Captioning and the late deaf/hard of hearing in Churches
"(He) said to the church, I would like everyone to benefit from this," said Merv's wife, Bev. "The church said that if we can get four court reporters to do this, we can use iCloud. And Ninette was able to find (them)."
Butler, Liz Speer, Molly Wolk and Christine Greenaway take turns live-captioning church services for Daniels and other hearing-impaired parishioners, whether they are at the service itself or on the road.
Sunday, it was Speer's turn to put on the headphones and set up the equipment, which uses iCloud to allow anyone to view the live-captioned services at firstorlando.com/caption and follow along.
"Our audience is people who lost their hearing at a late stage and never learned sign language," Butler said. "But they're very proficient in reading."
Freelance court reporters transcribe court depositions and other legal matters — a field open to those without college education yet still requires years of training.
"We do make errors, and we're not perfect," Butler said. "So it's so fulfilling (to hear), 'Oh don't worry about it. It's better than not being able to hear anything at all.' "
The captioning — not "closed," which is a specific embedding of text onto video, but instead CART, or Common Access Real Time captioning — is done using a standard court reporter stenotype machine hooked up to the Internet.
Each stroke is a combination of keys, often used to create a phonetic sound equivalent of a word or to string together several two or three strokes to create a "brief" for multisyllable words like "responsibility."
Every court reporter has their own combination of briefs, plus one-stroke movements for common legal phrases like "beyond a reasonable doubt."
For the services, they created one-stroke combinations for common sermon and Biblical phrases — "hallelujah," "Jesus Christ," New Testament," "Old Testament" and Holy Spirit.
"Those are definitely not the words you hear in typical legal settings," Butler said, adding that they memorized the names of the books of the Bible. "You need to get to a point in your head where as soon as they say it, the process in your brain is so automatic."
That's why court reporters are still used to this day in an age of intelligent software, she said, because there's so many different speakers and crosstalk that computers aren't trusted — and court reporters are even used for captioning for LED displays for theater productions on Broadway.
Butler said that they considered a large screen, but decided that would be too distracting for other parishioners. So down in the sanctuary, Daniels was reading along on an iPad open to the captioning page on the website.
The process of captioning could be seen in real time, just as Butler described — with phonetic terms such as "unleeshed" popping up, syllables and segments such as "crews" immediately turning into "crucified" with a few more keystrokes, and a multisyllable Biblical name became "him."
And it was all there for Daniels to see, once again able to follow along with a sermon he can no longer hear.
"This young lady is amazing," Daniels said of Butler. "She had two small children and she took it upon herself to come here at 8:30 in the morning in order to do this. There are amazing stories behind the people who do this, and the dedication they have."
"There are people around who, when they see a need, recognize that need. And they respond to that need.”
