Getting the best out of remote captioning for teleconferences

Whether you’re an organisation with deaf employees, or a deaf professional yourself, there are some key things you need to know to ensure live remote captioning of your teleconferences goes smoothly. Here are our top 10 tips:

1. Book remote captioning as far in advance as you can. That helps us to provide a captioner who will suit your needs. If, for example, you are working on a project involving a series of teleconferences, we’ll do our best to provide you with the same captioner throughout.
2. Don’t forget to provide us with the teleconference access details as soon as you get them. Our captioners join your calls at least ten minutes before they start to ensure your remote captioning is ready from the get-go.
3. If you have an agenda and list of attendees we’d love to see them in advance. It makes a big difference to your experience of remote captioning if we can add those details to our software before the call.
4. The same goes for any technical terms and names of people, places, events etc that you might discuss in the meeting. Don’t worry, we don’t need chapter and verse on them, just to add them into our remote captioning software ahead of the meeting so we use – and spell –them accurately. All this preparation helps us ensure our remote captioning, and real-time transcription, are as accurate as possible.
5. It’s a good idea for speakers to identify themselves at the start of the teleconference and, if possible, when they speak. This helps the deaf participants to know who is speaking.
6. If there is a Chairperson for the meeting, please ask participants to take turns to speak. We recognise that can be a challenge during teleconferences, but every little helps!
7. Everyone on the call will benefit if participants are reminded to speak clearly, and ensure they are in range of a microphone.
8. If appropriate for the teleconference it will help live captioning if all non-speaking participants have their phones on mute. It can be hard for everyone to hear over the sound of train announcements or street hubbub.
9. Do let us know in advance if there is any video or PowerPoint presentation planned. With 1Fuzion – state-of-the-art technology – our remote captioning can stream on top of your presentation or YouTube video, meaning deaf participants only need one screen to watch the film/presentation and read the captions.
10. Talk to us! If you have any queries or want expert advice on your teleconference, just email us on bookings@121captions.com or call us on +44 (0) 20 8012 8170. If a query arises during a live remote captioning session, deaf participants can message the captioner direct via the chat box on the captions screen.

To find out more about our remote captioning services for teleconferences, meetings, events and training, contact us.