Enhancing Accessibility at the Oxford Deaf Festival with AccessLOOP

The Oxford Deaf Festival is a celebrated annual event led by the British Sign Language (BSL) community, bringing together Deaf, Deafblind, Hard of Hearing and hearing audiences. This year, the festival partnered with AccessLOOP to enhance accessibility across the entire weekend, combining AI captioning, human live captioning and technical support.

Challenge at Oxford Deaf Festival

The organisers needed a flexible accessibility solution that could support a BSL-led festival with multiple communication modes, including BSL, voiceover, AI captions and human captions. With a limited budget, Action Deafness needed an approach that balanced scalability, accuracy, and cost efficiency, particularly for the evening BSL Comedy Nights, where the dynamic, interactive nature of the performances required high-precision human captioning.

The event team also required responsive on-site support capable of handling last-minute layout changes and ensuring accessibility continuity across both days.

Our Solution

AccessLOOP delivered a hybrid captioning model designed specifically around the festival’s needs and resources:

Daytime Sessions – AI Captions

Across both Friday 26th and Saturday 27th September, AccessLOOP provided AI-generated captions for the daytime festival sessions. This ensured high-quality accessibility for presentations, stalls, talks and community activities while remaining cost-effective.Our team also applied custom glossaries to improve AI accuracy for names, BSL-related terminology and festival-specific language.

Evening BSL Comedy Performances – Human Captions

For both evening BSL Comedy Nights, AccessLOOP supplied a specialist human captioner, ensuring the accuracy and responsiveness required for comedy, improvisation and Deaf-led audience interaction.Human captioning was essential here because performers interacted directly with the captioner—a level of nuance not possible with AI.

The ability to assess content type and recommend the most appropriate captioning method is a key part of our expertise, and this hybrid model delivered the best balance of accuracy and affordability.

Technical Support & On-Site Delivery

AccessLOOP also provided:

• On-site AV equipment

• Technical supervision throughout both days

• Rapid response to last-minute layout and timing changes

• Full integration of BSL, voiceover, AI captions and human captions into one cohesive setup

This ensured seamless accessibility from start to finish.

Impact

The festival became a standout example of inclusive, multi-modal delivery.For the first time, BSL comedians performed in a format that brought together live captioning, BSL interpretation and voiceover simultaneously on stage, a groundbreaking moment for performers and audiences alike.

By providing AI captioning during the day and human captioning at night, AccessLOOP ensured:

• Consistent accessibility across all audience groups

• High accuracy where it mattered most

• Cost-effective coverage for the full festival

• A smooth technical experience despite last-minute changes

• Reduced pressure on organisers, who could focus on running the wider event

  
  

The result was an accessible, engaging and inclusive festival experience that truly reflected the spirit of the BSL community.

Client Feedback

Action Deafness kindly shared their appreciation for the work delivered by AccessLOOP:

“Your provision of AV equipment, technical support, and live captioning made a significant difference. You ensured a seamless experience for all attendees and truly enhanced accessibility and engagement.”

“The professionalism of your team allowed us to focus on other areas of the festival. Please send our thanks to the on-site team.”

“A special mention to the live captioner during the evening performance. It was amazing to watch. This was truly a first.”

AccessLOOP is proud to have supported such a meaningful event and to have helped set a new benchmark for inclusive BSL-led festivals. We look forward to future collaborations with Action Deafness and continuing to expand what is possible in accessible, multi-modal event delivery.