Captioning Makes Us Happy!

LIFE is all about COMMUNICATION.

Without communications there are no relations.

Without relationships there are no human connections.

Without human beings who care for each other,

What’s left?

CAPTIONING is all about communication too.

CAPTIONS

SUBTITLES

REAL TIME SPEECH TO TEXT FOR THE WORLD.

Without you and you and you asking for it,

Captioning is missing in too many places.

Ask for it where you need it.

Join the CCAC to communicate and find relations who understand.

CCAC members communicate and help you (and me) ask for it (it’s called advocacy).

BE HAPPY.

http://CCACaptioning.org

http://CCACaptioning.org/join

CCACaptioning@gmail.com

 

Advertisement

Captions Capture the Votes! MA Candidate with Quality CC Online!

Happy we are! Found a second candidate with Quality Captioning on an online ad!

https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/mauratvad

In Massachusetts – have a look:

 

Thank you Maura! Now tell us when you have a live event with live realtime captioning, and we’ll shout about it nationally, in many places.

http://CCACaptioning.org – the one and only – join and support us, citizen advocates, all volunteers, official non-profit – let’s caption the world!

email: CCACaptioning@gmail.com

Success in “Captions Capture the Votes” in Oregon, thanks Rep. Sara Gelser!

CCAC volunteers have been working for months to educate, raise awareness, and advocate for QUALITY CAPTIONING to be used for all the many election year 2014 campaign ads on the Internet, and we also advocate for a live campaign event with live captioning for all in the audience.

Watch this especially popular one – all for a good cause:

We are happy to say thanks today to one candidate – as follows:

THANK YOU STATE REP. SARA GELSER  (Sara Acres Gelser) for inclusion of quality captioning! We count this as a  campaign video online since you are in the middle of a re-election campaign in the great state of Oregon!

Your video with good CAPTIONING is partially due to the CCAC campaign, Captions Capture the Votes) and our friends in Oregon e.g. Karen Brockett, and our conversations with you. 

We know you understand the needs of people with differences and our rights for access and inclusion.

Dear Representative Sara – we wish all candidates in every State followed your example. If you have a live event with live CAPTIONING or need help to arrange it get in touch. Best wishes for your campaign in Oregon.

Cheers Lauren/CCAC

JOIN and support the one and only CCAC – go to http://CCACaptioning.org to learn more. We are hundreds of citizen advocates, all volunteers, who know the value and vitality of quality captioning (subtitles, speech-to-text) – the world’s language!

http://ccacaptioning.org/donate/ if you care to pour some ice or warm water over your head and also make a contribution to the CCAC, thanks if you do!

Guest Blog – Real Day in the Life of a Captioner!

We enjoyed this honest and open view into a day in the life of …and as we told Jenn, it’s just great that students have quality CAPTIONING (CART) to learn what they want to learn, to reduce anxiety in important verbal situations, and to know that they have a record of it all, no matter if they use every word live and realtime or not. Since voices, acoustics, and so many factors are dynamic (change all the time), knowing that captioning is there for us is a huge life-saver (even when working with the opposite, see below, smile please).

Bu Jennifer Porto, Long Beach, California, 7 years captioning

Hello and… to introduce myself, my name is Jenn Porto. I’ve been a CART captioner for

approximately 7 years. My purpose of writing my stories is to share my fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants

moments that I encounter on the job. This post doesn’t make me an expert and does not mean that

I’ll always make the right decisions. I may say/do something that makes you wince. I’m okay with

that. There is no rule book for being a CART captioner. With that said, I am not always going to be

grammatically correct. This is an account of my day and my thoughts as they come to mind.

8/22/14 — Please do not read while eating or if you have a weak stomach. (Intrigued yet?)

I feel like I can say that I’ve realtime captioned (RTC’d) almost every type of job. I’ve captioned nude models for an art class — I’ll write about that another day – and, as of yesterday, cadavers for a GROSS anatomy class, emphasis on the GROSS. Before walking into the room, I had no idea as to how I was going to emotionally handle this class. I’ve never actually seen a dead body. I emailed the captioner who captioned the Wednesday portion of the class. She said it was no walk in the park. I worried because I’ve always been a bit gaggy. Would I cry thinking about the cadaver as a person that just passed? All I could picture was a human-sized frog, lying in its slimy bath of stinky formaldehyde. I could picture the brownish-pink intestines we had to dissect in our 8th grade bio class. Okay, I digress before I lose some of you.

Let me set the scene, the student … told me before the class that she didn’t need my captions during the dissection. “Thank gawd,” I woohoo’d inside my head. She asked if I could sit in the corner and take “notes” for her. “No prob.” The student’s wish is my command….( before the session, I was wondering) …how I could prevent dissection fluids from getting on my equipment? I know this all sounds really gross, but it was a genuine topic of discussion. Should I put my laptop in a plastic bag? I can’t imagine if I shorted out my laptop and had to call in a claim to my insurance carrier Marsh USA.

I had come prepared with my normal RTC equipment, including my Dell 15″ laptop, Stenograph Mira, 6’ extension cord, laptop stand, mini 7”x10” laptop, et cetera. I use a free program called Team Viewer to mirror the image of my laptop to the mini-laptop. What I had NOT brought with me is a bubble from which I could caption inside of.

First off, I walked into the room and saw the four bodies. “EWE-ewe-ewe. Hmmmm – Wait. It’s kinda cool — really cool.” The flesh had a visible texture of pale nude-colored human jerky. It looked like a manikin from a Knott’s Scary Farm prop. Honestly, it didn’t look real at all. The smell, well, formaldehyde is no longer used in the preservation process. The bodies had a slight chemical smell that I was able to diffuse with a little Vix Vapor Rub smeared ALLLLLL over my nose.

The group of students crowded around Body No. 1. I did my best to caption from my designated corner. Hearing the group was tough. Words like sacrospinous, triceps coccyx, and planter fasciae lata, to name a few, came up while they dissected the sciatica. It was hard to hear because half of the group had their back to me and the other half were looking down at the body. Even though she had asked me to just take notes, I set my laptop up facing her. I used a black screen with yellow letters, Arial font, size 34, so the font was big enough that if she needed the captions, she could glance over her shoulder. I did notice that my student stole many glances of my captions. Next Friday, I’m going to set up my mini-laptop on the opposite side of her. With the two laptops, she will have two viewing spots in the room.

After Body No. 1 was dissected, the class moved to Body No. 2. I could no longer hear from my

designated corner, so I decided to sneak a quick look at Body No. 1. From where I had been sitting, I

couldn’t see the body’s face. Although, when I stood up, I could now see eyelashes on the man’s face.

Until this moment, it was not a man, it was just a body. I started to see features. Feeling myself losing

my cool, I looked down at the man’s hands. His fingernails looked like a werewolf’s claws. They were a couple centimeters thick, grayish, and longer than a man would wear his nails. “Sit down,” I commanded myself. After sitting, I focused on my editing. Every couple minutes, I’d look over at the bodies, but only to make sure the student was still okay with her original desire for me to take notes instead of captioning. By the way, when I say “notes,” I mean I was captioning just like I normally would, but the student was not reading from my screen (at all times).

Unfortunately, my lunch break is directly after this class. (Yeahhhhh,my sentiments exactly.) I bought a salad from the commissary. Even though it didn’t have any meat, I found that I had lost my appetite while munching on my mixture of lettuce, beets, and celery. I wished for a shower. I felt as if I had a layer of body-preserving chemicals all over me. ICK! This was my first time captioning in such an ick-infested environment. Stay tuned for next week. I’m sure I’ll come up with solutions to the ick. All in all, it was just another day in the most rewarding career I could ever hope for.

=

http://CCACaptioning.org is the place to read more – please click on those pages frequently!

 

 

 

New Blogposts Invited! Users and Providers! Short or longer fine :-)

It’s time for you to submit a thought or two about why you love CAPTIONING of any sort – media or live and real time. We all know it’s the world’s language, so why don’t others understand this? Why are machine captions being used without corrections?

When did you first discover CAPTIONING? Where did you see it? Where do you miss it now?

Hope to hear from many of you :-).

 

 

CAPTIONING – WHATEVER WORKS! WITH QUALITY!

A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS! they say…

We agree and yet it’s hard to display…

All the many forms of captioning today,

In one drawing or photo

That shows them all – or hey…

How about if our CCAC members, friends, followers, supporters and others here,

Take time to lend an ear,

And find a photo to add to our collection?!

We’ll say thank you without hesitation :-).

We also have so many photos for public distribution,

On the CCAC social media pages,

Just look there anytime,

Don’t cost even a dime!

Yet to continue the fabulous fun of Captioning advocacy,

The CCAC does ask this small mercy – donate and support us.

There are annual expenses every year,

We don’t waste a tear,

Happy to invest,

Because so many are worth it,

Yes! No doubts,

Don’t Leave Us Out!

Caption Universally!

(join and offer support – CCACaptioning.org is the place).

 

CAPTIONING IS AN EYE-OPENER!

CAPTIONING – there are many ways to shout about the vitality and necessity and wonderfulness of captioning – yet we continue to meet people that really don’t know what we are talking about!  Honestly – they are not sure what it is….

WE continue to search for phrases that will catch attention e.g Captioning Communicates or Captioning Captures the Words.  This is our newest! Captioning is an eye-opener!

SOME friends and others talk only about “subtitles” for movies and television. Some know that captions are very similar to subtitles, and some know that we need them on all Internet media now also (all videos).

SOME have read about “live” or “realtime” captioning – or “speech-to-text” yet have never yet seen it live – have no local place to see RTC (also called CART, CART Captioning, Text Interpreting and also STTR in various different counties) in action.

WHO are these “some” and “we” we’re part of and concerned about? Mega-millions globally! We need quality captioning for access and inclusion due to hearing loss, deafness, tinnitus, different learning styles, visual learners, language learners, for translations globally, and for many others who prefer quality captioning in all noisy situations (e.g. sports bars) and also in quiet situations (medical center waiting rooms with the TV on all the time). Mega-millions!

LET”S hear your story —

WHERE and why and when do you have the captions on? Where was the first time you saw live captioning?

CAPTIONING is an eye-opener! Why? It brings us back into communications and relationships – that’s life and that’s what is healthy for all.

 

Lessons Learned

Michele is also a CCAC member and we are honored to have her participation :-). This is not about captioning per se – yet some encouragement for us all. There are always new things to learn, dips as she says (challenges and changes), and resources to discover. Use whatever connections and networks you can find! Best to all, Lauren/President/CCACaptioning.org