Everything You Wanted to Know About CART Writing

Everything You Wanted to Know About CART Writing - Part Four

By Cheryl Heppner

Editor: The folks at NVRC recently hosted (along with the local HLAA and ALDA chapters) a panel of CART experts to provide the latest information on this crucial technology. Cheryl did her usual outstanding job of writing it up and sharing it with interested folks. Here's her report. You are welcome to share this information, but please be sure to credit NVRC.

This is part four of eleven parts.

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April 2008

Lise Hamlin:

What is the normal course of events in scheduling?

Karen McConnell:

As soon as you find out that you have a conference or something that you want a CART provider for, let us know. Then we can put the right person on the job and have backups and everything else. We need information ahead of time so that we can put things in our dictionary. We have to know how to write all the words, and there are probably five or 10 different ways to write some words. If it's a word with five syllables, we could hit that a whole bunch of different ways. So we want to program our computer to know that word. The sooner that we know about the event, and who is going to be there, we can put all of those names in our dictionary. Things will come up so much cleaner for you, and you will enjoy it so much more.

Chuck Motter:

We have a website that we try to conduct as much of our business through as we can, both in terms of communicating with you, the person with a hearing loss, and our writers. And that website is on our promotional materials, but it's www.vli-dc.com. On that website you can schedule events. You can communicate with us about what your needs are so that we can best match a writer to the particular type of event that you have coming up.

You can also provide us prep materials. As Karen mentioned, we need as much as we can get. Things like a list of the expected speakers and PowerPoints that those speakers may use as part of their presentation.

In a classroom setting, the syllabi of the different classes that your student may be taking. If we can get ahold of textbooks, that's wonderful! Anything that can be provided to us in soft copy, electronically, we can post to our website. So if you schedule something with us, and you send us some of those prep materials in soft copy, then we attach that to what we call our writer side of our website. When a writer gets assigned to you, they can go on the website. They can find out what time, what date, what the event is, where to meet you if there is a particular place, as well as all of the prep materials. We try to streamline the process so that we can provide the best service to you that's possible.

We have a customer service staff, and if you choose to phone in you may do so. They are very accustomed to working with the relay service, so it should be a seamless process for you to dial in. We have TTY communication available as well, although that seems everybody is on text messaging now. You can text message things as well.

Debbie Jones:

Some of you have already covered this, but we'll go over it again. What would you recommend to clients to get the most out of CART services?

Karen McConnell:

To get the most out of the CART services, get the material to the CART provider ahead of time. That's probably the most important thing. A lot of times when you are working in a field there are certain words that you might think of as ordinary words. To someone like me, those may not be ordinary words. Send a word list, any speakers that may be involved, terminology. Also preferences like whether you want a blue screen with yellow letters, a white screen with black letters, or comic sans font. We want to please you. If there is a big group of people, we have to do a generic display because everybody wants something different. We just want to make you happy and make it the most accessible experience you've ever had.

Chuck Motter:

I echo everything that Karen said. You may need something special, such as if you have a client who needs a very different CART screen for accessibility. You can tell us those kinds of things if you wish to, and it remains confidential. An example might be someone with Usher's Syndrome, whose limited vision makes a black screen with white letters and font size 20 the best choice. Any sort of preparation materials that you can give us are wonderful. We rely on you as the person to advocate for things that you need from the conference providers.

If we're in the middle of a class and something is making access to the information difficult, we will not break in as a CART provider and say to the teacher or to the presenter, "Can you speak up? Would you please use the microphone?" Rather, we will write a note to you on the screen and say, "We're having difficulty. Would you like us to do that?" If you then give us permission, we're more than willing to do it. But it is not our role to do it in the first instance.

We leave it up to you to give us guidance about how can we make things more accessible. Many times, as I am sure you are aware, people will either speak off the microphone, or in a classroom setting the professor will turn around and begin writing on the blackboard, which takes them away from our audio source or prevents us from seeing their lips. And believe it or not, we do some lipreading, particularly if they are using unfamiliar terminology.

One of the areas that causes me a lot of grief is working with government agencies, because they use so many acronyms and pronounce them as if they were words. You are sitting there going, "It sounds sort of familiar, but I am not even sure whether to start that with a 'K' or a 'Q' or a 'C,' or whatever it might be." I had recently an instance where the person was talking about a quad row. Well, to me, that meant a row of 4, quad row, but it was QDRO. It was an acronym. That's an example of the kinds of things that we ask you to help us with.

If it's a one-on-one instance, many times, particularly if you are a person who would rather communicate through text, I will use 90% of my screen to display the CART, and at the bottom I will open a notepad file where you can type to me, so that if I am hearing something incorrectly, you can give me the correct term. From that point on I will do my best to make that modification. It's not always possible.

Karen and I were talking about this. We both have been thrown into situations where, for instance, in a medical setting they'll say the name of a disease that's six syllables long. Even if you type out that word, which turns into 20 letters or something, we're not going to be able to get that word exactly right every time on the fly. Now, the first break, we're going to put that name into our dictionary. From that point on, we'll have it. But those are some of the obstacles that we run into and some ways that you can really help us.

Chris Gaskill:

I feel that we've thoroughly covered this topic. To sum everything up, communication is a two-way street. If we can get as much information from the users as possible, we'll give as much back, and that's how you are going to end up getting the best CART experience.