In a victory for accessibility advocates everywhere, and especially to the delight of the AccessMU team, we are excited to announce that automatic transcriptions are now available in our Zoom instance!

To enable these live captions, you’ll need to flip a switch in your Zoom settings:

Note: To enable auto transcriptions, you will need to be running the latest version of Zoom, so please check to make sure your app is up to date!

Note 2: Only the HOST can enable and disable the automatic transcriptions.

In the Settings menu, under “Accessibility,” make sure the box next to “Closed captioning is available” has a blue checkmark.

Then during your meetings, you will see a button labeled “CC” — select that and then “Enable Auto Transcription.”

One thing to remember is that these are transcriptions provided by artificial intelligence — there is no “live” person in the back end of your Zoom call providing a typed transcript. As such, there may be some mistakes as the technology learns.

And that’s it!

Important caveat:

Automatic transcription is currently not accurate enough to be used in any cases where a person with a disability requests a captioning accommodation.  For more information about providing student accommodations, please contact the Miller Center for Student Disability Services.