Web Captioner

A free web-based service that uses automated captioning and displays a real-time transcription in your browser. It works best in Google Chrome, on your personal computer and if you have an external microphone, though it also works well with your computer’s internal microphone as long as the environment is quiet and you are within a couple of feet from your computer.

Web Captioner seems to solve a lot of the issues that are present with captions for accessibility.

Web captioner puts the caption window in the hands of the user.
Instead of being locked to a slide presentation, the captions appear in a separate window.
The captions are text-based, not open (or burned in) captions if the screen is being recorded.

This is helpful for many reasons:

Burned-in captions cannot be corrected afterward for spelling or grammar.
Burned-in captions conflict with viewing closed caption.
Open captions hinder search abilities and a user can’t search a transcript to be brought to that point in the video’s timeline.
This also hinders search engine indexing which makes a video more findable in an Internet search.
You also can’t convert burned-in captions to a readable text transcript or outline to address the needs of learners who prefer or need these alternate formats.
The text is exportable as a file so it can be uploaded to a video hosting service (YouTube, Panopto, Kaltura, etc.).

Keyword: caption