Making Hospital Week Accessible to Every Attendee, Music Included
Children's Miracle Network Hospitals works toward a mission of getting 10 million children life-saving hospital care each year, and for their 2023 Hospital Week event in Orlando, they treated accessibility with the same level of care.
The event itself was hard to categorize: part telethon, part healthcare industry conference, with a dash of esports, and a live performance from Andy Grammer. They brought in the Talon team to make sure every piece of it was accessible to every attendee.
Remote production monitoring setup showing a live stage feed, captions, and video call for Children’s Hospitals Week broadcast.
The Challenge
An event this varied meant accessibility needs varied right along with it. The General Session needed captions accurate enough to keep up with formal programming and with a live musical performance, where lyrics and timing matter as much as spoken words. Breakout sessions needed reliable caption coverage too, but at a scale where staffing a human stenographer in every room wasn't practical. For an organization whose entire mission is equity and access to care, anything less than full accessibility across every format would have undercut the message they were there to deliver.
Talon brought a human CART stenographer to caption the General Session live, capturing the formal programming and the Andy Grammer performance with the same accuracy. For the breakout sessions, the team deployed Automatic Speech Recognition captioning, giving attendees reliable caption coverage across every room without requiring a full stenography team on-site. After the event wrapped, Talon conducted a full accessibility review with the client and their production team, so lessons from this year could carry into the next one.
The Details
Client: Children's Miracle Network Hospitals
Location: Orlando, FL
Event Type: Hospital Week 2023 (telethon, conference, and live entertainment)
Services: CART captioning, ASR captioning, post-event accessibility consulting
Split screen showing ‘Children’s Hospitals Week’ graphics alongside a live camera view of the branded mainstage.
How We Solved It
Accessibility had to hold up across formal sessions, casual breakouts, and a live concert, all in the same event.
Provided live, human-generated CART captions for the General Session, accurately capturing spoken programming and the live musical performance
Deployed Automatic Speech Recognition captioning across breakout sessions, giving broad, reliable caption coverage without a full stenography team in every room
Conducted an event-wide accessibility review after the conference, giving the client and production teams a clear record of what worked and what to build on next time
Production monitor showing a nostalgic photo collage video feed above an empty teleprompter screen.
The Outcome
Attendees across every part of Hospital Week, from the formal General Session to the concert, had the access they needed to fully take part. One event partner was so impressed she asked if Talon could handle accessibility for all of her conferences going forward, telling the team they were the first she'd seen who "TOTALLY gets what we need to do our job the best we absolutely can." Children's Miracle Network's own team echoed that response. It was proof that accessibility, done right, isn't a checkbox. It's part of what makes an event actually work.