Zoom 103 - Adding Closed Captions

Zoom has a number of accessibility features, including automatic closed captioning. This feature allows you to read what people are saying as they are saying it, which is helpful if you have trouble hearing or understanding the conversation during the meeting. It doesn't capture every word spoken perfectly, depending on people's voices and accents, but it can still help. As your meeting host, I've set up our meetings so captioning is available for you, but you have to turn it on to see the captions. Here's how to turn it on.

When you join the meeting, you will see a control bar at the bottom of your Zoom screen, as shown in the picture below. You might have to move your mouse or cursor a little to get that bar to appear. Look for the "CC" icon, which stands for Closed Captions. Click on it and, when people speak, captions should appear just above the control bar.

If you're working from a desktop or laptop computer, you can change the size of the words in the closed caption box by clicking on the little up arrow or caret next to the CC icon, as shown above. The box below will pop up and you can slide the blue button to the right to make the letters bigger, or to the left to make the letters smaller. You can also change the color of the captions if that helps you see them more easily. This may not be an option on a tablet or phone, but be sure that you're using your device in "landscape" mode, rather than "portrait" mode. That means turning it sideways rather than holding it upright, and make sure your Zoom window fills the whole screen.

Please let me know if you run into problems getting captions to work for you.

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