When I started college I knew I would have a whole different set of challenges, such as larger classrooms, less individual attention, difficulty lip-reading international speakers and learning lots of new technical terms as a chemical engineering major.  Enter the solution – CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation).  I still sat in the front of the lecture hall, except now I had a captioner sitting next to me typing every word that the professor and students were saying.  Those spoken words were projected onto the laptop in front of me, so that I could read every word of the lecture, as well as dialogue between the students and professor when questions were asked.

As technology progressed I shifted to using remote-CART.  It was the same concept, except the captioner was no longer in the room with me.  Instead, a microphone sent the audio to the captioner at their location and I would connect with the captioner via the Internet with my laptop.  The words appeared on my laptop screen just as they had before.

After graduation came a career and a whole new set of challenges to navigate.  My biggest obstacle, as for many others with hearing loss, was listening on the phone.  One-on-one phone calls were solved with the use of a CAPTEL phone; however, it was not sufficient for those large group conference calls or webinars.  Luckily I found Jeanette Christian at 20/20 Captioning & Reporting and I have been using her services ever since.  Using CART for business conference calls puts me on the same playing field as my co-workers and gives me freedom to communicate in a way that is comfortable for me.

Now we are fortunate to have Jeanette on board as our CART provider for our HLAA Kansas City chapter.  She and her team remote-CART for our meetings every other month.  At our meeting this coming Saturday, March 10, Jeanette will be giving us an overview of how CART works, how you can benefit from it, and tons of other interesting information about captioning.  Jeanette’s colleagues at 20/20 Captioning & Reporting will provide remote-CART, so come join us to learn more about CART and see it in action!

Date:  Saturday March 10^th
Time: 10:30 am – noon
Location:  Johnson County Central Resource Library Meeting Room, 9875 W. 87th St., Overland Park, KS 66212