VITAC Enhances Accessibility at Democratic National Convention with Live Multilanguage Captions, Dubbing & Description

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES, August 19, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- VITAC, a Verbit Company, is playing an important role in making this week’s Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago the most accessible in DNC history.

VITAC will be providing live English captions and live audio description for DNC viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing or blind or with low vision. VITAC translators and voice-over artists also will provide live English-to-Spanish dubbing during the convention while multilingual captioners, working directly from that dubbed audio, will provide live Spanish captions.

“We’re excited to be a part of making this year’s convention accessible to people of all abilities,” said Verbit CRO Jim Holmes. “There’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to bring high-accuracy captions, descriptions, and translations to the screen. Our teams are up for the task and ready for the challenge.”

VITAC, the largest provider of captioning products and services in North America, has had a long, successful history in making government meetings and events accessible and was one of the first companies to bring live captions to a political convention, captioning the 1988 Democratic National Convention.

Since then, VITAC has worked with both sides of the political aisle and with governments and government agencies around the world to provide captions, audio description, translation, and other access services for everything from local council meetings to emergency press conferences to nationally televised presidential debates, including June’s debate between President (and then-candidate) Joe Biden and Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Most recently, VITAC’s AI-powered captioning solution, Captivate™, provided captions for July’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Built in-house by captioning, speech and machine learning experts, Captivate is designed to meet the specific captioning needs of each customer while providing accurate, cost-effective captions and transcripts, guaranteed uptimes, and integrations with multiple platforms.

“We offer a full suite of access services and solutions for government customers, supported by advanced AI and technology and professional human captioners, describers, and translators,” said VITAC General Manager Doug Karlovits. “Our focus has always been ‘accessibility for all’ and we’re happy to be able to provide that at this year’s Democratic National Convention.”

The Democratic National Convention will take place Aug. 19-22. In addition to traditional broadcast channels, the convention will stream on more than a dozen platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Twitch. The official livestream will be available at DemConvention.com.

About VITAC
VITAC, a Verbit Company, captions hundreds of thousands of programming hours each year. Powered by the latest in AI technology, VITAC helps broadcasters, cable networks, and streaming platforms of all sizes turn spoken audio and video into accessible and actionable text. Its newest AI-powered offering – Captivate™ – is the most reliable and accurate captioning solution on the market today, understanding accents, languages, and speech patterns better than generic ASR engines. For more information, visit https://vitac.com.

David Titmus
VITAC
david.titmus@vitac.com