Speaker's Guide to Live Captions and Sign Language Interpretation
How to prepare your talk for live transcription and sign language interpretation.
Mentally, I am still at A-Tag 2025. Last week I shared my presentation on semantic HTML, this week I offer you an unexpected learning:
How to prepare your talk for live transcription and sign language interpretation
Attentive readers will remember that my presentation was distinctively pokémon-themed. Naturally, the conference required us to submit talks and presentations at least a week in advance for interpreters and transcribers to prepare, and naturally, I was concerned with my pokémon comparisons landing right in every format.
I already knew that it was important to use a microphone for the sign language translators to hear the speakers clearly in their in-ear, but since my presentation included subtitled audio clips, I went to check with them on how to handle those:
I have audio snippets with subtitles in my presentation. How should we handle them in sign language?
I have Pokémon. Do they have sign names? (Sadly, they don’t)
The sign language interpreters decided to point at my slides whenever I played the recordings or mentioned a pokémon that was on the slide. Efficient queens!
I also checked with the transcribers because my presentation included both a number of developer terminology and a few Pokémon references, neither of which I would expect anyone to know how to spell correctly. I went over my entire presentation with them and noted down any specific terms (and Pokémon names) in the order they appeared in.
Ultimately, this was a win for overthinking for once because all parties appreciated the foresight that it may cause problems for them on the spot.
How to prepare as a speaker:
I learned that it would be best to prepare a list of any specific terms, names, or technical jargon in the order they appear.
Even though the captionists received all presentations beforehand, they explained to me that preparing from slides alone is always tricky because the content usually differs from what will be said out loud.
At the next events, I will prepare my own list of terms to hand in alongside the slides. If you want to be extra clear, I would recommend explicitly mentioning it in the email or naming the document something along the lines of “Presentation Title_Vocabulary List”.
For code elements, like <p> <div> <del> <abbr> whatever your heart desires, I chose to explain them in natural language, so <del> was written in the transcript as delete. You could also opt to keep it as <del> because that’s how it’s written in the code too. I think this depends on your audience. I knew non-developers would be present, so the natural language version made more sense, but if you present at a developer conference, it would be reasonable to expect that everyone knows the basic tags and finds code lingo easier to follow.
But when in doubt, consult with the transcribers on site.