18 posts tagged with "Live Captioning"

County and municipal PEG access channels sit at the center of public meeting video in Colorado. You simulcast council and board sessions to cable, your website, and YouTube. Cities and school districts ask your station for guidance on accessible broadcasts. And when budget season arrives, directors need a defensible story for how live captioning, archived captions, and audio descriptions get funded.

This guide is written for Colorado PEG and access channel directors, franchise administrators, and AV staff evaluating captioning vendors. It covers the legal landscape, how PEG funding may apply, and a practical procurement workflow that starts with measuring your gap before you commit.

CART captions in Microsoft Teams refer to professional human-powered real-time transcription displayed during a meeting, distinct from Teams' built-in automatic live captions. Teams' native "live captions" use AI speech recognition, while CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) delivers 99%+ accuracy from a trained captioner for accommodation requests, legal proceedings, and high-stakes events. Teams also exposes "caption options" settings for language, profanity filtering, and speaker attribution on its built-in captions.

California Senate Bill 707 is the most significant update to the state's open meeting law in decades. Signed by Governor Newsom on October 3, 2025, SB 707 amends the Ralph M. Brown Act to require public agencies across California to offer hybrid meetings with two-way remote participation, activate real-time captioning on video platforms, translate meeting agendas into languages spoken by significant portions of the local population, and take concrete steps to encourage participation from underrepresented communities. The law took effect on January 1, 2026, with enhanced requirements for larger agencies kicking in on July 1, 2026.

Every summer, cities across the country host parades, fireworks shows, festivals, and outdoor ceremonies. A grandstand announcer calls out each float, marching band, and community group as they pass. But that speaker system only carries 2 to 3 blocks. Anyone watching from further down the route, sitting in a lawn chair around the corner, or standing across a noisy intersection hears nothing.

For attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, the announcer was never accessible in the first place. Recap changes that for both groups: live captions and text-to-speech voiceover turn any outdoor event into one that every attendee can follow, from anywhere, on their own phone.

Live captioning for public meetings, lectures, and broadcasts depends entirely on the speech recognition engine running behind the scenes. If that engine goes down, captions stop. For organizations with accessibility obligations under ADA Title II or WCAG 2.1 AA, an outage during a city council session or commencement ceremony is not just inconvenient; it is a compliance gap.

Recap now supports three live speech recognition providers: Deepgram, ElevenLabs, and Google. When one provider experiences errors, Recap automatically fails over to the next, keeping captions running without manual intervention.

Government agencies and educational institutions increasingly issue RFPs for real-time closed captioning services. These requests appears in solicitations from school boards, city councils, state agencies, and colleges that need captions during live meetings, not just on recorded video afterward.

This guide explains what a real-time closed captioning service is, what procurement teams typically require, and how to evaluate vendors for school board meetings, city council sessions, public hearings, planning commission meetings, and commencement ceremonies.

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.

Across school districts, high school television stations, and student-run media programs, communicators are asking the same questions in public forums: How do we caption live concerts, student-led home-room broadcasts, and games and competitions when nothing is scripted? How do we keep up in post-production on the Monday after when students and advisers are already stretched thin? Is “upload to YouTube later” enough? How do real teams balance accessibility expectations against staffing?

This article answers those questions directly and explains how Recap Innovations supports each concern in one platform, from the live encoder to the archived episode on your website.

If you are a city clerk, city manager, or IT director at a local government with 50,000 or more residents, the ADA Title II compliance deadline for your web content is April 24, 2026. That includes every council meeting video, commission meeting recording, public hearing, and informational video on your city website or social media channels.

Many cities are discovering that their current streaming or website vendor has been slow to offer accessibility solutions, or that the quoted costs are far higher than expected. This guide is for the local government staff member who needs to get compliant quickly, practically, and affordably.

Live captions and real-time translation already remove barriers for attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing, and for those who speak a different language. But what about attendees who would benefit from hearing the translation rather than reading it? Starting today, Recap Innovations supports multi-lingual voiceover for translated live captions, powered by high-quality natural sounding text-to-speech.

Not every live event has the same captioning needs. An informal departmental meeting and a graduation commencement require very different levels of accuracy. That is why Recap Innovations now offers three distinct live captioning service tiers, including a new professional CART option with human captioners delivering 99%+ accuracy in real time.

Recap Innovations now supports live captioning for YouTube live streams, enabling content creators, educational institutions, and enterprises to deliver accessible broadcasts that meet WCAG 2.1 AA compliance standards.

Recap Innovations is excited to announce native support for real-time live captioning in Zoom meetings. Organizations can now deliver accurate, human-moderated captions directly to Zoom participants, combining AI speed with human precision for the highest quality accessibility experience.

Recap Innovations is expanding its live captioning platform with real-time translation capabilities, enabling viewers to access live captions in their preferred language as events happen. This breakthrough feature transforms live accessibility by serving international audiences, multilingual students, and diverse communities simultaneously during conference events, lectures, webinars, and broadcasts.

State and local governments, including city councils, county boards, and public agencies, face an approaching ADA Title II compliance deadline requiring all web and mobile content, including videos, to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standards. Communities with populations over 50,000 must comply by April 24, 2026, while those under 50,000 have until April 24, 2027. This requirement fundamentally changes how government entities publish meeting videos, public announcements, educational content, and other multimedia materials.

This comprehensive guide explains the video accessibility requirements for state and local governments, the compliance deadlines based on population size, and practical solutions for meeting these mandates through transcription, closed captioning, live captioning, and audio description services.

Live captions—also known as real-time captions or Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART)—are becoming essential for colleges and universities. With the April 2026 ADA Title II compliance deadline requiring institutions to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards, live captioning for all live audio content is now mandatory, not optional. This comprehensive guide explains what live captions are, when they're required, how they work, and how to implement them effectively at your institution.

Recap Innovations is excited to announce the launch of our comprehensive live captioning and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services, designed specifically for educational institutions preparing for the April 2026 ADA Title II compliance deadline. This new offering extends our industry-leading video accessibility platform to include real-time captioning for live events, lectures, webinars, and broadcasts.

Starting April 24, 2026, state and local governments, including public universities and colleges, must comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA standard under ADA Title II. This requirement significantly impacts how institutions handle video content, podcasts, webinars, and other time-based media. Understanding these requirements now is critical for planning, budgeting, and implementing compliant solutions before the deadline.

This comprehensive guide breaks down each WCAG 2.1 success criterion for time-based media (Guideline 1.2), explains what's required for ADA Title II compliance, and clarifies what goes beyond the minimum requirements.