What Is Webcasting?
Webcasting is a general term in I.T. that refers to broadcasting or presenting over the Internet. Web + broadcast = webcast. As Internet service providers get faster and more reliable, more businesses are using webcasting to further grow their businesses and add innovative and interactive ways to communicate with their target audiences.
Webcasting is happening in realtime and in big numbers. From lecture style webcasting and event-related live streams to PowerPoint presentations combined with realtime audio – the types of events streamed to the Internet are endless today. Users are also utilizing social media platforms like Instagram, Youtube and Facebook to live stream their messages.
Why Do I Need Webcast Captioning?
Right now a live-streaming revolution is taking place around the world, but millions of people are excluded from it. The majority of webcasts, webinars, and social media live streams do not include captions, excluding many people with hearing loss. 48 million Americans alone experience some form of hearing loss.
If you have media on your website or social media pages that are not accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing with captions, we can help ensure your platforms are compliant with the current FCC and ADA regulations. Not only will captioning your webcasts meet the needs of your participants, but it will also help your organization meet Section 508 compliance requirements.
Who Uses Webcast Captioning?
If you are an online trainer and do the majority of your business transactions and training online, you know how much work goes into planning a webinar or webcast. But one factor that often goes without consideration when planning a webcast is accessibility. If you have viewers or participants who are deaf or have hearing loss, they will struggle to hear what the speakers are saying if they don’t have access to live webcast captioning. If these attendees don’t know what is being said, they likely won’t bother watching the webinar. Accommodating your viewers with hearing loss is just as important as your hearing viewers.
Providing webcast captioning also makes your webinar more attractive to potential viewers who may use English as their second language as well. Captions provide a much-needed link to comprehension and communication access for people with language barriers of all kinds. Making your webcast accessible to everyone not only demonstrates your commitment to inclusion but also builds greater trust between your audience and your brand.
Webcast Captioning By Caption Pros Also Comes With A Transcript
As our professional captioner’s live captions turn your speech into text in realtime, a transcript is also being created during your webinar or webcast. You can make a written transcript of your webinar training available to whomever you choose, use it to write complementary content to accompany the webinar, or keep it on file as a record of your webcast. If your webinar was recorded and you intend for it remain online for people to watch at a later date, the transcript can be used to create closed captions. We can help you with the final output of this file as well.
When time is of the essence, we use realtime editors during your live webcast to ensure the transcript is ready immediately following the conclusion. While our standard is to provide a roughly edited file within 24 hours, we can provide a fully edited transcript delivered the same day as your event if requested.
How Is Webcast Captioning Done?
Our captioner listens to your webcast and then types every spoken word using a stenographic keyboard. The captioner’s computer then translates the steno language into English text, formatted as captions. All we need to make this happen is reliable access to your audio feed and an Internet connection. If we can hear the speaker or presenter during the webcast, we can caption it and provide a realtime stream of the content in text to any Internet-connected device.
Our certified captioners can provide seamless realtime speech-to-text translation for your webcast, webinar or social media live stream via our Web platform through a link to the live captions or through an iFrame code that can be added to the webinar page. Captions can then be streamed below the video on your own website. We also have the technology available that allows our captioners to overlay the text on top of any application that does not have native captioning support.
Still Have Questions About Webcasting?
Visit our FAQ page for a list of frequently asked questions or feel free to drop us a line through our contact form and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
