Captions (Live)
A live event carrying sound alongside pictures or slides needs captions while it is happening. Captioning the recording afterwards is a different obligation on a different clock. The standard names no method, so anything producing captions that meet the definition qualifies. And the definition does not relax for live. Speech, sound effects, music and speaker names are all still in scope, which is the reason a professional live captioner costs what they do. Two limits are worth knowing. A live stream with sound and nothing else, a radio-style broadcast, is not covered here at all. That one lands on 1.2.9, at Level AAA. And a two-way call between people is treated differently, because the rule was written for broadcast. It does not put the captioning job on the calling software. It puts it on the people running the call, meaning whoever is speaking or whoever is hosting, which on your own webinar is you.
Why it matters
A live event is the one format nobody can pause. Captioning the recording the next day does nothing for the deaf attendee sitting in your webinar now, trying to follow well enough to ask a question before it ends. They are not asking for the content later. They are asking to be in the room. Live captions help everyone else too, since chances are pretty good somebody is joining from a noisy kitchen or on a connection that keeps dropping the audio.
Who this rule protects
Deaf and hard-of-hearing attendees depend on live captions most directly, because without them the event carries no content at all. Attendees who read faster than they listen use the same text. So does anyone joining from somewhere loud, or on a line that keeps cutting out.
How to check it yourself
- Join a live stream or webinar as an ordinary attendee would and confirm captions are there. A switch inside the player counts, and so do captions burned into the stream that nobody can switch off.
- Watch the captions during the event and judge their lag and their accuracy. They have to arrive fast enough to follow and read as sentences rather than as word salad.
- Check the captions identify speakers, because a panel with no speaker labels collapses into one voice.
- Check the registration or invitation materials tell attendees captions will be available, so somebody can decide whether the event is worth joining.
- Check the published recording afterwards. A live event creates two obligations on two clocks. This one at AA while it runs, and 1.2.2 at Level A once the file is up.
Failures we see most often
- A monthly live Q&A runs with no captions, even though the recording is captioned days after the event ends.
- A platform supports live captions and the host leaves them switched off by default, every time.
- Automatic captions run so far behind the speech that an attendee reading them is a question and a half out of date.
- Live captions carry the words and never name the speaker, so a three-person panel reads as one person arguing with themselves.
- The captions drop the audience laughter and the applause, so a deaf attendee cannot tell how the room is reacting.
Who this one is for
Read from this rule's own note above, so the grouping and the note cannot disagree.
- Deaf and hard of hearingpeople who cannot hear the audio
How to fix it
- Turn on your platform's live captioning and test it before the event, using your own vocabulary rather than a demo script. Chances are pretty good the feature is already there and nobody has switched it on.
- For anything high-stakes, book a professional live captioner. The industry term is CART, short for Communication Access Realtime Translation. A human is what handles the product names and technical terms an automatic system mangles.
- Burn captions into the stream where the player has no caption control of its own. Always-on captions are as valid here as switchable ones.
- Say in the invitation that captions will be available, and say how to turn them on, so nobody has to join first to find out.
Step-by-step fix guides (5)
Passes vs. fails
Passes
The same event runs live captions on by default and announces that fact in the invite, so no attendee has to guess.
Fails
A live launch event runs with no captions, so deaf attendees have to guess at the content well enough to ask questions about it.
In audits and lawsuits
This rule arrives the moment a business starts broadcasting, meaning webinars, streamed launches and live training. A support call is a different matter. The criterion was written for broadcast, and it does not force a captioning obligation onto the app that carries a two-way call between individuals. Read the next line before you file that under exempt, though, because it hands the job to the callers or the host instead. Run the meeting and you are the host. In our audits we check two things about the live half. Whether the platform supports captions at all, and whether the host actually switched them on. Then we check the recording, because publishing the file starts the Level A captioning clock on the same event.