Everything You Wanted to Know About CART Writing - Part 1

By Cheryl Heppner

Editor: The folks at NVRC recently hosted (along with the local HLAA and ALDA chapters) a panel of CART experts to provide the latest information on this crucial technology. Cheryl did her usual outstanding job of writing it up and sharing it with interested folks. Here's her report. You are welcome to share this information, but please be sure to credit NVRC.

This is part one of eleven parts.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

April 2008

Lise Hamlin:

We have remote CART today, being provided by Mike Cano. Welcome, it's great to have you here. Debbie Jones and I will have a series of questions for our panel, which were provided to the panelists in advance. After those questions, we'll take a break, and then in the second half of the program you get to ask whatever questions you would like. In the back of the room are note cards and pencils. If think of something you want to ask, you can take a notecard and pencil and write it down so that you don't forget.

Because I am an emergency preparedness person, I want to tell you that if there is an emergency, walk, don't run, to the nearest exit. Our nearest exit is in the back of the room. If for some reason that's blocked, you can go out this door (indicating) and all the way to the other end, or you can go out the other way and there is an exit the other way as well (indicating). Just go calmly. I was in a meeting of firefighters yesterday, and one said, "Well, we can always break the windows." And somebody said, "Why would you want to break the windows?" He said, "We're firefighters, we like breaking windows. Okay?"

Cheryl Heppner:

NVRC is happy to have the Hearing Loss Association of Northern Virginia and Association of Late-Deafened Adults, Potomac Chapter, involved as co-sponsors.

Lise Hamlin:

Before we go on, I just want to introduce you to the other staff that are here today who have little name tags on. They are Melody, Bonnie, and Gay. Now let me introduce the panelists: Christopher Gaskill, Karen McConnell. We thank you all for spending your Saturday morning to explain CART for us. Debbie gets the first question.

Debbie Jones:

Does your agency provide CART for all or some of the following situations: Meetings, school, presentations, courtroom, medical, legal, performing arts, employment, and anything else? Also, do you do remote CART as well as live CART? And what other services does your agency provide?

Chris Gaskill:

I work at Alderson Court Reporting. I am the federal hearings coordinator. Alderson has been around since 1938. We're primarily a court reporting company. We do depositions for corporate law firms. We do public meetings and hearings for the United States Senate, the Supreme Court, and organizations such as those, federal agencies and stuff.

CART is kind of a niche of the market that we cover. We cover a few CART jobs a week. It's not the primary portion of what Alderson does. We've been trying to increase that. Alderson typically provides CART reporting for anyone who calls in requesting it. We have done almost all of these situations, with the exception of performing arts, within the past two years that I've been involved with CART at Alderson. We primarily provide live CART. I think we've only done remote CART once in the past couple of years. We also provide captioning for live events such as Senate hearings and things of that nature.

Karen McConnell:

Metro Reporting has done CART in pretty much all of these settings. We've done remote CART. We do staff meetings and also do legal such as writing CART for a deaf plaintiff. We do performing arts, classes, lots of different meetings, different organizations.

I have been doing CART probably since the early '90s. I started court reporting in 1973 and I started my own business in 1994. In the '80s, we used to do a thing called instant edit, kind of a prototype where the text would come up on the screen and we had actually somebody sitting there editing our text. That was my first introduction to realtime.

Our company first did CART in the school setting, and then by word of mouth we've eventually evolved into doing every kind of CART imaginable. One thing I am very proud of is that I won an award from NVRC in 2006. I am very happy that I work with the HLAA group. We do a lot of pro bono CART work. And we also do pro bono in depositions. We still do depositions, but a big part of our company is now providing CART and remote CART and anything associated with that.

Chuck Motter:

I am the director of CART and captioning for Visual Language Interpreters, a new role for me since January second of this year. We presently provide these services in all of the listed areas, the meetings, the school, the resentations. The two areas I personally am not aware that we provide services at this point are in the courtroom or legal setting, and the medical setting. We just have not had a request yet for that. We do the performing arts and in the employment arena, staff meetings, any sort of meetings where someone needs access in connection with their employment.

Visual Language Interpreters was begun in 1999 as a sign language interpreting provider. Over the years as part of the provision of those services, they have gotten increasing requests for CART and captioning. That was the genesis of establishing the division and of my hiring. In the performing arts arena we have provided CART on a LED display. We provide remote CART through a proprietary platform. What you are seeing Mike write on this morning is one form of platform where remote CART is available. Ours is slightly different, but very similar in terms of appearance.

We also provide the on-site service both on a one-on-one basis, and as well to larger groups. We have the capability to provide captioning. CART is an acronym which stands for Communication Access Realtime Translation. And to me that means a full screen of text that you are seeing. True captioning is the integration of the text with the video image. Think of your news broadcast and the captioning that you are used to seeing on TV broadcast.