[Athen] Caption Mic

[Mirabai Knight]

From: "Gaeir Dietrich" <gdietrich at htctu.net>

> I certainly appreciate you speaking up. I knew in theory that there would be

> difficulties (pretty much everything you said), but I did not know of any

> test cases. As you said, those selling speech recognition packages on top of

> Dragon often make claims far beyond what is possible.

>

> Interestingly, Nuance themselves does not make such claims for Dragon. That

> should tell us all something!


I'm glad it wasn't out of place. I forgot one more thing that might be
relevant: another disadvantage of remote captioning, whether
stenographic or speech-based, is that only the person wearing the
microphone will be transcribed. That means that questions from
students, unless the professor repeats them before answering them,
will be marked as inaudible, and the student might feel left out of
the discussion, especially if it's more of a seminar-style than a
lecture-style class. I'm certainly not opposed to remote captioning in
general. I've played around with it myself, and I could certainly see
myself providing it when onsite work was not available, but by and
large, if an onsite captioner can be found, it's more likely that the
transcript will be accurate and complete. The Caption Mic materials
mentioned that some students might not like their classmates to know
that they're receiving captioning, and might feel awkward with a
captioner sitting next to them, but a good solution for that is to
find a captioner or CART provider who has two computers that can
transmit text wirelessly to one another. In situations where my
clients have told me that they'd prefer to sit on their own rather
than looking at my laptop over my shoulder, I hook up my equipment in
the back of the room and let them sit in the front.

Mirabai Knight
StenoKnight CART Services
http://stenoknight.com