Cart Captioning
This video* answers the question “What is CART Captioning?” very nicely: CART Services for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing People
For more information, please keep reading:
CART Captioning is……Accessibility
CART captioning is a speech-to-text translation process that presents the spoken word as readable English text. CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) captioning is also known as real-time captioning or live-event captioning. These services provide equal access to the spoken word to everybody. CART is the key to opening up the world to your audience who is deaf, hard-of-hearing or use English as a Second Language (ESL). It’s all about accessibility.
According to Johns Hopkins University, there are 48 million deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the United States. Only about 500,000 use American Sign Language. The rest use other techniques and technologies, such as hearing aids, lip reading, and captioning. This very large audience benefits the most from captioning.
The Americans with Disabilities Act specifically recognizes CART as an assistive technology which affords “effective communication access.” Communication access more aptly describes a CART provider’s role and distinguishes CART from other real time reporting or uses of stenography, such as court reporting.
CART Captioning is……Participation
CART services enable your Deaf and hard-of-hearing audience to fully participate in meetings, workshops, presentations, conferences, lectures, seminars, conference calls, webinars, classes, etc. Without captioning, you limit the effectiveness of your story. By providing access, you will get deaf and hard-of-hearing people to participate completely and fully, in ways they never could have before. Additionally, the investment in captioning helps to ensure that you maximize the return on your event. Meetings and seminars can be costly to host; maximizing the productivity, communication and education of all in attendance makes sense. Additionally, the inclusion of CART gives you a transcript that all can use for review or record keeping.
CART Captioning is……Inclusion
Captioning can be used by the deaf and hard-of-hearing to understand what is being said in any life situation. Deaf and hard-of-hearing people want to know what’s going on, just like everyone else. When you don’t caption your meetings, webinars, conferences, classes, videos, etc. you are sending potential consumers, customers, employees, students and partners the message: “You are not wanted here.”
Captioning helps organizations, educators, and speakers communicate effectively in real time to everybody in the audience. Captioning is great for noisy environments, where everybody benefits! The resulting transcript is also useful for those who can’t take notes due to disability or other reason. Provide captioning and word will get around that you care about inclusion.
CART Captioning is……Confidence
Captioning enables comprehension, and with comprehension the participants have the confidence to participate fully and meaningfully, ensuring that everybody is both getting and giving their best. Think about it. If you are concerned that you don’t really know what is going on, then you will worry that your thoughts, questions and ideas might be off-base. If that is the case, you will keep quiet, denying others your input and feedback. Nobody benefits in this situation.
Consumers who want to know every word spoken with close-to-exact accuracy ask for CART services. Additionally, captioning provides notes, a transcript (at no additional cost), which can be exceedingly useful for review or as a record of events. Like many things related to accessibility, what works well for people with disabilities, works well for just about everybody.
Onsite or Remote?
CART captioning can be done either onsite or remotely. Onsite is just as it sounds, where we arrange for a provider who will come to you, where they sit in on your event and provide the captioning service on the spot. Additionally, technology allows eCaptions to arrange for CART captioning everywhere you have reliable access to the internet. This remote service can be cheaper (no travel costs) and it also has the advantage of not drawing as much attention to the consumer requesting the services. Remote CART is also more flexible, allowing us to accommodate last minute changes more easily.
Remote CART is really pretty simple, the audio comes to the captioner over the internet (using Skype, Zoom or a similar cloud based service) and the text is then visible to the consumer on a website in any browser, on any platform. The most important thing is to have a good microphone, as the quality of the captioning will depend on the quality of the sound.
Common platforms that we frequently provide remote CART with are:
- Blackboard
- Join.me
- Adobe Connect
- WebEx
- Skype
- Zoom
- tcConference
- Teams
If your platform isn’t listed, feel free to ask, chances are it will work.
Here is a sample of what CART captioning looks like to the consumer:
We can arrange for CART services in English, Spanish & Italian
To request services or receive a cost estimate,
please complete this form.
* Communication Access Real-time Translation: CART Services for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing People
Copyright © 2014 by University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational, noncommercial purposes provided the source is acknowledged. The AccessComputing project is funded by the National Science Foundation (grant #CNS-0540615, CNS-0837508, and CNS-1042260). Any questions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the federal government. We support the University of Washington’s online privacy statement and its terms and conditions of use.