I find this time of year to be a little rejuvenating – despite the heat, which seems inescapable, except for our friends in the southern hemisphere. It’s when the Global Alliance of Speech-to-Text Captioning was founded. It’s hard to believe it’s been three years. And we are just getting started!
The Captioning Quality Task Force is getting organized and putting a plan in place to move forward. The goal: gather data from broadcast networks’ captioning accuracy in the United States. This data will include human-generated captions as well as automatic speech recognition captions. The Task Force will need submissions of data, so I hope you will assist in monitoring your local stations for good and less-than-good captions.
But what can you do today to help? Join our Fitness FUNraiser Challenge! It’s underway, but it’s not too late to join. Register for the Challenge, set a goal and post on social media, using #MovingCaptionsForward, when you reach it! Registration costs $25 per person. Make a team and compete amongst your family and friends. The Challenge ends on August 3rd. Help move captions forward today!
Why should you join the Fitness FUNraiser Challenge? Because there are prizes!! Prizes will be awarded for the most social posts using #MovingCaptionsForward, most funds raised as a team, AND most funds raised as an individual. Prizes include a set of candles from White Light Candles, a $200 Amazon gift card, and a copy of Gael Hannan and Shari Eberts’ new book “Hear & Beyond: Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss.”
You can raise funds two different ways. One is by joining the Fitness FUNraiser Challenge or you can use your social circles on Facebook and create a Facebook Fundraiser to support the Global Alliance. The choice is yours. All of the information you need to know can be found here.
The prizes will be awarded at our anniversary celebration, CapCom ’22, on August 6th at 11:00 am US Eastern Time. CapCom is where the Captioning Community comes together to celebrate Communication Access. It will be streamed on our Facebook page and YouTube channel. Join in the celebration to hear from the world-renowned Happy HoH herself – Gael Hannan. This event will have human-generated realtime captions as well as ASL. We hope you will join us!
This will be my last newsletter as Chair of the Global Alliance. It is time to turn the reins over. However, I will still be actively involved as Immediate Past Chair. This transition will happen at our next board meeting, August 17, at 2:00 pm US Eastern time.
Note to our members: Be on the lookout for an email asking for your vote for the new Directors. I’d like to thank our outgoing Directors Ronald Drach and Raja Kushalnagar.
Ronald has been an advocate for the Global Alliance since he learned about its existence. He has helped increase membership and awareness in his social circles, leading to many great opportunities.
Raja has served on the Fundraising Committee and given the board insight on other captioning technologies and evaluation of captioning accuracy. We appreciate his contributions and hope he won’t go too far as we kick off our Captioning Quality Task Force.
Kimberly Shea’s term as treasurer is coming to an end. She has kept a keen eye on the purse strings this past year, which is necessary for a young organization. This is why we need your support – membership and participation in the Fitness FUNraiser Challenge! In order to keep doing the work, we need YOU to help us!
Lastly, if you missed our last Empower Hour, How Telecommunication Relay Services Work, check it out on our YouTube channel. Turn on the CCs for communication access. If you would like a copy of the text file and/or the slide deck, email us at info@speechtotextcaptioning.org.
I hope to see you all on August 6th at CapCom ’22!
|
