Video calls are a vital service for catching up with colleagues or family members. But they can introduce accessibility challenges, especially for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Closed captioning in video calls is the solution. And it’s not just for those with hearing impairments. We all find ourselves in situations where reading text is just more convenient than listening to audio—if headphones aren’t available or we’re in a crowded public space, for example.

Here’s what you need to know about support for closed captioning in the most popular video calling apps, including how to turn it on.

Subtitles in Skype

Skype is the granddaddy of video-calling apps, one which has seen a lot of competition from the likes of Google and Apple. Skype provides fully automated captioning and, you might not be too surprised to learn, it’s probably the most mature of the offerings we’ll investigate.

Enabling closed captions couldn’t be much easier than it is in Skype: during an audio or video call, click the More button, then select Turn subtitles on. Straight away, you should see speech transcribed to text, with each participant’s avatar identifying who said what.

Subtitles in Skype

You can view subtitle history by clicking the chevron (up arrow) above the subtitles; on desktop, this will open up the history in a separate panel.

Subtitles are available as a global setting so, if you always require them, you can set them to appear for all Skype calls by default.

Go to Preferences (on a Mac) or Settings (on Windows), then select the Calling section followed by the Call subtitles item. Make sure Show subtitles for all calls is enabled.

Screenshot showing Skype's "call subtitles" settings

Here, you can enable subtitles across all calls as well as hiding or displaying subtitles for the words you speak, and configuring the language you’re speaking in. Skype supports a short list of 11 languages to choose from.

Google Meet’s Captions

Formerly known as Hangouts, Google’s Meet app takes full advantage of the voice recognition software Google has been developing over many years, which has seen the light of day perhaps most prominently in the company's smart speakers.

As with Skype, Meet’s captioning is simple to use and effective. Aside from the occasional running together of sentences and word confusion, Meet is responsive and accurate enough to relay a conversation.

In a meeting, pull up the menu and select Turn on captions. As you speak, your words will get translated into text which appears at the bottom of your screen. You’ll see other people's speech transcribed here too, alongside your own.

Example screenshot of Google Meet showing closed captions

Zoom and Closed Captions

Zoom takes an entirely different approach. Rather than automatically converting speech to text, the app treats closed captioning as a user problem. One which you need to solve manually by typing the captions yourself.

For larger, more formal meetings, where a nominated participant might be taking minutes anyway, this might not be an issue.

First, you need to set things up in advance of any meeting by logging into the Zoom web interface and updating your preferences. Go to the In Meeting (Advanced) section and enable Closed captioning. You can also choose to Save Captions if you need a record after the event.

Screenshot of Zoom showing "In Meeting" setup

Once you start a meeting, you’ll be able to assign somebody (yourself or someone you delegate) to type a transcript along with the conversation. In essence, you might as well just have one nominated person typing everything into a chat window; Zoom’s closed captioning is more like a sanctioned, single-owner chat.

Screenshot of Zoom showing closed caption enabling

Zoom also provides the ability to hook in a third-party captioning service; this is a complicated affair and will be beyond what most end-users will find acceptable. But for large businesses, it might be a viable solution.

Live Captions in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft has spent a lot of effort positioning Teams as the solution to distributed, from-home working. While it’s been popularly received for some of its organizational tools, the application is less advanced when it comes to closed captioning. Although the option is present, it takes a bit of work to enable.

For a start, you may have to enable a preview of Teams if your current version doesn’t support closed captioning out of the box: go to Settings and select the Turn on new meeting experience option under Application.

Screenshot of Teams showing settings

Then, when you’re in a meeting, use the More actions menu to Turn on live captions. Once enabled, you should see a real-time transcript at the bottom of your video window.

Screenshot of Teams showing closed captions

In our experience, the translation service is not quite as solid as either Skype or Google Meet, making plenty of mistakes especially at the boundaries between sentences. There is also no obvious way to keep a record of subtitles or view more than two lines of speech at once.

FaceTime Finishes Last

Although Siri is integrated into both iOS and macOS, and speech recognition is supported for many assistant-related functions, Apple is yet to build automated closed caption support into FaceTime.

The iPhone and desktop versions of FaceTime both offer fewer features than the other applications on offer here. So, while they’re good at basic Apple-to-Apple communication, alternatives are better for more advanced needs.

Opening Up Possibilities With Closed Captioning

Closed captioning is the kind of feature that you might not think about unless you need to. But it can make a real difference to people with any level of hearing impairment. And it can be very useful in other situations, too.

As with automated solutions in all walks of life, your results with video call closed captioning may vary. If you speak slowly and clearly, in simple sentences, you stand a much greater chance of having your words captioned correctly. Although natural speech translation is not quite perfect, if you can put up with a few errors or go out of your way to speak in just the right way, it’s an awful lot better than nothing.