No Symposium Coverage Complete w/o the Tech

By BitcoDavid

One of the terp team at work. Photo: BitcoDavid

True. There were 2 ASL interpreters, and what I noticed there, was that not only did they take turns interpreting for the individual speakers, but they did this cool tandem thing for audience questions. An audience member would sign her question, and Terp 1 would say it in English, then Terp 2 would sign the speaker’s answer back to the questioner.

C.A.R.T. in action. Photo: BitcoDavid

C.A.R.T was also employed, and it’s the first time I have been privy to seeing C.A.R.T. in action. The operators – there were 2 of them, as well – would key in the spoken words, using a Steno machine. The output of the Steno was fed into the U.S.B. port on a laptop. The laptop drove a little DLP projector, onto a 60″ Da Lite screen. While what appeared to be the lead C.A.R.T. operator was keying in words, the backup operator would be using the Web on her own laptop, to look up words, spellings and other references.

My trusty little Sony Handicam, earning its daily bread. Photo: BitcoDavid

On top of all that, they had a PC at the podium, and were running constant PowerPoints from the overhead DLP, onto a separate screen behind the speaker.

My little guy needs some Abilify and a hit of Viagra after seeing this monster. Photo: BitcoDavid

I wanted you to see more C.A.R.T.

The backup operator. Photo:BitcoDavid

All things considered, I was impressed by the accuracy and speed of C.A.R.T. As you know, captioning is something that’s important to me. The manual method I use is absolutely accurate, assuming I can hear the dialog, but it’s very slow and labor intensive. The computerized method employed by YouTube among others is horribly inaccurate – relying, as it does, on speech to text conversion. I noticed that C.A.R.T. wasn’t 100% accurate, but all things being equal it was sufficient to the task, and with almost no noticeable delay.

Here’s the primary operator and her screen. At her lap level can be seen the Steno machine. Photo: BitcoDavid

BitcoDavid is a blogger and a blog site consultant. In former lives, he was an audio engineer, a videographer, a teacher – even a cab driver. He is an avid health and fitness enthusiast and a Pro/Am boxer. He has spent years working with diet and exercise to combat obesity and obesity related illness.

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