Real-time captioning software for webinars?
July 3, 2012 9:57 AM   Subscribe

Asking on behalf of a friend: she runs a weekly GoToMeeting webinar that now needs to be captioned in real time. Is there a good software solution?

Details: My friend T runs a weekly webinar for clients of a particular software she supports. Since that software is intended for use by Centers for Independent Living, and since Federal law requires that CILs be staffed by at least 50% people with disabilities, a number of the people using the software are Deaf.

T needs to find a way for the weekly webinars to be captioned in real-time. She's pretty sure her boss wants a software solution, rather than hiring a company to do the captioning for them. Some quick web searching turned up a couple of possibilities, but they are PC-only, and she is a Mac user.

The webinar software they use is GoToMeeting. She's a Mac user, currently using Snow Leopard (10.6.8), but planning to go to Mountain Lion (10.8) whenever it comes out. She doesn't have Parallels installed, though she tells me that seems to be one potential solution (that or something like VirtualBox or Boot Camp) that would let her run Windows on her Mac.

Does anyone out there have experience with software for live-captioning GoToMeeting webinars? What do you suggest?
posted by theatro to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
The newest version of gotomeeting has a recording tool for mac.
posted by royalsong at 10:04 AM on July 3, 2012


Could she use something like Keynote, pre-write her captions there, and play that as she does her webinar?

I'm not sure if you're looking for something that's going to take dictation as she talks, or allows someone else to type as she talks (which you could do with any IM client open on her desktop), or if she just needs a pre-written script to show up.
posted by Lyn Never at 10:49 AM on July 3, 2012


I'm hearing-impaired. Any real-time software-based captioning is going to suck. Just go on YouTube and turn the automatic captions on. They suck. Maybe, maybe you can get the gist of what's going on, but that's about it. I'd pre-write the captions.
posted by desjardins at 11:12 AM on July 3, 2012


Response by poster: Thanks, all! I'll pass your suggestions along to her, and hopefully she'll be able to find a solution her boss will approve of.
posted by theatro at 8:28 AM on July 6, 2012


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