captioning has benefits in addition to accessibility that allow you to reach an even wider audience?

The Live Captioning Initiative, first and foremost, helps hearing impaired individuals follow along and participate at events in real-time. However, Live Captioning also benefits people whose first language is different from the language being used or comprehend written word better. It helps people understand speakers with different voices and accents in many group situations and helps make your event more accessible by enabling access for people with disabilities. It also can help further the reach to an even wider audience once the event is over.

The Live Captioning tool has a feature that allows a transcript to be created for each speaking session at an event. This transcript can be uploaded for video captioning to YouTube or other video sharing services. The transcript can also provide SEO value to websites when it’s added as text to the event page.

In this session we will demonstrate Live Captioning and its benefits for any event. Attendees will learn how to:

Use the Live Captioning Initiative tool.
Create a transcript for each speaker at events.
Understand the differences between live captioning and real-time captioning (also known as open captioning or real-time stenography).
Compare other speech to text tools.
Help contribute to the Live Captioning Initiative.

Live Captioning tool: https://lc.midcamp.org/
Live Captioning Project: https://github.com/MidCamp/live-captioning
Live Captioning on Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/live-captioning-initiative
View Presentation: https://bit.ly/drupalcorn-lc

Speaker: Andy Olson
https://2019.drupalcorn.org/session/live-captioning-initiative-make-your-next-event-accessible-everyone