Zoom Accessibility & Captioning | Distance Education

Requesting Help for Captioning

Form to request multimedia captioning or transcript assistance

Accessibility Best Practices in Zoom

RESOURCES FOR ACCESSIBILITY CONSIDERATIONS IN ZOOM

Zoom blog: Tips for Hosting More Accessible Meetings

Yale University: Accessibility Best Practices for Zoom Meetings

Two Captioning Settings

There are two settings to turn on in your account settings that aid in captioning efforts. One will generate live auto-generated captions during a Zoom session, and the other will generate auto-captions to your Zoom recordings. It is recommended to have both features turned on. See below for more details.

Note: Auto-generated captions are not usually accurate enough for a deaf or hard-of-hearing student, but still are a good half-measure until human-created captions can be created. If you have an identified deaf or hard-of-hearing student in your course, contact the Distance Education Instructional Accessibility Specialist for assistance, or fill out the form to request multimedia captioning or transcript assistance.

Live Captioning in Zoom

ORDER LIVE CAPTIONING FOR ZOOM LECTURES

Live caption service is reserved for live online classes with student participation. You will need to provide a schedule of lecture dates and times.

To request live captioning, contact the Distance Education Instructional Accessibility Specialist or the Disability Resources Department if you have a disabled student in your course.

How to Turn on Live Auto-Captions

Turn on a feature to generate live auto-generated captions during a Zoom session. Update to the latest version of Zoom. Turn on the feature in your Zoom settings, in the Meeting tab, under Closed Captioning, and then activate it from the bottom menu while in a Zoom session.

Live Transcript setting in Zoom

Auto-Captions for Zoom Recordings

Turning on the Audio Transcription feature will add auto-generated captions to your recorded videos. These auto-captions can act as a temporary accessibility solution while videos are being captioned otherwise. It is always a good idea to turn it on. This feature is only available when you are recording your lectures to the cloud.

Sign into ConferZoom web portal (see Sign In link in upper, right), and click Settings from the side navigation. Then click on the Recording tab.
From the Recording tab, navigate to the Cloud recording option.
Click the Audio Transcript checkbox to enable it, then click Save to confirm the change.

Recording Settings in Zoom, Audio Transcript option shown

Order Captions for Recorded Zoom Videos & Embed Lectures in Your Canvas Course

See the following tutorials on how to download a Zoom video, upload it to 3C Media Solutions, order captions, and embed the video in your Canvas Course:

A few notes about this process:

You don't have to wait until your captions are ready to embed the video. After embedding the video, when the captions are ready, they will just show up in the embedded video.
The video makes a good point that by embedding the lecture video in your course, rather than simply linking to it, students won't be able to share the video with others not enrolled in your course.
3C Media Solutions is a good place to store your videos. Archived videos in Zoom is not a permanent storing option, at some point they will automatically be deleted.