Live vs. Post-Production Captioning: Which One Do You Need?

Live vs. Post-Production Captioning: Which is Right for Your Event?

Captions are the cornerstone of accessible and high-quality content. Not only do they ensure that people who are Deaf or hard of hearing, can comprehend speech within videos, but they also help people focus in a world full of constant distractions. In fact, statistics show that 80% of people who use captions don’t have a hearing impairment, while another 80% say they’re more likely to watch a video to the end if captions are available. Despite these impressive figures, 83% of global advertisements lack captions, meaning many businesses are failing to reach key audience members.

If you haven’t done so already, it’s a great idea to start captioning your live events, training videos, marketing content, and more! But how should you implement captions for live events? We’ve put together a quick guide to live and post-production captioning to help you enhance audience engagement and accessibility.

1. Understanding Live Captioning

Live captioning delivers text transcription of spoken content in real-time, typically using communication access real-time translation (CART) services.

Live CART captioning offers the following benefits:

Interactivity: If you implement CART for virtual events, you can widen audience participation, ensuring Q&A sessions and panel discussions are as inclusive as possible.
Immediacy: Live captioning keeps audiences engaged during live events. Implementing CART for virtual events is especially helpful if audience members are in noisy environments or cannot turn their sound on.
Compliance: Implementing live captioning aligns with accessibility standards, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)—an especially vital consideration for public schools, universities, government institutions, and non-profit organizations.

Live captioning tends to work well for virtual or in-person town halls, live webinars, conferences, summits, and live streaming events.

2. Understanding Post-Production Captioning

Post-production captioning involves adding captions to pre-recorded content following an event. This method ensures more precise and polished captions than live captioning, as you can edit for grammatical accuracy and timing.

Benefits include:

Customizability: You can add translations and make adjustments in line with your brand guidelines.
Precision: With post-production captioning, you can rectify any transcription errors.
Boosts Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Post-production captioning increases the amount of searchable text on your website or social platforms, enhancing your SEO.

Post-production captioning tends to work well for recorded webinars, podcasts, YouTube content, marketing materials and advertisements, and training and educational videos.

3. Key Differences Between Live and Post-Production Captioning

Wondering where the main differences lie between live and post-production captioning?

Here are the top factors to consider:

Timing: Live CART captioning delivers instant results, making it perfect for time-sensitive events. Post-production captions, meanwhile, require additional processing time.
Accuracy: Post-production captioning typically excels in spelling, grammar, and tone accuracy. However, CART captioning services are increasingly delivering high-quality results with minimal errors. Our team of human captioners maintains a 98.9% accuracy rate.
Audience Engagement: Live captioning can help keep audience members engaged during events, encouraging them to ask more questions and get involved.

4. Choosing the Right Captioning for Your Event

Selecting the right captioning type for your event can be tough. To help make your decision a little easier, we’ve listed the most crucial factors that should inform your choice:

Budget: Live captioning is often more costly due to its real-time nature, specialized technology, and engagement benefits. Post-production, on the other hand, is often completed in-house and requires fewer resources (although it is typically more time-consuming).
Event Type: Live, interactive experiences can benefit hugely from live CART captioning. Meanwhile, uploading post-production captions to evergreen content will ensure its accuracy and longevity.
Accessibility Goals: If you’re looking to deliver an inclusive event, live captioning is a must. If you’re looking to reach audiences over time, post-production captioning is probably a better choice.

Start Captioning Today

As you can see, captions represent the bedrock of video accessibility, so now is a great time to consider your options. Both live captioning and post-production captioning have their unique advantages, depending on your audience, goals, and event needs.

If you’re wondering whether to invest in post-production captioning or CART services for accessibility, don’t hesitate to get in touch with HRI-CART today. Our friendly team will help you choose the perfect captioning solution for your event.