In This Post You Will Find:
- Enabling closed captions on Zoom:
- Enabling Captions On Your Own Personal Zoom Account:
- Automatic Captioning vs. CART Captioning vs 3rd Party Live Captioning
- Starting closed captioning in a meeting
- Entering closed captions as a participant
- Using closed captioning in Zoom breakout rooms
- Desktop client
- Mobile app
Enabling closed captions on Zoom:
If you are enabling captions for your own account, this first paragraph is all you need.
Enabling Captions On Your Own Personal Zoom Account:
- Sign in to the Zoom web portal
- In the navigation panel, click Profile
- Click the Settings tab.
- Scroll all the way down to Closed Captioning (under Remote Support and before Save Captions)
- Toggle to enable it. If a verification dialog displays, click Turn On to verify the change.
- (Optional) If you want to make this setting mandatory for all users in your account, click the lock icon, and then click Lock to confirm the setting.
- Immediately below the Closed Captioning option, there is a check box for “Enable live transcription service to show transcript on the side panel in-meeting”. Click it on.
- Toggle the Save Captions option.
Note: Make sure your version fo Zoom is the most up to date!
Updated note: I’m not sure this works on phones, tablets, or older computer systems.
Kara Guiff
Thursday 18th of February 2021
Do you know if this works in breakout rooms as well?
Meriah
Friday 19th of February 2021
No, I don't know, I'm sorry. I've only tested it one-on-one.
Carrie E Levin
Thursday 24th of December 2020
Meriah - this article is misleading. Zoom added an accessible built-in tool and decided to call it "Closed Caption" (CC). It's a tool, nothing more. So technically, Zoom doesn't offer any free closed captions. You failed to mentioned that CART captioners cost money - they're actually quite expensive charging as low as $80/hour. The 3rd party caption apps - AVA and Rev,com charge monthly fees, unlike Otter which is free. These apps use ASR, or automatic speech recognition, thanks to AI. Asking a participant to type is an alternative though most I bet cannot come close to the accuracy of a CART captioner, let alone 3rd party apps with ASR.
Zoom offers something called "Live Transcript" (ie - auto-caption) only on their paid tier accounts: PRO, BUSINESS, EDUCATION and ENTERPRISE. Unlike Google Meet, Zoom refuses to offer for free to the millions of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing folks "Live Transcript". Check out this petition urging Zoom to provide free captions for people with hearing loss.
https://www.change.org/p/zoom-provide-free-captions-for-people-with-hearing-loss-on-video-conferencing-platforms
Karen Mueller-Harder
Sunday 3rd of January 2021
@Meriah, I figured out what the confusion is! In your article, you indicate that automatic captioning (NOT done by a person) is now available, but you don't actually say how to invoke it (though you give lots of good info about assigning a person to type). In the section "Starting closed captioning in a meeting" there is now a THIRD option available (at least to me, as the host of a meeting with a "pro" account), after a captioning service or assigning someone to type: "Live Transcript"! I click that, and suddenly, there are captions at the bottom of the screen, and the speaker is identified if I open the chat window! And they seem to be quite accurate, if everyone is speaking clearly. Hooray!
Meriah
Sunday 27th of December 2020
Have you actually tried it? Because I have. Many times. It IS closed captions, and they do work. I have no idea why Zoom isn't making a big deal out of the fact that they have them now (- perhaps they are in beta? I don't know), but they DO WORK - if they didn't, I would not have posted this.