Earlier this week I attended the BDF Annual Conference Back to the Future. It was a great event and designed with inclusion in mind. It had full subtitles on each of the screens (and available online to put on your own personal device if you preferred) and BLS interpreters. It was great to finally attend a fully inclusive event (a genuine first) and be able to fully understand what is being said and enjoy the full day with no issues.
Additionally, Subtitles were shown on all the screens. This was really important. I’ve been to some events where Subtitles are only shown on one screen or shown on a separate screen rather than beside the Speakers so you had to be sat in a particular place to see them and/or it was awkward to watch both the speakers, slides and subtitles as they weren’t all in the same place. Subtitles were shown on all of the screens (and you could bring them up on a personal device too) – this meant that it didn’t matter where you sat in the audience (or if you were online) you had access to subtitles. I still chose to sat at the front because I wasn’t sure and the person on the door didn’t understand what I meant when I asked where the subtitles would be shown so it would have been useful to know this information in advance. Similarly I couldn’t always see the BSL interpreter from where I sat (not that I needed to) but I assume that BLS users would have been told if they had asked where they would be standing so that they could see them from their seats.
The subtitles/captions were great, they were accurate and kept up with the pace of what was going on in the conference and I highly recommend that if you are running your own conference or event you consider using a proper live captioning service. MyClearText offers comprehensive live captioning services for all event types and you can find out more about their services here.
[…] Read more about the BDF Conference here. […]