Professional CART/Captioning in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 15 years

When would we use a Realtime Captioner?

Captioners can provide a variety of services: real-time captioning in the courtroom, public hearings and meetings, and training or education classes. Captioning may be used for a single individual, or a group, and can be used in conjunction with television or webcast programming.

F.A.Q.

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​Can a Captioner replace an ASL sign interpreter?

Not necessarily. Captioners and sign interpreters address two different groups of people. Pre-lingually deaf (or culturally Deaf) people usually have sign language—ASL—as their first language, and English came later. Some might be more comfortable and comprehension level might be higher with an interpreter. Postlingually deaf people (or late-deafened adults) learned English before they learned to sign, if they learned to sign at all. For these people, captions may provide a better comprehension level.   

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​Who is qualified to caption for me?

If you decide to employ a Captioner you've never used before, call and check on the Captioner’s qualifications, and ask for and talk to their references. Real-time captioning is very difficult to do with the accuracy needed to minimize garbled words, so you want to be sure the person you hire is well qualified and has the appropriate technology to do the job.

Why use Realtime Captioning?

Some people who are deaf or hard of hearing do not use sign language. Therefore, some other communication options, including interpreters or assistive listening devices (personal headset amplifiers), are not effective for some deaf or hard of hearing people. For these individuals, captioning may provide an effective adjunct to seeing exactly what is said in those situations. It should be noted that real-time captioning also benefits others, including persons with cognitive impairments and others.​

What is Realtime Captioning?​

Real-time captioning is a relatively recent application of a technology that has been used by court reporters for many years - using a steno machine to transcribe what is said, a real-time captioner types in real-time from the machine connected to a laptop computer. People can then read everything that is said as it is being said (in "real time") from the Captioner’s laptop computer monitor or projected onto a screen.

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