For those of us who teach online, accessibility is an important service for our attendees. But “real” closed captioning services start at $1.50 per minute (and up drastically from there).

Here, I share several tips for providing free captioning for hearing-impaired viewers when presenting on Zoom.

First up is Powerpoint, by Microsoft—huge props to Microsoft for pioneering this excellent service embedded in presentation software. Apple isn’t even close to providing this yet. All you need to do is turn on “Always Use Subtitles” under Slide Show settings and choose your language. Once the show is playing, the captions keep up really well.

and

Webcaptioner.com a free web-based captioner. You must use Google Chrome to take advantage of the API for voice transcription. Donations are suggested and well worth it if you use this service.

The only thing I have not yet figured out is free captioning for spoken portions of Zoom presentations when you are not using a slide show or screen-share.

Check out my tests in the video—I think you’ll be impressed!