Accessibility, honestly assessed.

Two strands run in parallel and are constantly confused. The European Accessibility Act, Directive 2019/882, addresses businesses that offer products and services to consumers. Public sector bodies have been covered for years by the Web Accessibility Directive, 2016/2102, which is a separate and older regime with its own reporting duties.

For most of our users that means a municipal institution, a state university or a public authority looks to the Web Accessibility Directive and its national implementation. A commercial organiser selling tickets to consumers looks to the Accessibility Act. Churches and associations are a special case, because legal form decides it rather than intuition. One exemption is worth knowing: services from microenterprises, meaning fewer than ten staff and no more than two million euro of annual turnover, sit outside the Accessibility Act's service obligations.

We cannot tell you which one applies to you, and anyone who claims to without looking at your legal form and your offering is guessing. National transpositions also differ, so the details in Germany are not the details in Spain. What we can say is that both strands ultimately point at the same technical standard, EN 301 549, which in turn leans on WCAG 2.1 level AA. Work towards that and you are not working in the wrong direction under either.

The legal texts talk about services and websites. Inside the room it is something more concrete: whether a person understands what is being said. That rarely fails on a single obstacle. It fails on a chain of them. Poor room acoustics, a speaker who turns towards the screen, a language that is not your first, a seat in row twenty, a hearing aid that cannot cope with reverberation.

This is why a single measure almost never solves it. An induction loop helps people with a hearing aid and a T-coil, but not the international visitor. Captions help her and help deaf guests, but not someone with low vision. A sign language interpreter helps part of the deaf community and not all of it, because far from everyone uses sign language.

What works in practice is a combination and an honest inventory. Write down who is actually in your audience and what each of those people needs. The large gaps become obvious quickly, and so do the ones you have already closed without noticing.

Listening is covered. People receive the signal straight from the microphone on their own device, at a volume they choose, through their own earphones, from any seat in the room and from home as well. On top of that come live captions to read along with, and translation into further languages as text or as a spoken voice. For hard-of-hearing guests, international guests and everyone in the back rows that is a genuine gain, and nothing has to be handed out.

A fair amount is not covered, and that deserves saying just as plainly. We do not provide sign language; we complement an interpreter rather than replacing one. Audio description for blind guests is technically possible, but the describing text has to be written and spoken by a person. An induction loop feeds a hearing aid directly with nothing in the ear, and for some members that remains the better answer.

And OpenBooth does not make your website accessible. If your obligation concerns your web presence, then it concerns your web presence, not your audio. The embedded player is one element within it, nothing more.

Live captions work on fragments of speech, without the full context of a finished sentence. For keeping up in the moment that is plenty. For a version somebody should be able to rely on it is not, and you should not market it that way either.

Accuracy rests on three things and only one of them is software. First the audio: a feed taken straight from the microphone produces markedly better results than a room mic. Second the vocabulary: standard language works well, while niche jargon and proper nouns are error-prone on first appearance. Third the speaker, because pace, accent and mumbling come through directly.

Where accuracy matters legally or contractually, in a hearing or an examination setting, book a human captioner. For everything below that line there is a practical middle path: let people read along live, then translate the recording afterwards from the complete file, where full context makes the result noticeably more accurate.