Captioning

[JJohnsonRID]

Hi all,

My organization is hosting a town hall meeting next week and we got accommodation requests that we provide captioning. I'm fully aware that Zoom provides ASR captioning. Problem is, the meeting will be conducted solely in American Sign Language. We do not want our attendees to hear anything during the meeting. Is it possible to have voice interpreters connect to a line, and have the captions appear during the Zoom meeting/webinar and not have the attendees hear the voice interpreter? 

[Ray_Harwood]

Welcome to the Zoom Community, @JJohnsonRID 

The only way to do this would be if your ASL interpreter was onsite listening to live audio, or listening to audio through some mechanism other than Zoom.  Then just have all participants muted, and sound will make it to the attendees.

However, I would recommend NOT disabling audio.  Some hearing-impaired attendees will not be 100% deaf, and may rely on audible intonation to sense emotion and emphasis.

Are you using manual captioning, or automated captioning?  Hopefully you have tested/practiced this several times in advance.  NEVER so something like this the first time on a live event.

[Frank_TB]

Hello,

in addition to Ray’s advice I wanted to point out a relatively new  Sign Language interpretation view  setting for Zoom meetings.

”Account owners and admins can enable Sign Language interpretation view, which allows hosts to assign users as sign language interpreters, either when scheduling a meeting or webinar or during the session. Hosts can designate up to 20 users as sign language interpreters. Sign language interpreters are shown in dedicated video channels that are pinned and spotlighted, identifying the specific type of sign language they are interpreting. Participants can then select which sign language video channel they’d like to view, and resize or relocate the video window as needed.”

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/9513103461005-Enabling-Sign-Language-interpretation-view 

Regards

[JJohnsonRID]

The majority of the speakers are deaf themselves, and the meeting will be entirely in sign language. We do NOT want people to hear anything. That's the issue. It seems we'll need to have a separate line from Zoom for the interpreters to communicate with the CART provider, so captions are enabled. That way, nobody in zoom can hear anything, and can only see the captions and what's being signed. 

Thanks. 

[Ray_Harwood]

Thanks for the additional info, @JJohnsonRID.  Zoom doesn't really have a way to provide "out of band" audio communication.  Make sure all mics are muted, and disable the Allow Participants to Unmute Themselves option on the Participants window:

(Note: Hosts and Co-Hosts will still be able to unmute themselves and others.  Ensure they are all informed of your mode of operation.)

There is no way (to my knowledge) to disable audio entirely.  The Audio setting when creating a meeting requires one of the buttons to be enabled:

There are several ways to share audio outside of Zoom among a select group of people; these ways include conference calling, running a second Zoom meeting (your interpreters would need two devices, one for listening, and one for captioning or signing), and other audio-capable applications, such as Discord. 

There is also a "cloud intercom" service I've used successfully on occasion, call Unity Intercom at https://www.unityintercom.com/cloud.  (Ignore their hardware-based solutions; look at their Cloud service).  With Unity, you can set up multiple channels between participants, and there are client apps for Windows, Mac, IOS, and Android.  It's a little pricey, but does the job, in my opinion.