Microsoft recently unveiled caption customisation for Teams, in an effort to enhance accessibility and inclusion for people with hearing impairments or linguistic diversity. They have updated the platform with improved speaker attribution as well as live captions that support 27 new spoken languages on web.
Live captions can be edited independently in the timeline, just like any video track. Furthermore, it’s also possible to resize and move the caption window as necessary.
Customisation of the Caption Window
This new feature, available now to 365 Insiders in the public preview of Teams, allows them to customize their caption window by altering font size, color and positioning as well as language settings and specifying how much of a transcript will be shown at any one time.
Live captions is a useful feature that can help participants follow along in video calls even when audio quality is poor or they have trouble hearing. It identifies who is speaking and provides real-time captions during meetings.
Microsoft is further expanding this feature by adding customisation options that give more freedom of choice for the user, such as turning off profanity filtering used to automatically censor vulgar words in captions and transcriptions by default. This change allows them to set their preference independently without interference from meeting organizers or Teams admins – it’s an incremental but helpful improvement on what was already available.
Customisation of the Caption Language
Microsoft Teams is adding a feature that enables users to customize the captions they see during meetings, promising greater accessibility and inclusion for hearing impaired or linguistically diverse individuals.
The new feature will enable people to customize font colors, sizes and number of lines displayed, as well as customise caption panel placement.
Users can now tailor their experience to their own individual needs and preferences, regardless of whether they use the web client or desktop app. Furthermore, our team has enhanced speaker attribution in live captions by including their names next to text that has their spoken lines.
This year, Teams Premium subscribers will also have access to global calls and meetings featuring live caption translation, which will remove language barriers during global calls with participants from different regions and countries.
Customisation of the Caption Styles
Teams allows users to personalise their captions in several ways, from changing font size and color, increasing line count and altering positioning within the caption window, all the way through to scrolling back through recently added captions for easy reference during meetings.
Users have the flexibility of selecting different font styles (e.g., md and bf), fine tune their text alignment using options such as alignleft, alignright and center; they may also experiment with stroke settings such as fill thickness background.
Create and save a new caption style easily. To do so, select a caption, click its Font list in the Properties Inspector, select Add New Caption Style from the Caption style menu, name your new style and select Save to save your new style for use with future captions through Object Style Manager’s Caption list. Once saved, its import capabilities allow it to be imported through Caption list as part of Object Style Manager.
Customisation of the Caption Positioning
Live captions provide text displayed alongside video and audio in real time to assist attendees who may be deaf, hard of hearing, have different levels of language proficiency or are connecting from noisy environments. This feature can be enabled both in meetings and calls by selecting the captions button next to the video player after starting up a meeting or call.
Utilizing this settings pane, users can now configure their captions in one or more of the following ways:
Users have the ability to adjust font size and color of their captions, increase the number of lines displayed on-screen and adjust their positioning. They may also customize language and style settings so their captions suit their tastes; additionally they can opt for either an above- or below-video display option; enable or disable profanity filtering controls as desired for swearword-free captions; as well as enable or disable profanity filtering controls that censor or allow swearword usage within their captions.
