Fact · Accessibility and health
5seconds
A University of Toronto report on AR captioning says the lag for captions should never exceed 5 seconds, and that 80 percent of captions should appear within 3 seconds.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“the lag time for captions should never exceed 5 seconds, and 80% of the captions should never exceed 3 seconds”
Evaluating Usability of a Real Time Augmented Reality Audio Captioning System, Salaar Liaqat, University of Toronto, course project report, n.d., Introduction and Study 1.
Open the original- What it measures
- The report attributes the limit to a working group on English captioning standards, and its own latency study used a 5-person test.
- What it does not show
- A student report that quotes an earlier regulatory limit. It does not establish a current rule, and the report's test had 5 participants.