How can the field of live captioning services improve?  

• censoring profanity or allowing automatic captioning to censor profanity is unacceptable.

• understand that auto-captioning IS NOT solution

• Lobby for laws and regulations stipulating human captioners, educate high school students about this terrific career whether they work in live captioning or post-production, prioritize testing and certification of human captioners, review and publish findings of ASR error rates.

• Advocacy for live captioning is needed in hospital and health care settings, educational settings, legal settings. While auto-captioning is improving, it has a long way to go and can't capture accents, emotion, humor, etc.

• We need more advocacy towards equitable communication access. Increasingly, educational institutions are imposing Verbit, Otter, and other automated systems that produce ineffective captions on students. This places an already highly marginalized population at risk as it limits their level of communication, participation, and understanding, which in turn negatively impacts them academically and emotionally, limiting their opportunities to advance academically. There should be more awareness and education from the professionals who support students with disabilities attending college who rely on captioning services. Unfortunately, the law doesn't mean much for these institutions; they are swayed by the monetary and labor advantages of using automated options. Not all students have a clear understanding of their legal rights, especially when the same people who are supposed to look after their access are engaging in gatekeeping processes that do not benefit them. While automated systems are a great resource to have available, they aren't equitable for all types of circumstances or environments. Captioners are our "ears" in the classroom; not only do they facilitate access through their typed work, but also advocate for students when verbal communication is weak by speaking up on our behalf, requesting speakers to repeat their statements, adjusting their speech pace or tone, asking for clarification when something is mispronounced or hard to understand. Only a human being can adjust the captions to an environment, which is a big factor impacting the quality of the transcription. Sadly, only those who rely on captioners truly understand the difference and impact captionists have on equitably communication access in real-time to facilitate participation and belonging.

• More providers and not so expensive, especially in the k-12 setting.

• So often we hear we don't have a "CART" we can get an ASL Terp for you. HOH don't know ASL most of the time. So much misunderstanding out there. No one knows about CART and it's life changing. Medical professionals are shocked to learn about CART for the HOH.

• hire DIVERSE providers. be accurate. be transparent.

• Automated live captioning has had a huge positive impact on my access in many contexts - I use Otter for daily communication with hearing people,Zoom auto captions for meetings, Google LIve Transcribe for videos and movies, etc. It's amazing. I still prefer interpreters over captioning, but having the option of autocaptions is a fantastic backup. I would love to see greater accuracy in autocaptions for people with accents and for live performing arts events.

• Make the auto captions NOT always on. Make them as DIFFICULT to turn on as it is for human captioners!

• Transcribers occasionally write [Rambling.] as the instructor is going over something again in greater detail.

• I'm not sure how it would but requiring them for all videos would be really helpful I'm sure

• Availability of live captioning services.

• It should be offered in all settings without questioning you or asking for evidence of why you need it

• Improve AI versus actual person blended approaches; both are not infallible; both are needed

• Less output delay

• I would welcome its being more readily available in rural communities. Local network television's closed-captioning services leave a lot to be desired, and captioning is rarely available in the programs and events offered at community events. People are not often familiar with the differences between automated and live captioning, too.

• Doing surveys like this to ask consumers what they want. Thank you!

• I hope there are or soon will be minimal (at least) training and skill standards for TV/media captioning competency and accuracy. It is frustrating to watch TV - especially live events such as local news and most sports programs - where the captioning quality is bad to worse.

• We need more qualified live captioners to meet the need/demand of the customers who need the service. It would be great if there were scholarships or other financial aid for people who want to be trained.

• Be available and present. I also think more info (such as stats) should highlight the major differences between automated captions versus live captioning. As an example, it would be helpful to cite info re percentage of times that automated captioning includes errors versus live captioning. I would venture to guess that automated captioning services reflect 15% accuracy and live captioning captures speaking with 75 - 85 % accuracy. It would be important to compute this and have this statistic available for advocacy purposes.

• Help figure out to make CC available in zoom while sharing PowerPoints from other students or me.

• Improved microphone usage.

• More providers

• Having a camera for the captioner to see what is going on so they can point out when the prof says and points at the board or at the screen. Also a mic that pics up the room so as when other students talk they are able to cc that as well. That's when I struggle to hear or read the cc the most

• More racial and ethnic diversity in providers. Less automated captioning, more live captioning.

• Be more active