Caption This! Best practices for live captioning of jargon-rich
scientific presentations
Abstract
Whether your scientific presentation is in-person or remote, everyone
will understand more of your presentation if it has captions. Like
subtitles of a movie, open captioning makes verbal material accessible
for many people. A study of BBC television watchers reports that 80% of
15 caption users are not deaf nor hard of hearing (1). During
English-spoken scientific presentations, people who are deaf or hard of
hearing, people who have auditory processing disorder and not yet fluent
non-native English speakers develop listening fatigue that can prohibit
their understanding and limit their participation in discussions.
Increasing the accessibility of our presentations and improving
inclusivity of discussions provides a path 20 towards increasing
diversity within sciences. Studies show that subtitles/captioning
improve both English language skills (e.g., 2, 3) and accessibility of
science for deaf and hard of hearing participants (e.g., 3, 4).
Furthermore, not everyone may be in a space where they can access audio,
for example, if they are sharing space with other workers. A myriad of
tools and platforms can provide captioning for live presentations. Why
then don’t 25 we regularly caption presentations? Our resistance may be
due to factors such as not knowing or believing that captioning is
needed, not knowing how to use these tools, and believing that the
resulting captioning will be inadequate. In response to the first
reason, folks should not be forced to disclose their disability in order
for presentations to be accessible to them. In response to the last two
reasons, this article outlines different strategies for providing
captions and presents 30 results of our performance assessment of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) based auto-caption of jargon rich geologic
passages. Because most scientific presentations are delivered using
either Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation software, we
focus our performance assessment on the auto-captioning provided by
these platforms. While a variety of tools can add captions to recorded
lectures that can be edited to improve accuracy, offering a transcript
after a 35 live presentation is not a suitable solution to improve
participation. Here we provide evidence-based best-practices for
providing captioning that will increase the accessibility of live
scientific presentations In-Person Presentations For in-person
presentations, trained human captionists or AI-based auto
caption/transcription 40 software can provide live captioning (Fig. 1).
Captionists use stenography tools to provide