Speak & Spell
August 3, 2017 4:58 AM Subscribe
Robot CART options for Deaf attendees at impending conference?
Next week, we are staging a small-but-influential space science conference in Monterey, California. Our organization is non-profit and our budget this year was stricken by two major sponsors having to decline due to personal restrictions.
We are proud of providing CART services–aka Communication Access Realtime Translation aka real-time captioning–for attendees who are Deaf or hearing impaired. But our budget drop-out is more than CART would cost us, around $5k.
What I am asking of the hivemind this time is: Are there some modern technological possibilities to make this happen robotically ie Google Translate, Dragon, etc where we could have the audio translated on the fly and live on screen?
Space and science conferences are historically nonchalant in providing for accessibility and diversity. The future is here, fortunately, and there should be options for overcoming any such ordinary hurdles for broad inclusion. Hopefully, there is such an option here.
Access and inclusion is a priority for us. Circumstances have brought us here. How may we we succeed in solving this creatively?
Next week, we are staging a small-but-influential space science conference in Monterey, California. Our organization is non-profit and our budget this year was stricken by two major sponsors having to decline due to personal restrictions.
We are proud of providing CART services–aka Communication Access Realtime Translation aka real-time captioning–for attendees who are Deaf or hearing impaired. But our budget drop-out is more than CART would cost us, around $5k.
What I am asking of the hivemind this time is: Are there some modern technological possibilities to make this happen robotically ie Google Translate, Dragon, etc where we could have the audio translated on the fly and live on screen?
Space and science conferences are historically nonchalant in providing for accessibility and diversity. The future is here, fortunately, and there should be options for overcoming any such ordinary hurdles for broad inclusion. Hopefully, there is such an option here.
Access and inclusion is a priority for us. Circumstances have brought us here. How may we we succeed in solving this creatively?
Have you also compared the cost of using in-person sign language interpreters? (b/c English is not the first language of many d/Deaf people, and if the language in your conference is technical or specialized, using CART may not be accessible enough.) Besides ASL interpreters and CART, I do not know of any other accommodations that are adequate.
posted by carlypennylane at 12:27 PM on August 3, 2017
posted by carlypennylane at 12:27 PM on August 3, 2017
Agree with brainmouse. Automatic transcription is just not there yet, especially for technical content, accented speakers, etc. It would not be a sufficient accommodation.
A friend-of-a-friend works with the company White Coat Captioning for jargon-savvy remote captioners. I'm sure there are other providers too.
posted by Alioth at 9:09 PM on August 3, 2017 [1 favorite]
A friend-of-a-friend works with the company White Coat Captioning for jargon-savvy remote captioners. I'm sure there are other providers too.
posted by Alioth at 9:09 PM on August 3, 2017 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
That said, $5K seems like a lot for this, depending on the length of your conference. You might look into remote CART services, which might be cheaper (especially given cost of living stuff in Monterey vs. other parts of the country), or looking into C-Print/TypeWell which is not as good as CART but usually cheaper, if it comes down to that or nothing.
But if some sort of accommodation has been requested and this is in some way a "public" accommodation, you are required to provide some sort of access for your Deaf attendees, unless you can prove that the cost is an undue burden, so this is not just an expense you can choose to not pay.
posted by brainmouse at 10:03 AM on August 3, 2017 [1 favorite]