Microsoft Teams meetings and closed captions

Last year during the COVID lockdown I used Teams as my online teaching platform to run my classes. I decided to record the classes using screen sharing for the video content. In this way my classes became available 24/7 for my students which meant if they missed a class or wanted to revisit it they could. Unfortunately, the did have to wade through the complete 2 hour class to find what they wanted but at least the information was available.

Once lockdown finished, I kept recording the classes via Teams which meant students who were unable to attend (eg sick children or car issues) were still able to attend the classes from home. By recording these classes they were also available for revision purposes as well (still the whole class in one recording).

Roll on 2021 and I decide to continue recording my classes in Teams. It does mean board work is missing and if I move too far away from the computer they might not hear but it’s still better than nothing. This year I have a student with a hearing impairment who requested I turn on the closed captions for my meetings. It seems she used closed captions last year with success. So I ask her how to do it as I hadn’t seen anything to do it and she said just click on the 3 dots and it should be there. Guess what, it wasn’t!

So started my long journey into how to turn them on. Google lead me to the method – just click on the 3 dots and it will be there. No it’s not!!! A bit more research suggested the Team policies could be an issue so I emailed the help desk. Response, just click on the 3 dots!!! Grrrrr!!! So I decided to check with a workmate and guess what – he had the ability to turn on closed captions. More research. It seems sometimes the group policies don’t work as intended so I emailed back the help desk. Eventually the solution was found for my case. My language settings for Teams was English US which is presumably the default language. I don’t usually worry about the default English in apps but I do for Windows where I have already changed it over the English NZ (after all, I want to see ‘u’ in words like colour and ‘s’ in organisation). I would have thought the system default language would be used by the apps by default but it would appear not. After all I have downloaded the desktop version of Teams rather than using the online version.

Language changed to English NZ and now I have closed captions!!!

Next problem is that the closed captions are only shown while the meeting is on. Again, changes by Microsoft are responsible for this as well as the creation of transcripts. It seems that closed captions and transcripts were available when the recordings were uploaded to Stream but that is changing and they are now being uploaded to OneDrive or SharePoint depending on the type of meeting created (General or in a Channel). From what I have read, transcripts will eventually become available again so that will be good.