About Relay Conference Captioning

Relay Conference Captioning (RCC) is a free service available to all Hawaii residents and is dedicated to providing functional equivalency to deaf and hard-of-hearing participants in conference calls and/or multi-party calls. We use the same high-quality captioners that provide closed captioning for live television, news, sports and weather to deliver live, realtime text streamed to an Internet-connected computer anywhere in the world.

How it works

Once you have scheduled a conference call and arranged for a conference call bridge, schedule your RCC service from Relay Hawaii. You are guaranteed a conference call captioner for your event if you book an event with at least 48 hours advance notice (2 working days). Calls must occur during regular business hours. Calls must begin at or later than 8 am and must conclude at or prior to 6 pm in your time zone.

When booking your event, you will provide the phone number to your conference call and PIN number, if needed, so that your captioner may dial-in to the event to hear the audio. Your RCC captioner will access the event a few minutes prior to the scheduled start of the call. Your captioner will caption all of the dialogue on the call including noises and/or sounds where appropriate (i.e. beep to indicate that a new caller has joined the call, etc.)

Once the call is booked and your captioner is assigned, you will receive an e-mail from the scheduling department with the Event ID as well as the Web address for you to access your captioned call. Please log-on to the provided Web address a few minutes prior to the start of the call and follow along with the captioned text as it captures what is spoken on the call in realtime.

Participants can follow along with the dialogue by reading it on-screen as it is spoken and captioned. In order to fully participate in the discussion, a text entry window is provided for you to type to your captioner. Your comments/questions will be spoken on your behalf by the captioner at the earliest break in the discussion or otherwise where appropriate. As the captioner is speaking on your behalf, you will see your original text to the captioner added to the realtime streaming display. All dialogue that is captioned is added to the event transcript, if transcript service has been requested at the initial time that the event was scheduled.

Accuracy and how you can help

Our captioners can keep up with dialogue up to 225 words per minute and maintain an average 98% accuracy or better. As this is performed in real-time, an occasional error will occur when the captioner isn’t familiar with terms or names, or simply miss-spells the word. We work constantly to enhance the skills of our team and you can help in the accuracy by providing as much advance information about the event including proper names, agenda, speaker notes, PowerPoints, and anything that you may have about the call.

Things to avoid

Commentary and discussion directly with the captioner that is not a part of the call should be avoided. Your captioner is there to capture the dialogue and deliver it to you in realtime.

Disclaimer

Relay Conference Captioning is a service of Sprint and Relay Hawaii and is made available free of charge to Hawaii residents. To use this service you must live or work in the state. If you are unable to provide a verifiable home or work phone number with a valid area code and prefix, you are not eligible to use this service.