Orla Pearson

Orla Pearson, DIRECTOR (2022 - 2024)

My passion is for high quality captioning. It’s the very core of my business. We don’t ever compromise , because I believe that high quality is what is needed for true accessibility via live captions. I have worked in the industry for 30 years, and run my company for ten years. Every day I educate technicians, event organisers, services users, event spaces, anyone who will listen on why high-quality human captions is what is needed to make an event accessible.

I speak at any event I can helping people to understand the nuances in live captioning that matter to the audience and why and that AI is not a tool for accessibility for those who need it.

I believe that AI is doing a completely different job than a skilled captioner. AI listens and delivers what it thinks it hears, all of it without edits. Captioners listen and curate the content, correcting, adding punctuation to make the sentences flow, adding in nuance, flavor, emotion, intonation to the text, giving as much of the experience of a hearing person is getting in the room.

Good captioners will edit the text to make sure it’s readable by their audience and always writes with the audience in mind. I have unique experience with the BBC, as a freelancer and now running my own company, I see the captioner side, the client side and the audience side. But also as a software platform developer, solving the problems of captioning delivery.

We have built a successful business on high-quality captioning, with full technical delivery and there is a huge market out there for that.