Text on Tap  for  Microsoft Teams

Text on Tap is the streaming platform of Text on Top. A captioner produces the text of your online meeting or conference in real-time, typically on some special amazingly fast keyboard. As you know, you can read along using this Text on Tap website (see this live example), but it is also possible to provide the text as Closed Captions in a Teams Meeting!

The so-called CART link provided by Teams, allows the Text on Tap server to inject text into the Teams Meeting. This is very useful since the participant of the meeting does not need to do anything, except switching on the Closed Captions option.

To be honest, the implementation in Teams is rather poor. It is not real-time verbatim and the appearance (font size, color) cannot be changed. Despite the limitations of Teams, Text on Tap tries to deliver the captions with minimal delay!
Alternatively, use the Text on Tap Overlay tool to get the best experience.

Instructions for the meeting host

The captioner needs the so-called CART link in order to stream the text to Teams.
The host of the Teams Meeting needs to take the following steps:
  • Start the meeting.
  • Click on the three-dots menu and open the Meeting Options and scroll down.
  • Switch on the Provide CART Captions option.
  • Click Save. A box with the URL and Token will appear just below the Provide CART Captions option.
  • The captioner needs only the URL. Click in the field that says "//api.captions.office...". Press CTRL+A in order to select the full URL, then press CTRL+C to copy the URL to the clipboard.
  • Send the copied URL to the captioner. You can use the built-in chat function in Teams, or write an email.
  • Now the captioner can take it from here.
Instructions for the meeting host
NOTE 1: A Microsoft Teams business account may be required to support CART captions.
NOTE 2: At this time a scheduled meeting does not seem to work, even though you enable CART. This is an issue in Teams that will hopefully be fixed soon!


Teams meeting example
Image grabbed from techcommunity.microsoft.com