Live Captions & Translations For Any Slide Deck Presentation
ConferenceCaptioning.com and “Always On-Top” ensures accessibility & inclusion regardless of presentation platform.
Saamer M
Last Update hace 3 meses
In a world of hybrid work and global reach, accessibility is no longer a "nice-to-have" feature, it is a leadership standard. Whether you are presenting a keynote in Canva, a quarterly review in Google Slides, or a pitch deck in PowerPoint, ensuring your audience can follow along with live captions is critical for engagement and retention. However, many captioning tools are tied to a specific platform, have poor transcription quality for scientific terminology and accents. This guide provides a universal, "always on-top" solution that ensures your captions & translations remain visible over any presentation software you choose. Some presenters rely on built-in captions that disappear the moment you switch from a browser to a desktop app, or from one slide deck to another. This creates a disjointed experience for your audience and a technical headache for your team.
Solution: Universal Floating Overlay
By using ConferenceCaptioning.com along with a simple Chrome extension, you can create a dedicated customized caption bar that floats on top of your screen and doesn't require internet to work, creating extremely high quality captions & translations with punctuations! It can be customized and stays exactly where you put it, even when you enter "Full Screen" or "Presenter Mode."
Before your meeting, you’ll need your dedicated captioning URL from the Conference Captioning app.
Solution: Universal Floating Overlay
By using ConferenceCaptioning.com along with a simple Chrome extension, you can create a dedicated customized caption bar that floats on top of your screen and doesn't require internet to work, creating extremely high quality captions & translations with punctuations! It can be customized and stays exactly where you put it, even when you enter "Full Screen" or "Presenter Mode."
Before your meeting, you’ll need your dedicated captioning URL from the Conference Captioning app.
- Follow the steps in this video until the 1:15 mark to download the app, setup your account, start streaming and get the local URL from the app (it will look like an IP address, e.g., 192.168.0.100:8080/index.html)
- Replace the index.html to url.html and put it in your browser to customize what the captions should look like (e.g., Fading white text on a black background for high contrast).
- Copy the generated Localhost URL provided in the "Always on Top Video Overlay" box (shown below). You can also use "Generate Preview" and scroll to see what it will look like.
Step 2: Enable the "Always on Top" Floating Window
To ensure your captions never disappear behind your slides, we use lightweight Chrome extension (such as "Always on Top" or "Picture-in-Picture for Every Site").
Result:
This window is now "locked" in the foreground. Now, simply open your presentation tool of choice within the Chrome browser-Google Slides, Canva, Prezi, or PowerPoint in "Present Mode." When using Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet, simply share your "Entire Screen." Your audience will see your beautiful slides with professional, real-time captions scrolling underneath.
To ensure your captions never disappear behind your slides, we use lightweight Chrome extension (such as "Always on Top" or "Picture-in-Picture for Every Site").
- Install the “Always on top” extension from the Chrome Web Store.
- Open the URL you generated in Step 1 in a new Chrome tab, and Using your "Always on Top" extension (you might have to tap on the extensions icon), trigger the window to float.
- Drag the window to the bottom of your screen, Resize it to look like a standard "lower-third" caption bar, and Use Ctrl/Command & “+” to zoom in & make the text bigger
Result:
This window is now "locked" in the foreground. Now, simply open your presentation tool of choice within the Chrome browser-Google Slides, Canva, Prezi, or PowerPoint in "Present Mode." When using Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet, simply share your "Entire Screen." Your audience will see your beautiful slides with professional, real-time captions scrolling underneath.
Why This Matters for Leaders
- Platform Agnostic- You aren't locked into one ecosystem. If your marketing team uses Canva but your finance team uses Excel, this captioning workflow remains identical for both.
- Improved Information Retention- Studies show that captions improve comprehension for all viewers, not just those with hearing impairments. This is especially true for international teams where English may be a second language.
- Total Control over Design- Unlike "auto-captions" provided by meeting software, this method allows you to control the font size, color, and positioning, ensuring your presentation looks polished and professional.
- Streamlined Execution- This setup takes less than a minute once the extension is installed and allows you to focus on your delivery rather than worrying about whether your audience can "hear" you.
- Live translation- Using the URL generator page, you can also get the link to show live-translations instead.
- Audio hearing aids - The QR from your stream, can be shared for people to follow along on their own devices, from where they can listen to the speaker in real-time into their bluetooth hearing aids
Pro-Tips:
- The Multi-Device Strategy-The app uses your device NPU (Neural Engine) so it shouldn't affect the CPU/GPU, but if you prefer not to have the captioning software running on your main presentation computer, you can run the Conference Captioning app on a tablet or a separate laptop. As long as you are on the same network, the URL will feed the captions to your presentation screen seamlessly. You will have to use the “Internet Based Caption URL” instead from the URL generator website
- Using Safari from presenting won't work because the extension is a Chrome extension. There are applications available to allow it on Safari, but they require a lot of privacy permissions to be given, so we personally haven't vetted one to be privacy-safe
- For more information on maximizing accessibility for your next event or to see our hardware integrations, visit the support chat within your ConferenceCaptioning.com account.