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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
173-09-19-14 – Kathy Cortopassi – Voice To Print Captioning
Show notes:
CART & Captions Explained (Kathy & TJ Cortopassi, www.voicetoprint.com)
Call in your holiday gift suggestions for our upcoming Holiday Shopping Show: 317-721-7124
Call for Papers | Rehabilitation Engineering & Assistive Technology Society of North America http://buff.ly/1mbfm3j
Intel Unveils Connected Wheelchair – Assistive Technology at Easter Seals Crossroads http://buff.ly/1mbexHu
Accessibility Summit 2014: Writing Great Alt Text http://buff.ly/XDMkxr
ERIC – 508 Compliance: Preparing Presentations, Excel Files, Websites, and Multimedia Products, Regional Educational Laboratory, 2014-May http://buff.ly/XDMaX4
Smile Blog: TextExpander Snippet Expansion Comes to Every App in iOS 8 http://buff.ly/XDIswB
Freedom Scientific – News http://buff.ly/1DjIElp
App: Weather Radio WTD – www.AppleVis.com
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——-transcript follows ——
KATHY CORTOPASSI: My name is Kathy Cortopassi. I am President of Voice to Print Captioning.
TJ CORTOPASSI: Hi, this TJ Cortopassi, Assistant to the President of Voice to Print Captioning.
KATHY CORTOPASSI: And this is your Assistive Technology Update.
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology, designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs. Welcome to episode number 173 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s scheduled to be released on September 19 of 2014.
I’m excited today to have my good friend, Kathy Cortopassi and TJ Cortopassi, to talk about CART and captions and how, when we do events or when you look at the show notes, you get the words that were spoken, presented, in a visual format. So we’re going to uncover how the process works and talk about CART and transcription in that kind of stuff.
Also we have a story about a local person, a young man at Rose Hallman Institute of technology, who is working with Intel to create a biometric aware wheelchair. Some great tips and hints on how to make your online content a little bit more accessible. And an exciting thing happening with the release of iOS 8 and an app from the folks over at AppleVis called Weather Radio WTD.
So we hope you’ll check out our website at eastersealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project, or call our listener line at 317-721-7124.
The holidays are just around the corner, and before you know it, it will be time for our third annual Assistive Technology Holiday Shopping Show. If you have an idea for an assistive technology holiday gift or a gift that helps somebody with a disability, let us know what is. Give us a call on our listener line at 317-721-7124. Tell us the name of the gift, where you buy it, how much it costs, and why it’s useful for somebody with a disability. You might just be who should get on our November 28 Black Friday Holiday Shopping Show. Give us a call, 317-721-7124.
Are you going to be in Denver, Colorado, June 10-14 next year? The RESNA Assistive Technology Conference is going to be there, and they are just opened up their call for papers. They are looking for individual to do sessions and workshops or instructional courses all about assistive technology. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes over to the RESNA website and you can find all the instructions and information there so that you can apply and perhaps become a presenter at RESNA 2015.
From Fitbits to Apple Watches, everybody’s excited about biometrics and these wearable devices that can tell a computer what your body is doing and give you information back. Well, a young man from Indiana, his name is Tim Balz, and he is a Rose Hallman Institute of Technology student. He has worked with Intel and Stephen Hawking to create a thing called the connected wheelchair. This is a wheelchair that will measure things like blood pressure, movement, and all kinds of biometric information and report it back to a processor that can then do things like make a 911 call if there is an emergency or help a user keep track of things like body temperature and other things that have to do with safety.
Our social media content specialist, Laura Metcalf, has done a story on this on our website. I’m going to put a link to Laura’s blog post where you can learn more about this wheelchair. It’s got an interesting video where Stephen Hawking talks about the importance of this device and is just really cool technology, plus there is an Indiana connection. We love it when Hoosiers are doing stuff in the world of assistive technology. Check out our show notes and we’ll have more information there on this new project with Intel about the connected wheelchair.
I’ve got a couple of stories here focusing on making more accessible content. The first one is called Writing Great Alt Text. There was an online accessibility summit, the fifth annual, that happened. And a research expert named Whitney Quesenbery talked about Alt Text, why it’s important, and how to do a better job of it. Quick recap will let us know the Alt Text is text that’s associated with an image so that a screen reader or other assistive technology will be able to address the content of the image. She talks about why there’s a lot of bad Alt Text out there. Alt Text is just not doing the job.
Then there’s a list of helpful tips in here, things about repeating the text that’s in an image, if the image has words in it, repeating those so that they are available in the Alt Text. Talking about how you don’t have to have Alt Text if your image is just used as a bullet point. When information is in a chart, combining the visual chart with a data table. Also she talks about the importance of making the addition of Alt Text just part of your workflow, make it part of the way you do your job. Some tips about keeping it short and figuring out how to do things more succinctly. Without going through the whole list, I’ll pop a link in the show notes and you can learn more about what Whitney suggest in terms of making all text a little bit better.
And from our friends over at RESNA, we learned about a new Department of Education publication that talks about preparing presentations, Excel files, websites and multimedia products. This is part of the Institute of Education Sciences and it’s all about 508 compliance. I like this guide. It’s about nine or 10 pages and is in a PDF file and really break things into practical steps. It gives some tips and resources on how to make your presentations, your Excel files, websites and other kinds of stuff that gets used in presentations more accessible. I love the format because it has a little bit of narrative.
Then it has some do’s and don’ts. For example, with Excel it says do set up table shows in advance, and it gives some details. It says do make sure that the tab at the bottom of the worksheet describes the content, not just Tab A or Tab B. It says do make sure that all contents are visible in the page or print preview and that the links are all correct and active. Then it says don’t use blank and merge cells or don’t use floating controls written in Visual Basic because screen readers can’t read them. So it’s not all quite that technical but it’s all good information and very interesting. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes over to this article that you can read or this document that you can read about 508 compliance and how you can make your multimedia presentations more accessible. Check our show notes.
As I sit recording the show right now, my iPhone is downloading iOS 8. I’m recording the show just a few days before it airs and it’s a day that the iPhone software upgrade became available. One of the things that I’m most excited about is the availability of text expander keyboard for iOS 8. Text expander is a Mac application that I’ve been using on my computer for a long time, and it lets me put in a bunch of stuff and associate it with keyboards keystrokes. So it’s basically an abbreviation expander. But I can put it commonly misspelled words or I can put in a shortcut to addresses and phone numbers in things that I type a whole lot. It types them into my Mac for me.
I’m excited that with iOS 8, the promise is that the text expander touch software is going to allow me to have a systemwide keyboard to do my abbreviation expansion. For example, if I type “.ww”, it types on my email address. Or if I type “.address”, it types out my work address book some looking for to having that in iOS 8. There’s a bunch of stuff coming in iOS 8 will have a big impact on people with disabilities. Over the next few weeks, wheel have more information about that. But in the meantime, checkout smile software text expander keyboard for iOS. I’ll pop a link in the show notes.
We know that Freedom Scientific is one of the main manufacturers of equipment for folks who are blind or visually impaired. They make the JAWS products, several video magnifiers and other things. They have a new newsletter out with lots of good information. They talk about the fact that there is a new Onyx desk set HD portable video magnifier; JAWS the screen reader, version 16 is in public beta; magic 13, the magnifier, is in public beta. They have a training bundle and a newly designed website. Other information available on their newsletter. I will pop a link in the shorts and you can check out all the cool stuff that’s happening with Freedom Scientific. Check our show notes.
Each week, one of our partners tells us happening in the ever-changing world of apps, so here’s an App Worth Mentioning.
SCOTT DAVERT: with this week’s App Worth Mentioning, I’m Scott Davert from AppleVis.com. This week we are talking about an app called Weather Radio WTD. Weather Radio WTD is like a lot of weather apps in that it will give you a lot of different weather alerts that are related to severe weather. Some of the differences it has though are that it allows you to do lots of different configuration with different locations and even gives you some warnings that I’ve never seen in other apps. Best of all, it’s completely accessible with voiceover and also very usable for those who use braille displays.
One feature that really set this weather app apart from all the others is the fact that, for an additional $4.99 a year, you can get access to what are called lightning alerts. Basically what that will do is it will give you an alert anytime lightning is detected within 6 miles of your current location. So for those who can’t look up to see that there is lightning around, or for those like myself who need thunder to be a bit louder before go to hear it, this is a really unique feature and it’s a really great way to stay safe during those late summer and fall thunderstorms that we get here in the United States.
If you’d like more information about Weather Radio by WTD, you can see its app entry in the iOS App Store. Or if you’d like to know more about it from a voice over users perspective, or if you just like to hear a word or two from the developer, there’s also an interview with the developer with a couple of our AppleVis editorial team members. You can find that on our website at www.AppleVis.com. With this week’s app worth mentioning, I’m Scott Davert.
WADE WINGLER: So this is an audio program, and a lot of the times folks are just focusing on the audio. But there’s more to it. In fact, I don’t know that everybody in the audience realizes that we have a transcript of every show available. When you look at our show, in the show notes, especially on our website, you can get to a full transcript of everything that we do here.
Now, why am I doing a plug for the transcript of the show and why is it relevant? Well today I have Kathy and TJ Cortopassi on the line from Voice to Print Captioning. They are people who do cart. TJ is actually the person who transcribes our show every single week. He is probably the only person that I know in the world who has absolutely listened to every single word of every single episode that has happened on the show in the recent past because he turns it into print that not only helps folks who are deaf or hard of hearing, but also makes it easier for folks to find our show.
Kathy on the other hand is the person that I worked with on a number of situations where she provides CART services for some of our lives events. Kathy usually shows up in the room, not in person, but as a projector and a screen showing the words that are being spoken in the room from our presenters at our speakers and those kinds of things. Although Kathy and TJ and I work together very closely many times a week almost every single week, we don’t see each other face-to-face. This will be an interesting conversation
I have joining me via telephone TJ and Kathy. Folks, are you there?
KATHY CORTOPASSI: Yes we are.
TJ CORTOPASSI: I’m here.
WADE WINGLER: Good. Thanks, guys. This is an early morning recording, and I appreciate you getting up and out of bed and spending some time with me this morning.
I thought it would be great for my audience to learn a little bit about CART and transcription and Voice to Print Captioning and the work that you guys do. Kathy, could you spend a little time introducing yourself and TJ and just giving us the basics about CART and was to print what you guys do?
KATHY CORTOPASSI: Thanks, Wade. First of all, CART is not something with the wheels that you push around to carry things with. CART stands for communication access real-time translation. So what I’m doing essentially is making communication accessible for those with hearing loss. It actually has its roots in court reporting, those little stenographic machines that you see that have 22 characters, mostly the people are in the courtrooms or in depositions. That’s where I started 30 years ago. I was a court reporter for 10 years. I had five kids. That was a very difficult commute and a long day. But that was my job. I somewhat loved it.
One day, my daughter was sitting on my lap and I told her to get up. She didn’t hear me. She didn’t budge. She didn’t react. That was strange. So my husband was sitting across the room and I said, “Honey, can you kind of watch her and see maybe she’s just too distracted?” I raise my voice louder and louder and louder, and the girl never heard me. She was in first grade. I thought, “My goodness. Court reporters have been helping people with hearing loss for a few years here. I’ve wanted to look into it, but now it’s personal. It’s my daughter. I may need to learn how to do this for her.”
So we did take her to the doctor. She had severe allergies. Had we waited another day, her eardrums could have been irrevocably burst and she would’ve been permanently deaf. So we caught it in time, thank God, but I also think that it was the hand of God because that was the push for me to go over to the “other side,” I’ll call it. The light side. I had been on the dark side. Now I’m on the light side where I get to help people.
But I was still a foot in both worlds for a while there until I went to the Clock Tower Theatre in Rockford, Illinois, and I actually provided CART for a live play, a musical. I didn’t know who I was going to work there for. I just had the script and then I was actually following the script but also they would go off script and I would write real-time what they were saying.
Afterwards, a lady came up to me. She asked me if I was the one who is doing that. I said yes. She got down on her knees and she wrapped her arms around me with tears flowing down her face and said, “This is the best birthday present I’ve ever had. Thank you so much.” I said, “Happy birthday. I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was you are anything. I’m just doing my job.”
She went on to say that theater was something that she and her daughter enjoyed for 20 years and that they would go every week to one theater or another in Chicago and see life musicals and plays. Because of her hearing loss, she had to stop because it was the longer enjoyable. The music was just noise to her. She was actually kicking and screaming coming to this theater because she didn’t know that there is going to be CART. She had never heard of it or seen it before. So now she said she can go back to the theater and her life has been totally recharged and renewed. I thought, “You know what? When was the last time an attorney got on his hands and knees and wrapped his arms around me and said, “Thank you so much miss court reporter for the deposition.” Lawyers out there, I don’t want to insult you, but you could be a little bit more grateful to us.
But this is where I thought I’ve got is still here and now I can use it to actually help people. That’s what I turn my back on court reporting totally and I’ve been doing this for 20 years now.
WADE WINGLER: That’s a great story. I want to get into the technical details of how this works, but can you help me with a little bit of the language first. I hear the terms CART, captioning, transcription, and subtitles. Can you take me to school just a little bit on those?
KATHY CORTOPASSI: Subtitles is the word that has been used basically in Europe. In the United States, we call them captions. Closed Captioning in particular is that which you can turn on or turn off on your TV. When they are there and you can’t turn them off, that is Open Captioning. So it’s open and it can’t be closed. CART is anything involving the realtime where you’re going to see the words, but there is no television screen and no picture of the person speaking or the technology of the TV studio. That’s the difference between the two. One does not involve the TV technology, one does. But it’s the same people on the same machine doing the same work.
WADE WINGLER: And the transcript is a little bit different even yet, right?
KATHY CORTOPASSI: For your show in particular, TJ will listen to every word and he will make sure that every word is in there. He takes the time that it takes to make sure that it’s verbatim. But when we’re doing it life, we don’t have that luxury of stopping you and going back and making sure that everything is good. I’m sure there’s some words missed that you can’t hear in there if you were to do a verbatim transcript of its. The thing is the communication access and making sure the people live in the environment can see what’s going on if they cannot hear it.
WADE WINGLER: That’s great. Kathy, tell me a little bit about the nuts and bolts. Tell me about the technology. I know there are 22 buttons, there’s an audio stream, and there is a video screen with some words on it. Tell me a little bit about how that works.
KATHY CORTOPASSI: We went to court reporting school, all of us who are doing captioning with the steno machine today. But those of us that stayed in court reporting, some just are happy there and that’s what they do. But some of us worked on our skills to where we can write with at least 99% accuracy all the time what’s being said. Then we are connected through our machine to the laptop, and in the laptop is the captioning or court reporting software. From there we can either send those captions to the Internet, which is the way you receive it on your and when I work for you. We can send it to the television station through the old-fashioned fax modems, where you can hear that scratches on when it is dialing. Or we can project it. We project it onto Jumbotron screens. We project it onto flatscreen televisions. We use projectors and LCD screens. Those are the four main ways we project. It’s all the same court reporting/captioning software with us in the background.
WADE WINGLER: So TJ, when you’re transcribing our show, what does the process look like from your perspective?
TJ CORTOPASSI: Compared to my mom, it’s actually similar and different. My mom uses a physical machine that she types into and then processes that into the computer software. However, for me, I actually use voice recognition software. I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a very expensive, high-quality microphone, and as I’m hearing every single word, I’m repeating every single word as it is said. So it is quite interesting when I’m hearing things and I have to kick them out as soon as they are said. My Dragon software gets my signal, sends it to the special captioning software which then puts out the words into the format I establish. So for Microsoft Word, the fonts, the formatting, everything from there.
WADE WINGLER: For my perspective, it’s really easy. I take the audio file of the show just a day or two before it goes out and I pop it into dropbox. I shoot you an email and say, “Hey, TJ, it’s there.” Magically within a day or so I get this Word document back. It’s pretty easy from my standpoint.
TJ CORTOPASSI: And from my standpoint, it’s not so easy, but with a lot of practice I’ve actually become quite adept at it.
WADE WINGLER: Cool. So Kathy, I know that your days are different from day to day. Give me a quick idea about what a day in the life is like for somebody like you who does this for a living?
KATHY CORTOPASSI: I’m probably more on the side of a workaholic. I don’t just provide services, I actually have a company. So we serve clients from Eli Lilly to the United Nations to a church in Illinois to the state of Indiana. Any student that’s going to any college and the state of Indiana that may need CART may eventually get me or my agency serving them. So it’s a little hectic.
If it’s very early morning in the United Nations in Europe, I could be working from anywhere from midnight our time to 6 o’clock in the morning. Then my regular day will begin. Classes usually start at 8 o’clock around the world so 8 o’clock Eastern would be 7 Central. Just adjusting your schedule. The television is 24/7 and those stations are not going away. There’s more stations coming up all the time. They have to be captioned. So I compete for the captioning work with the other companies and captioners out there. So you figure they have early-morning news, they have lunchtime news, they have early evening news, they have the nighttime news. So my day will usually and somewhere in the 11 PM area.
I don’t do too many of those midnight to 11 PM days. Once in a while you do, but I’m no spring chicken anymore so I can to 24 hours anymore. It’s a variety. This week, I’m doing a medical school; I’m doing pharmacy students; various news programs and United Nations and Canada television. Just a variety of things. That’s what I love about my job. I’m constantly learning, constantly being exposed to different things. Alzheimer’s probably will never set in because I’m just always thinking and concentrating and learning new words and learning about things. I’ve been going to college for 20 years and getting paid to do it.
WADE WINGLER: That’s great. Kathy, it kind of became obvious that TJ is your son and you’re teaching him a little bit about the business. If somebody was interested in learning how to do this for a living, what would your advice be to them?
KATHY CORTOPASSI: Well, for me, I took the traditional court reporting school role with the steno. That is still 90% of the profession. There are a lot of companies that will not accept you if you don’t use steno. That is my suggestion. TJ, however, because he’s currently in college to be a teacher, he just wanted to speed the process up a little bit and try something different. So he took the challenge of doing this career with the voice. That’s an option, so that’s what he can do the transcription a lot easier because that’s what he does. He does the transcription end of our business and anything that comes in where they want the transcript, they want a video from YouTube transcribed, that kind of stuff, I pass it to him. But that frees us, myself and other steno writers, to do the realtime things and the client that won’t accept voice.
So there’s a school in Indiana that actually has a virtual — so you don’t have to go in person — school. That’s College of Court Reporting and Hobart, Indiana. My alma mater is a school we actually have to go to. It’s in Chicago. It’s McCormick College in downtown Chicago. Those other two that I really do suggest that are close to Indianapolis.
WADE WINGLER: Kathy, would this be a good job for somebody with a disability?
KATHY CORTOPASSI: Phenomenal. I’ve been wanting to push that for the whole 20 years I’ve been doing this. There’s no reason why someone who has their faculties, who has a hearing and their hands — or now their voice. There’s no reason they cannot do this job. In fact, I know to court reporters now that are blind that do this job. Things did have to be altered for them to learn, but as soon as they learned and they graduated, that’s it. They are off doing this job.
I know one actually got injured that actually uses a wheelchair, but formerly before that had been a court reporter, so just a transition from walking to wheeling. I really push the VR counselors out there. I know you’re getting exposed to what we do, but I don’t think you’re considering this as a career for people with disabilities. Please do. This is something they can do out of their homes many times and they can also be helping their own people. They are helping other people disabilities. And it pays well.
WADE WINGLER: Excellent. Kathy, we have less than a minute left here. Can you give me just a quick glimpse into what you think the future is for CART?
KATHY CORTOPASSI: We haven’t even scratched the surface of where speech is where there is no text. Politicians need to use this when they are speaking to the public. We’ve got an aging population out there. Churches need to realize that they need to put the words up on the screen, because their seniors are beginning to lead church because they can’t hear anymore. So according to national trends, there is 22% growth projected in this field. A lot of us are aging out and retiring so we need new, young blood or just new, fresh blood to join our profession. So please encourage everyone.
WADE WINGLER: Kathy and TJ Cortopassi are with Voice to Print Captioning here in Indiana and they are a vital part of what we do at the INDATA Project. Kathy, if folks are interested in reaching out, learning more, or they want to use your service, where should they look?
KATHY CORTOPASSI: I would say our website is www.voicetoprint.com. Or the phone, 866-523-5359.
WADE WINGLER: Thank you so much for being with us today.
KATHY CORTOPASSI: Thank you.
WADE WINGLER: Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Looking for show notes from today’s show? Head on over to EasterSealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.