If you have a paid Zoom account then you can enable live automatic subtitles for free, which may help those who are deaf or hard of hearing. This feature is not enabled by default, so these are the steps you need to get it working.
Enable closed captions for the account
You need to do this from the Zoom website, not from the app. Login to your account, then go to Settings and pick In Meeting (Advanced). Scroll down to the Closed captioning section. First make sure closed captioning is enabled, then tick the box to enable live transcription.
You only need to do this once for your account.
Enable closed captions in the meeting
Once those are enabled on the account, you will see a new button in the meeting controls of the Zoom App labelled Live Transcript.
In order to get live subtitles, the meeting host must click on this button and Enable Auto-Transcription. You have to do this for each meeting, it is never automatic.
Once subtitles are enabled by the host, everyone will see them. Meeting attendees have some control over what they see on screen too, accessed through the Live Transcript button (or from the arrow on the side of the button for the host).
If you click on Subtitle Settings you can change the size of the text, which is rather small by default.
You can also see the entire transcript of the meeting, if the text is disappearing too quickly.
Things to be aware of
Automatic transcription is not perfect by any means, although with a clear voice it is surprisingly accurate most of the time. But it very often gets real names wrong and there’s no way to correct that.
If several people are speaking at once or there is background noise then the transcription will start throwing up rubbish or stop altogether. It is important that people are self disciplined in not all speaking at once and muting when not speaking. This will also help those who are hard of hearing to hear as well as read what’s going on.