Helping people be a part of things




Texas Certified Realtime Reporter and Caption Source owner Whitney Riley captures and translates what is said via communication access real-time translation (CART) captioning, accompanied by Kathleen Ulrich, an independent contractor with Caption Source, during a recent demonstration of their services.

Do you sometimes watch movies or television programs and wonder what was just said? Have you ever sat in a university lecture hall and wondered what the professor just said that was so important it might be on an exam? Maybe you’ve been in a conference and not understood the foreign language used around the table. Do you know someone who is hearing-impaired, who is missing out on the joys of hearing conversations and music lyrics?

Perhaps CART — communication access real-time translation — is the answer. One San Antonio company, Caption Source, provides captioning for anyone in the above categories, and more.

When Caption Source owner Whitney Riley was just 16 years old, a court reporter was a guest speaker to her business class. Whitney was fascinated — so much so that when she was 23, she went to court reporting school.

“CART is something we do one-on-one” for the customer, Whitney explained. Using a stenograph machine that has only 22 keys, the 26-letter alphabet is quickly and efficiently written, as people speak.

What appears on Whitney’s screen as she types may appear to the untutored eye as gibberish, but it turns into captions to help the hearing-impaired and others follow TV programs, films, university lectures, court proceedings, church services, and more!

It’s not like conventional typing, however. For example, “on the left hand, the letter M is PH together; on the right hand it is PL,” Whitney explained. “There is no letter M. There is no letter I. When we see EU together, we automatically see I.”

“To get certified in Texas, you have to take the certified shorthand reporter exam and pass with 95-percent accuracy at 225 words per minute.”

Whitney was certified in 1989. Some people in her company are certified to write at least 260 words per minute.

Her first job in the field was working for attorneys, taking depositions. She started her own company in 1993.

Caption Source has used stenography court-reporting skills and talents to caption auctions, university classroom lectures, concerts, board meetings, church services, the San Antonio Rodeo, and more! Some of the functions transcribed are done in person; others can be done remotely. According to Whitney, the ADA requires that services such as closed-captioning be made available to hearing-impaired individuals.

A Caption Source employee can be in a lecture hall transcribing notes and discussion while the text is being sent via computer to the student’s laptop, so they can read what the professor is saying. There’s no need to sit near the person who requires the service, so the service is anonymous, and privacy ensured. The hearing-impaired individual is not singled out among other students. Whitney shared that another way of looking at the disability accommodation is “if a person is in a wheelchair, the venue does not expect the person to bring their own ramp.” There are governmental funds set aside for the services her company provides.

Whitney has 25 independent contractors who cover events that happen mostly in Texas. They also cover remote events and conference calls, and work with the Veterans Administration and National Institutes for Health. Caption Source also has a Spanish-language captioner; the company also works with several Texas stations that broadcast in Spanish.

“This service is so valuable,” Whitney said. “With CART and Caption Source, you get 99-percent verbatim of what is being said.”

But captioners don’t only transcribe what is said. During auctions, some of what the auctioneer says can be gibberish, she said, so the captioner types in “(indiscernible).”

Captioners also convey environmental elements for the hearing-impaired, so they understand things happening around them that they cannot hear. Whitney related that once, in a class with a client, a dog was outside the classroom barking. “It got really annoying, and suddenly the whole classroom was commenting about the dog,” she said. She explained the situation to her client. “So now we put that in our captioning, so they understand sarcasm, sounds around them, etc.”
Captioners also get creative to help convey action.

“For concerts, we use parentheticals,” Whitney described. “If the girls start screaming, we type ‘(cheering and applause).’
“Some of it we make up on the fly, because we don’t have keystrokes for environmental sounds.”

At the San Antonio Rodeo, hearing-impaired people can use an app on their phone to read the captioning about what’s taking place in the arena, and what the announcer is saying. The captioning service is advertised on the Jumbotron; the universal symbol for closed-captioning appears on the screen, and viewers are directed to the website where they can click a link for the service.

While captioning at conferences in Salt Lake City and Minnesota, Whitney was captioning in English. But Japanese business people attending could follow proceedings in their own language, as she used a service to translate her notes into Japanese by using Google Translate.

“The Japanese people thought it was amazing,” Whitney marveled. “They were just blown away because they were part of it.”

Helping people be a part of things is what her service provides.


Did you know?
The first closed-captioned live broadcast in Texas was in 1991, in Austin.

Learn more
For more information visit www.captionsource.com or email whitney@captionsource.com.
Owner Whitney Riley holds numerous certifications, including CSR (Texas), PRP,CRR, CCP, DBC (National), CART Certification, Level V, in the State of Texas, and Texas Certified Realtime Reporter.