Live Captioning for Employee Accommodations: What HR and IT Teams Should Know
We recently heard from an organization evaluating live captioning for a single employee who is deaf and participates in 25-30 hours of virtual meetings per week. Their primary platform is Microsoft Teams, but they also use Zoom and occasionally Webex. They had straightforward questions: What does it cost? How accurate is it? Does it work with Teams? Are transcripts available after the meeting? Is the data secure? Can we try it first?
This is one of the most common inquiries we receive, and the answers are not always easy to find from other vendors. Here is what HR, disability services, and IT teams should know when evaluating live captioning for an employee accommodation.
Why built-in platform captions often fall short
Zoom, Teams, and Webex all offer built-in automatic captions. For many participants, these are a helpful convenience feature. But for an employee who relies on captions as their primary way to follow a conversation, accuracy matters significantly more.
Built-in captions typically achieve 85-95% accuracy under ideal conditions, but accuracy drops with background noise, multiple overlapping speakers, accents, technical vocabulary, and proper names. An 85% accuracy rate means roughly one error every six or seven words, which can make fast-paced meetings difficult to follow. Speaker identification is also inconsistent: captions frequently misattribute dialogue, which is especially confusing in meetings with many participants.
When an accommodation letter specifies "high-accuracy live transcription," organizations need a service that can reliably exceed 95% accuracy and correctly identify speakers and terminology.
Three accuracy tiers to match the accommodation requirement
Recap Innovations offers three live captioning tiers so you can match the service level to the specific accommodation need:
Automated AI (95-98% accuracy): Real-time AI captioning with no scheduling required. Captions are generated instantly. This tier works well for routine internal meetings where the employee is comfortable with occasional minor errors.
AI + human moderation (97-99% accuracy): AI generates captions instantly while a live human moderator corrects errors, fixes speaker labels, and ensures technical terms and proper names are captured correctly. This is the tier we recommend for most accommodation use cases, especially when the accommodation letter requires reliable speaker identification.
Professional CART (99%+ accuracy): A dedicated human captioner transcribes the meeting in real time. Best for high-stakes meetings, legal proceedings, board sessions, or any situation where near-perfect accuracy is required.
All three tiers produce a searchable, editable post-meeting transcript.
Platform compatibility
Zoom
Captions relay directly into the Zoom meeting window via Zoom's manual captioner API. Participants see captions natively inside Zoom without installing additional software. Setup takes a few minutes per meeting. For a full walkthrough, see our Zoom live captioning guide.
Webex
Captions are delivered through the CART API or through our automated meeting bot, which joins the Webex session and handles audio streaming and caption delivery automatically. No manual steps required from the employee.
Microsoft Teams
Today, the employee opens a personal caption viewer link in a browser tab alongside their Teams window. Captions appear in real time in the browser. This works on any device and requires no IT configuration of the Teams environment. Post-meeting transcript import from Teams is fully supported via the Microsoft Graph API, so recordings can be imported into Recap for editing and search after the meeting.
Native in-meeting Teams caption relay is coming soon.
Any other platform
The personal caption viewer link works with any video conferencing tool. The employee shares their browser microphone or an RTMP audio feed, and captions appear in the browser. This is a platform-agnostic fallback that covers Google Meet, phone conferences, and in-person meetings where the employee has a laptop.
Post-meeting transcripts
Every live captioned session produces a transcript that archives automatically. On the AI tier, the transcript is available immediately after the session ends. With AI + human moderation or CART, a polished transcript is delivered within 24 hours.
In addition to live session transcripts, you can import meeting recording transcripts from Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Google Meet directly into Recap for editing, search, and export. This means even meetings that were not live captioned can have searchable transcripts created from the platform's recording.
Security and privacy
Meeting audio is processed in real time and protected with enterprise-grade security:
- SOC 2 Type II certified, verified by independent annual audits
- AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.2+ in transit
- Hosted in the United States on secure cloud infrastructure
- SSO and SAML integration with your identity provider
- Password-protected live caption viewer links with JWT expiry
- Data retained for the duration of the contract, with a 30-90 day export window and secure deletion on termination following NIST SP 800-88 guidelines
Request our SOC 2 report at security@recap-innovations.com. Read more about our practices in our SOC 2 announcement.
How to get started
- Try it right now. Our live caption demo lets you test AI captioning with your own voice in two minutes, no signup required.
- Book a walkthrough. Schedule a 30-minute demo and we will configure captioning for your specific meeting platform and show you exactly how the employee would experience it.
- Run a two-week pilot. Test with 30 hours of real meetings, validate accuracy with the employee, and confirm the setup works with your IT environment. Money-back guarantee if it does not meet expectations.
If you are evaluating live captioning for an employee accommodation, we are happy to answer specific questions about your setup. Visit our real-time closed captioning services page or workplace live captioning solution page for a complete overview, or book a demo to discuss your requirements directly.