Adding closed captions to your Zoom meeting enhances accessibility for the hearing impaired and foreign participants. Ideally, you have three options for Zoom captioning: automated, manual, and third-party-generated captions. Your choice will depend on the level of accuracy you need for your Zoom meeting.
Zoom’s automated captions are available in different languages and can be used for meetings and webinars. To use Zoom captioning, make sure that you are using the Global minimum version for Zoom desktop client or Zoom mobile app.
Automated captions
To use automated captioning:
- Sign in as the host
- Go to Settings > Meeting > Advanced > Automated Captions, then toggle on
- Click Enable to verify the change
- Click the pencil icon to select languages
- Click Save
Click the ‘lock icon’ if you don’t want users to change the setting
To turn on translated captions, Go to Settings > Meeting > Advanced > translated captions, then toggle on
Manual captions
Under the manual captioning option, you can assign a person or more to key in the captions manually. To do this:
- Go to Meeting Controls > Host Controls > Setup Manual Captioner> Enable Manual Captioner
- Go to the Zoom toolbar, select Live Transcript > Assign a participant to type, or I will type
- Go to the participant that you want to assign to the participant’s list, hover over it, and click ‘More.’
- From the drop-down menu, click Make Co-host > Yes
- Repeat step 3 and click ‘Assign to type closed caption’ from the drop-down menu
Third-party-generated captions
Third party generated captions let you use a closed caption service provider such as Interpretcloud for accurate Zoom captioning.
To use this option, start by enabling manual captioning in your meeting. You also need to enable the use of caption API tokens to integrate with your third-party closed captions app or software.
Then, copy the meeting’s caption URL (API token) and paste it into the closed captioning software. Once you do that, you’ll have access to the software, and Interpretcloud will handle the rest.
