A workday is meetings, huddles, all-hands, phone calls, and rooms. How to request captions that cover all of it — and where CART and AI each fit.
The accommodation conversation usually starts with a form and stalls on a question: what, exactly, should we provide? For a deaf or hard-of-hearing employee the honest answer is rarely one thing, because a workday is not one thing — it is scheduled meetings, drive-by huddles, quarterly all-hands, phone calls with vendors, and a colleague leaning over the desk. Live captioning is one of the few accommodations that covers all of it — provided it is set up as a tool the employee controls, not a feature someone else has to remember to switch on. Here is how to request it, and how to choose between CART and AI.
Most captioning conversations at work begin and end with the video platform. Zoom, Teams, and Meet all offer some form of captions, and for scheduled calls on one platform they may be enough. But map an actual week and the platform's share of it shrinks fast:
An accommodation tied to one platform covers a slice of this. The request should be scoped to the barrier — understanding speech at work — not to one piece of software.
In the US, workplace accommodations are typically worked out through what the ADA framework calls the interactive process — a structured conversation where the employee describes the barrier, the employer explores options, and both land on something effective and workable. Similar processes exist in many other countries. Two things make it go well from the employee's side.
First, describe situations, not audiology. "I miss decisions made in huddles and can't take vendor calls without a colleague" gives HR something to solve; a hearing threshold does not. Second, arrive with a specific, low-friction proposal. An accommodation that requires no scheduling, no per-meeting setup by others, and no IT project is dramatically easier to say yes to.
List the recurring situations where speech is lost: huddles, all-hands, phone calls, noisy in-person exchanges. Concrete scenes anchor the whole process and make the eventual accommodation testable — did it fix these, or not?
Ask for a live captioning tool the employee runs themselves — one that captions any audio the computer can hear, so it covers every format above without anyone else doing anything. Ask for a paid seat, budgeted by the company like any other work software.
Security review is where accommodation requests go to wait. Shorten it: state where audio goes, whether anything is stored, and which compliance attestations the vendor holds. A tool that stores nothing has a much shorter conversation ahead of it.
Two weeks of real use beats a procurement debate. Agree that the scenes from step one are the test, then review together: did captions cover them? Most objections resolve themselves against actual experience.
CART — a trained human captioner writing in real time — and AI captioning are not rivals so much as different shapes of coverage. The honest comparison:
| CART (human captioner) | AI captioning | |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduling | Booked in advance, per session | Always available — covers the unscheduled part of the day |
| Best at | High-stakes formal events: legal, disciplinary, board-level | Volume and spontaneity: daily meetings, huddles, calls |
| Cost shape | Hourly, per event | Flat monthly subscription |
| Judgment | A human rides through crosstalk, sarcasm, chaos | Handles jargon well with a custom dictionary; no human judgment |
Many employees end up with both: CART booked for the events where every word is load-bearing, AI captioning running for everything else. The full trade-off analysis is in our CART vs AI captioning comparison.
Unicaption is built to be the always-on half of that answer — a captioning copilot the employee runs themselves, pointed at whatever the workday produces:
It runs in the browser with no install, plus macOS and Windows desktop apps and a Chrome extension — which matters in locked-down IT environments. And the free tier gives you 30 minutes every week with no credit card, which is exactly what a trial-period proposal needs.
The difference between an accommodation on paper and access in practice is mostly operational habit. The pitfalls are predictable:
Teams that get this right usually notice a side effect: captions quietly help hearing colleagues too — the non-native speaker, the person dialing in from a loud café, the multilingual team that reads faster than it listens.
Common options include live captioning (CART or AI), sign language interpreters, written agendas and notes, and preferred seating. Live captioning is often central because it covers the most formats — video meetings, huddles, phone calls, and in-person conversation. What counts as reasonable is worked out case by case through the interactive process between employee and employer; this is practical orientation, not legal advice.
Describe the specific situations where you miss speech — huddles, all-hands, phone calls — then propose a specific tool and a two-week trial. A self-serve AI captioning tool like Unicaption is easy to approve because it needs no scheduling, joins nothing, and stores nothing: audio is never stored and transcripts are deleted when the session ends. The free tier gives you 30 minutes every week, so you can demonstrate it working before anyone signs off.
For high-stakes, scheduled events — legal, disciplinary, board-level — many deaf professionals still prefer CART's human judgment. For the daily volume of meetings, huddles, and calls, AI captioning at state-of-the-art streaming accuracy with a custom dictionary for company terms covers what CART cannot practically be booked for. Many employees use both, and the employer funds both.
Yes. A tool that reads the computer's audio captions any call taken on the computer — softphone, VoIP, messenger — and a microphone source captions in-person conversation when the laptop or phone sits between the speakers. Unicaption supports both sources, in 60+ languages with optional live translation shown beside the original.
Live captions for meetings, huddles, calls, and rooms — run by you, stored nowhere. 30 free minutes every week, no credit card.
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