Simply Captions
Accessibility . Reliability . Excellence
Trust your live
Sporting Event . Broadcast event . Conference
Convention . Political Event
(Remote or In-Person)
to our decades of realtime captioning experience.
Boutique Realtime CART/Captioning - We treat your event as if it were our event.
Simply Captions is a captioner-owned and operated realtime captioning company. Our mission is to reliably provide the highest quality captions and treat you and your event with the attention and care we would want for our own.
When you work with Simply Captions, Tracy and Patty will become a member of your team, helping you deliver accessibility - whether small meeting or stadium event of 90,000 - for your event.
No Pain. Simply Captions.
The Basics.
What is live (or realtime) captioning? It’s the process of taking the spoken word as it is spoken live and translating it near verbatim into readable English text, allowing access for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.
So what is the difference between broadcast captioning and onsite or remote captioning/CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation)? The delivery. For broadcast captioning, we send our captions to an encoder. For CART captioning, there are may ways to display the captions - a mobile phone or tablet, full screen through an LCD projector, an Internet platform like Streamtext or 1CapApp, or platforms like YouTube and Zoom, to name a few.
Who uses captioning? Everyone! It was originally intended for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing who did not use American Sign Language. It has become helpful for those where English is not their primary language, as well as helping children improve their reading skills. Those without any hearing loss use it when they can’t have the sound on or are in noisy environments. 48 million Americans have some hearing loss.
Why not use artificial intelligence voice-to-text to caption? AI has gotten better, but it throws out pretty raw text, with little to no punctuation, no change of speaker IDs, and has a lot of difficulty with accents and unfamiliar terminology. It is not equal access.
Why Stadium Captioning now?
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements are getting very clear for stadiums. Access must ensure effective communication. In at least two lawsuits filed by consumers, the courts have ruled that captioning must be provided in stadium and arena venues.
Just like mandated curb cuts, everyone loves captions once they have them. The play you didn’t quite hear - who caught the ball or has the penalty or assisted in the goal - you can just check the screen or the ribbon board.
Broadcast Captioning
Line 21 broadcast captioning for television broadcasts or events needing broadcast quality production.
Onsite or Remote Captioning
Remote CART/captions on any platform - we can stream to Zoom, WebEx, Streamtext, 1CappApp and many others. If you need help with the technology or choosing the right service, we will work with you to make sure your event is on the right platform.
We can also do multiple streams - online streaming as well as Line 21.
Whether it is realtime captioning the largest live event held in two languages or captioning for your local group of less than ten people, we will caption your event with reliability and excellence.
Captioning is not just for Deaf and Hard of Hearing
While that is the primary function, accessibility, many more individuals will use captions - being in a place where you can’t have the sound up to listen, people who have some hearing loss in certain conditions, like noisy areas. Many users check the captions when they just miss hearing something. At a sporting event, you could not hear the announcer well when he announced who made the goal, but you can look at the captioning screen and catch who made the goal and the assist.
Captioning is for everyone and makes your event accessible.