CART Operators Chicago IL

Communications Access Real Time (CART) is a system that provides access to spoken information for people with hearing loss. The CART system operator generally began as a court reporter.

CART operators use a court reporting machine to input spoken text. These machines are quite complex, but they are much faster than a typewriter because they allow for inputting words a syllable at a time rather than a word at a time.

CART operators, like real time television captioners, must be able to input spoken information as fast as a person speaks, and the better ones are able to keep up with all but the most rapid speakers.

The output of the court reporting machine is fed to a computer, which produces a text document that corresponds very closely to the words used by the speaker. (The CART reporter has some license to change the words, as long as the resulting message is true to the original.

Once in the computer, the text can be displayed on a computer monitor (for one or two users) or projected onto a screen (for tens, hundreds, or thousands of users.)

CART is a wonderful system for late-deafened people, and is generally their system of choice.

April 2001 - The intent of many accessibility laws is to provide a person with a disability with a service that is functionally equivalent to the service available to a person without disability. It's not a real clear definition, but one that can provoke considerable thought and discussion. Here's a VERY interesting article on that topic by a CART user with NORMAL hearing !

August 2001 - It seems that CART has grown up before our very eyes. There are still too few reporters and other growing pains, but the field is well on its way to becoming a profession. Here is an article by Maureen McGuire and Pete Wacht on finding a good CART reporter . The article recently appeared in NVRC News. As always, we appreciate their permission to share their information with you.

June 2002 - cartinfo.org Aids CART Consumers

February 2003 - I'm really excited about the possibilities of using voice recognition to do live captioning. Here's a report on the use of voice recognition to caption an ALDA meeting .

December 2003 - Here's an interesting article by Shelley Arthur about similarities and collaboration between CART reporters and ASL interpreters!

January 2004 - You've probably been hearing a bit about remote CART. That's the term used to describe a situation in which a captioner provides captions without being physically present. Here's an article on remote CART from the 2003 ALDA conference .

January 2004 - With television and movies increasingly being captioned, surely our public servants in Washington are providing access to their proceedings, right? You'd think so, right? Then you should take a look at this!

March 2006 - You may be aware of C-Print as an alternative to CART. Demand for C-Print is skyrocketing at NTID!

June 2007 - School to fight ruling that student should have CART

December 2007 - Court a...