In the past 6 weeks, I have interviewed or attended Open Houses at 8 different schools around the country. Don’t get me wrong, I am flattered and humbled by the positive responses I received from my PhD applications.
But: It. Was. Exhausting.
Nonetheless, it provided an opportunity to try out different captioning systems and see what captioning is like in places that are not New York City.
First off, at every school I visited, I was able to secure captioning accommodations. It’s a good lesson that as long as you’re proactive and explain exactly what you need, most schools are able to comply. Thank you to all of the administrators and coordinators who helped set this up.
That being said, all captioning is not created equal. The experience made me realize that I’ve been pretty spoiled in New York City, with a relative abundance of well-qualified captionists at my disposal. The following bullet points are largely to serve as a comparison of CART captioning and C-Print, because after extensive googling I found zero qualitative comparisons.
- The first observation is not a comparison. Rather, it is a direct experience with the phenomena of “discount captioners,” as described by Mirabai Knight, one of the most proficient and strongly activist captionists I’ve used. So-called “CART firms” will troll court reporting schools for mid-level students and use them to charge cash-strapped schools extremely low rates. The result is a terrible experience for students, and a blemish on the reputation of CART captioning.
- At one school, I actually pulled a professor aside as we were changing rooms and said, “I’m going to have to rely 100% on reading your lips, because I have literally no idea what the captioner is writing.” As Mirabai’s article explains, this is unfortunately all too common, as many schools do not realize that only highly-proficient, highly-trained captioners can provide a sufficient experience for deaf and hard-of-hearing students.
- CART vs C-Print
- Mirabai provides a bunch of great reasons why C-Print can fall short of CART captioning. I only used C-Print twice, whereas I’ve been using CART multiple times a week for the better part of 3 years. I’d strongly encourage anyone interested to check out Mirabai’s article.
- Overall, C-Print was…fine. But when it comes to hearing, “fine” ≠ “adequate.”
- C-Print does not advertise itself as a literal, word-for-word transcription. Rather, they only “ensure” that the most important things are transcribed. But “importance” is completely at the discretion of the captioner. There were a few occasions where I know the C-Print captioner did not transcribe words that I would consider important, such as the name of an institution where a researcher was located.
- A C-Print captionist uses a QWERTY keyboard, and depends on a program where they type many abbreviations that the program expands to full words. This usually works well enough, but C-Print is definitely at least 1-2 seconds slower than CART. While 1-2 seconds may not sound like a long time, I would defy you to try having a conversation with someone where things lag 1-2 seconds behind. You’ll quickly see just how significant 1-2 seconds can be.
- C-Print can be advantageous in noisy situations where an in-person captioner is not available. I used C-Print at a lunch, in an environment that definitely could not have used remote captioning. In this case, a slower, more summarizing transcription is better than a word-for-word transcription that cannot eliminate a high level of background noise.
- Mirabai provides a bunch of great reasons why C-Print can fall short of CART captioning. I only used C-Print twice, whereas I’ve been using CART multiple times a week for the better part of 3 years. I’d strongly encourage anyone interested to check out Mirabai’s article.
tl;dr: C-Print captioning is an okay substitution when in-person captioning is not available. But in no way should an institution feel that providing C-Print captioning is the equivalent of providing the transcription provided by CART captioning.