Live closed captioning
The Ultra experience includes live closed captioning. This provides an accessible learning experience for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as for students whose native language is different from the moderator's.
Moderators must make attendees captioners. Captioners type what is being said during a session. Other attendees can view what is being typed in real time. You can have multiple captioners for multiple languages.
More on making an attendee a captioner for moderators
Captions entered during the live session are included when the session is recorded. If your session had more than one caption track, only the first available one is captured.
More on session recordings for participants
Being a captioner
As a captioner, you can provide captions for others in your session. This is a role that is assigned to you by a moderator.
There can be more than one captioner in a session. Captioners are identified in the Attendees panel with a Closed Caption (CC) icon by them.
Live closed captioning is not supported in Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean. Users with browsers set to these languages receive an error when they start.
Let's get started
When you are made a captioner you see an alert letting you know that you can now provide captions.
Select Let's get started when you are ready. This alerts other attendees that captions are available. Your captions appear on their screen as you type them in real time.
Selecting Let's get started also opens a text field for you to type what you hear during the session.
Your name is used as the title of your captions by default. It is good practice to change the title to something others can recognize when they view your captions. For example, Closed Captions or Spanish Subtitles.
Do you see the content being shared and want to watch the speaker? Select the picture-in-picture to see the active speaker.
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean browsers
The input process for live closed captioning is not supported in browsers set to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This means that what you type may not appear how you want. Attendees see all keystrokes, not just the resulting word.
Example: To type the Japanese word "河口", the captioner types "kakou", which appears as "kかkこう". These characters are manually converted into "河口". Attendees viewing the captions see both the typed and converted characters, making the captions difficult to understand.
Set your browser to English to type captions in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Watch a video about live closed captioning
Video: Closed Captioning in Blackboard Collaborate shows you how closed captioning works in Blackboard Collaborate with the Ultra experience.