Auto-generated captions on Zoom and Teams hit only 60-70% accuracy, but employers count them as a 'reasonable accommodation' for deaf employees instead of providing CART

Auto-generated captions on major videoconferencing platforms achieve only 60-70% accuracy according to research by the University of Minnesota, and even the best commercial solutions cap out around 93%. The industry standard for accessible captioning is 99% accuracy. Yet when deaf or hard-of-hearing employees request captioning accommodations for meetings, many employers point to the free auto-caption toggle in Zoom or Microsoft Teams and consider the obligation met. A 2024 survey by 3Play Media found that only 47% of organizations using auto-captions even bother with human review afterward. At 70% accuracy, roughly one in three words is wrong, garbled, or missing. In a 30-minute meeting, that means hundreds of errors. Technical terminology, proper nouns, accented speech, and crosstalk — all common in business meetings — drive accuracy even lower. For a deaf employee, this means following a meeting through a stream of text that reads like a broken telephone game. They miss action items, misunderstand decisions, and cannot participate in real-time discussion because they are spending cognitive effort trying to reconstruct what was actually said. The result is professional isolation: deaf employees are excluded from the informal knowledge-sharing that drives career advancement, passed over for projects that require 'strong communication skills,' and subtly pushed toward individual-contributor roles where their 'accommodation' is less disruptive. The structural reason this persists is cost and ignorance. CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) — a trained human stenographer captioning at 99%+ accuracy — costs $100-250 per hour. Employers see auto-captions as 'free' and CART as 'expensive,' without calculating the cost of losing a talented employee or facing an EEOC complaint. The ADA requires 'effective' communication but does not name specific technologies, so employers default to the cheapest option and wait to see if anyone complains. Meanwhile, the EEOC's updated 2023 guidance on hearing disabilities in the workplace explicitly states that employers may need to provide CART when auto-captions are insufficient, but most HR departments have never read this guidance document, and enforcement only happens after a deaf employee files a formal charge.