Live Captions So Delayed They’re Useless During the Event

Why it matters

Deaf and hard-of-hearing participants in live streams, classes, and meetings.

How to test

Watch live captions against the speaker/slides: if the lag makes them unreadable relative to what's currently being shown, it fails.

How to fix

Readable, reasonably accurate real-time captions must run for the entire live event.

<div id="live-stream"><!-- live video --></div>

<div id="live-captions" aria-live="polite"></div>

Real-time captions, from a human captioner or a checked automated feed, must ship with the live audio, not after it.

Outcome

On a car-rental site's checkout flow, this barrier is gone for deaf and hard-of-hearing participants in live streams, classes — they get the same result as anyone else here.

Who is affected

Deaf and hard-of-hearing participants in live streams, classes, and meetings.