Words matter, especially when it comes to poetry. For the Poetry Foundation, getting the words right on their recorded and live events meant they could continue promoting and celebrating poetry and lyricism and placing it before the broadest audience possible – even when in-person events weren’t feasible. A Customer Spotlight looks at how The Poetry Foundation uses VITAC’s accessibility solutions to reach the widest audience possible.
“Poetry is challenging to caption — it’s highly imaginative and condensed language that is often outside familiar registers of speech,” says Poetry Foundation Events and Accessibility Coordinator Noa/h Fields.
Being outside the familiar registers of speech makes poetry trickier to caption, especially for automatic speech recognition solutions, which rely on familiar registers of speech to match text to the sounds the machine hears. Quality captions ensure that the imagery, artistry, and lyricism of poetry can be appreciated by deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences with the same depth of understanding as hearing audiences.
April is National Poetry Month, and while we at VITAC might not be writing in verse, we’re proud to support the Poetry Foundation with our Zoom captioning integration solutions, quality customer service, and accurate captions created by real people. Find out more about getting the words right here.