In plain language
Live streams with audio need real-time captions.
Who it affects
Deaf and hard-of-hearing participants in live streams, classes, and meetings.
How to check
Join a live event and confirm readable, reasonably accurate captions run throughout. Worked example — A social media platform's settings menu: watch a full live session start to finish: any stretch of missing/dropped captions during substantive content is a fail.
Common misconception
Auto-generated live captions from a webinar platform are a starting point, not a guarantee. Heavy accents, jargon, or fast speech can push accuracy too low to be usable without a human captioner. Real example: on a weather app's forecast screen, a live weather-alert broadcast embedded in the forecast screen streams with audio but no live captions, so the spoken alert details are unavailable to anyone watching without sound.