VITAC, a Verbit Company, played an important role in making the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago the most accessible in DNC history.
VITAC provided live English captions and live audio description for DNC viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing or blind or with low vision. VITAC translators and voice-over artists also provided live English-to-Spanish dubbing during the convention while multilingual captioners, working directly from that dubbed audio, provided live Spanish captions.
“We’re excited to be a part of making this year’s convention accessible to people of all abilities,” said Verbit CRO Jim Holmes. “There’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to bring high-accuracy captions, descriptions, and translations to the screen. Our teams were up for the task and ready for the challenge.”
VITAC, the largest provider of captioning products and services in North America, has had a long, successful history in making government meetings and events accessible and was one of the first companies to bring live captions to a political convention, captioning the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
Since then, VITAC has worked with both sides of the political aisle and with governments and government agencies around the world to provide captions, audio description, translation, and other access services for everything from local council meetings to emergency press conferences to nationally televised presidential debates, including June’s debate between President (and then-candidate) Joe Biden and Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Most recently, VITAC’s AI-powered captioning solution, Captivate™, provided captions for July’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Built in-house by captioning, speech and machine learning experts, Captivate is designed to meet the specific captioning needs of each customer while providing accurate, cost-effective captions and transcripts, guaranteed uptimes, and integrations with multiple platforms.
“We offer a full suite of access services and solutions for government customers, supported by advanced AI and technology and professional human captioners, describers, and translators,” said VITAC General Manager Doug Karlovits. “Our focus has always been ‘accessibility for all’ and we’re happy to provide that at this year’s Democratic National Convention.”
The Democratic National Convention took place Aug. 19-22. In addition to traditional broadcast channels, the convention streamed on more than a dozen platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Twitch.