eSCRIBE's Closed Captioning Service is a great add-on to it's Webcasting service, used to help facilitate accessible video streams for your constituents and adhering to accessibility standards. Maintaining a high level of transparency with the public is critical, especially in current times where remote meetings might leave people feeling like their elected officials and municipal resources are not as accessible as before. Providing enhanced accessibility tools can be a great driver for engaging all citizens of all capabilities.

Along with new technologies comes the need to properly equip your users with the tools and knowledge to best leverage these new and exciting features and closed captioning is no different. eSCRIBE Closed Captioning service leverages sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to analyze the audio stream from the meeting and apply auto captioning to the live and previously recorded videos. In short, the better your audio quality is, the better the closed captioning accuracy and results will be.

Below you will find some tips to keep in mind and to pass along to your meeting participants to ensure that your organization is taking all appropriate steps to increase the closed captioning accuracy and make sure you that are getting the most out of the service:

1. Should your meeting participants be joining the session via a virtual conference tool (ex: Zoom, Teams, Webex), it is highly recommended that each user join the virtual conference session using their own headset with a mic.

• Built in mics and speakers on devices are great for informal settings but to really get the best audio to and from your meeting participants, a good quality headset and mic are highly recommended. A good quality headset/mic will work to reduce background noise and increase the clarity of the audio received by the Closed Captioning service, thus increasing the accuracy of the captions.
• Proper enunciation and pacing by meeting participants and public presenters can go a long way.

• This one can be a little tricky, as meeting participants are used to speaking the way they are most comfortable without considering the external technologies that are in place that benefit from proper enunciation. It is best to communicate with your meeting participants and public presenters that carefully pronouncing words and speaking at a clear and steady pace is necessary for the public to follow along with the video stream and allow the artificial intelligence engines to do their job in interpreting what each person is saying, as accurately as possible.  
• The positioning between meeting participants and their mics can help reduce muffled voices or low audio.

• Prior to a meeting, it’s always a good practice to ensure the adequate placement of mics between the participant and the speakers. This can be easily overlooked and not communicated to your meeting participants and public presenters but doing so can drastically improve the quality of the audio feed. Mic that is too close will result in muffled audio, on the other end, if the mic is too far, the speakers volume will be too low audio and present problems for the captioning to pick up their voice accurately. Doing a mic and sound levels check prior to the meeting commencing is recommended practice to add to your pre-meeting checklist.

As a rule of thumb, the lower the quality of the meeting audio, the lower the quality and accuracy of the closed captions will be. So keep these tips in mind when preparing for your meetings and as always if there is anything you’d like to review or discuss about your current audio or video setup, don’t hesitate to reach out to your account manager to schedule a call and review.

For other best practices in webcasting, take a look at the following articles:

• Best Practices to Facilitate Remote/Hybrid Meetings
• Setting Up A Contingency Plan For Webcasting