This translation has not been editorially reviewed yet. The German version is authoritative. Deutsche Fassung →
Accessibility
Do live broadcasts on the website need captions?
Yes: anyone broadcasting live with sound on their website — a shareholder meeting, a webinar, or a talk, say — must offer real-time captions so that deaf and hard-of-hearing people can follow along. The requirement only applies to genuine live broadcasts. Recorded videos fall under a separate rule with the same goals.
Live captions: reading along as it's spoken
In a live broadcast, captions are created at the moment something is spoken — written by live captioners, or generated by speech-recognition software that a human oversees. For a company, this quickly becomes concrete: if you stream your annual results press conference, a hard-of-hearing journalist can't report on it without captions. Many streaming platforms now offer live captioning as an add-on feature. A practical workaround for smaller occasions: instead of broadcasting live, record it, caption it at leisure, and publish shortly after — then the simpler rules for recorded video apply.
Why a human always judges here
A live broadcast only exists while it's running — an automated check visiting your page at some arbitrary time can neither know when you're broadcasting nor judge the quality of live captions. Our measurement engine reliably detects whether your page contains video elements or embedded players. If it finds none, the requirement counts as met, since there's nothing to caption without media. If it finds some, the report always marks the criterion as "manual review" — a machine never decides here. At the Gold Standard level, a human establishes whether you broadcast live at all and how your broadcasts are captioned.
- Establish whether your company broadcasts live at all — webinars, meetings, and event streams all count.
- Ask your streaming platform about its live captioning feature and test it before the real event.
- Hire live captioners for important broadcasts — with speech recognition, a human should read along and correct it.
- For smaller occasions, consider recording instead of broadcasting live: caption first, then publish.
- Announce in the invitation text that captions will be available — otherwise affected participants may stay away from the start.
FAQ
Does the captioning requirement also apply to internal webinars?
The check rule applies to content on your website. Whether a broadcast is public or internal, and what legal obligations follow from that, is a legal question — our audit is a technical examination, not legal advice. Accessibly captioned webinars reach more participants either way, internal ones included.
How are captions created for a live broadcast?
Either live captioners type along in real time, or speech-recognition software generates the captions automatically. The software option is cheaper, but makes mistakes with names and technical terms — for important broadcasts, a human should oversee and correct the output. Many streaming platforms offer both as an add-on feature.
Can an automated check test live captions?
No. A live broadcast only runs at specific times, and the quality of the captions only becomes apparent during the broadcast. Our automated check detects whether a page contains players, and then explicitly hands the judgment over to a human. At the Gold Standard level, your captioning practice is clarified with you.