Graduate Studies through CART Captioning

This essay centers on my experiences as a user of CART captioning, which is distinct from other forms of captioning. Especially since the pandemic, most individuals will likely have some experience with basic automatic captioning, often provided through generative artificial intelligence (AI) captioning. This captioning only captures speech, and as such, is an incomplete representation of the soundscape. It also often contains errors and frequently is published without human review. Closed captioning, as distinct from AI captioning, transcribes both dialogue and the surrounding soundscape (for example, describing background music). Both are placed on media and are not live, meaning they are generated after the fact. Meanwhile, CART captioning is a form of dynamic, speech-to-text captioning, generated by individuals experiencing the soundscape alongside me:

Speech-to-text services are provided through three main systems: Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART; National Association of the Deaf, n.d.), C-Print, and TypeWell (NDC, 2017). Moreover, there are two systems through which speech-to-text services are provided: verbatim and meaning for meaning. In the verbatim system, each spoken word is written, whereas the meaning-for-meaning system provides a translation of the spoken language in a concise and comprehensive manner (Francis, Camp, & Colwell, 2008; NDC, 2017). CART is considered to be a verbatim system, while C-Print and TypeWell are meaning-for-meaning systems (Alsalamah, 2020, p. 116).

CART captioning can be performed both in person and virtually, as long as the captioner has access to all spoken and environmental sounds. In virtual, or remote CART captioning, rather than the consumer reading directly off the CART captioner's computer screen, the text from the CART captioner is sent through the internet to a specified place on a server. The consumer goes to that specified place on the server and is able to read the text of what is being said. The audio is heard by the CART captioner via a telephone call or through the internet" (NCRA, CART Captioner FAQs).

CART captioning is differentiated from other forms of closed or AI captioning in that it is generated live, often through a separate transcript from any media being experienced, is verbatim, and captures the entire soundscape word-for-word at the time of speech and sound.

In contrast to CART, meaning-for-meaning captioning is content focused, where captioners experience the soundscape and then distill the main or relevant points from the live dialogue. It is unique among captioning options in that the purpose is not to provide complete, word-for-word access to the soundscape; instead, it is designed to support individuals who do not wish to capture non-relevant information in their audio transcripts.

Throughout this essay, I will focus on CART captioning, specifically as a service rendered at the institutional level for a largely Deaf or hard of hearing identified (or self-identifying) population, but I also acknowledge that CART services can be accessed in a variety of contexts and for people with other disabilities. I had the privilege of CART captioning in my previous master's program and now in my current doctoral program. I say privilege with purpose here, as CART captioning is a costly accommodation. As such, it is not yet fully integrated within all academic institutions for some hearing-related disabilities; further, many universities may have to weigh individual need for CART captioning services with the availability of captioning staff, which is often a scarce resource. In fact, after establishing access to CART captioning during my masters, I deliberately factored in access to CART services as a deciding factor when selecting a PhD program. As Brueggemann stresses, "We encounter the economic argument used to deny access; we have to consider the cost of accommodating single disabled persons…. I represent those costs." (2001, p. 792). Throughout these past few years and at a couple of different academic institutions, the most consistent part of my education has been the presence of CART captioning providers. In most cases, I have a consistent team of CART captioning providers who have been assigned to me. These captioners provide me access to the soundscape: in all of my academic courses, office hour visits with professors, meetings with students, courses that I have taught, staff meetings, writing tutoring visits, committee meetings, reading groups, research meetings, and more, I have done so with the assistance of CART services. Typically, I spend most of my week with the same CART captioner or the same pairing of captioners. Because of this, I have built partnerships with many of these captioners, and it is this sort of academic access intimacy that I would like to name and explore.

As I enter into this exploration, I utilize an autoethnographic approach that "has been posited as concurrently introspective whereby the autoethnographer gains a deeper understanding of their own life, and extrospective whereby the autoethnography uses the lens of their own experiences to understand and critique contextual and societal factors" (Pryer et al, 2023, p. 1527). In a departure from much of the research focused on hard of hearing and/or d/Deaf experiences, my goal is not to theorize about or evaluate different accommodations or strategies for access (see Hood, Wood, & Jones, 1997; Iwertz & Osorio, 2016; Jolly et al, 2024; Steinfeld, 1998; Stinson, 2009; Yoon & Kim, 2011); instead, my goal is to participate in the disability studies methodological goal of a "radical reshaping of relations of power …. in common with feminist, action, and other forms of research oriented toward social justice" (Price, 2012, p. 164) by examining the "contact zone" (Pratt, 1991) of institution, service provider, and disabled individual through my own lived experience. Autoethnography is a powerful tool through which I can practice this disability justice research methodology; as Pearson and Boskovich (2019) explain, "an autoethnographic approach enables a first-person narrative of interweaving theory and lived experiences to present different ways of knowing that may not be readily available or accessible, on topics that may be perceived as taboo" (p. 9).

Exploring Access Intimacy within a non-voluntary institutional relationship

Before the pandemic, I would typically pass by one of my CART captioners during my walk to class, and we would frequently walk the rest of the way together. These walks were always my favorite—I remember laughing as I navigated around the rolling suitcases and bags the captioners carried to hold their equipment. We would tell jokes and talk about the importance of accommodations and accessibility.

When thinking of accommodations, many people may not immediately picture a structure that facilitates access through developed, personal, and very human relationships such as those that I just described. For example, Teresa Blankmeyer Burke rightly points out that

many accommodations for disability involve little room for choice on the part of the disabled person. Curb cuts, retrofitted elevators in historic buildings, televised closed captioning, and theatrical production audio description are accommodations made with the goal of serving large populations with variable needs. (2017, p. 267)

Simultaneously, she reminds us that communication accommodations run counter to this trend: "It is well known that communication accommodations for deaf and hard of hearing populations are not universal. For example …. most of those who do not know ASL will instead choose written English accommodations such as closed captioning, transcripts, [or] CART" (p. 269). This identified difference between CART captioning and other forms of more standardized accommodations explains why access intimacy is a powerful lens through which to analyze these partnerships. As Blankmeyer Burke explains, "The ethical and philosophical issues of choosing disability accommodations, particularly regarding human service provider accommodations, have not received much attention in the academic literature" (p. 267). As exemplified through my experiences, despite these individuals being assigned providers of my institutional accommodations and therefore in a (somewhat involuntary or non-self-selected) institutional relationship with me, these captioners understood me, intimately. They knew almost every second of my academic experience—who I sat next to, my responses in class, what I thought about the readings, and even how I asked questions during class discussions. These sustained partnerships provided access to every sound that happened in classrooms. One of my favorite memories is when one of my captioners typed [BURP] during one of my graduate seminars—I burst into laughter and ultimately disturbed the flow of discussion—but it was a priceless moment. The moments I have experienced with these captioners have been so personal. On the other hand, I understand that not everyone has good relationships with accommodation providers, and I have had my fair share of complicated and not-so-good captioning stories, but to me, that is also part of access intimacy. As Blankmeyer Burke and Nicodemus explained:

Though questions will continue to be raised about our respective duties in our partnership, the notion that it there is [sic] shared responsibilities is a move in the right direction. As interpreters, we should raise these questions directly with our consumers in an effort to be transparent in our decision-making. While we make ourselves vulnerable in hard discussions, they provide the opportunity for more authentic, and possibly more intimate, interactions. (2013, p. 11-12, emphasis mine)

Access intimacy is framed through Mingus' seminal work as a relationship that grows out of mutual understanding and identification:

Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers, disabled or not, or sometimes it can be built over years …. Access intimacy is also the intimacy I feel with many other disabled and sick people who have an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives …. Access intimacy is not just the action of access or "helping" someone …. It has looked like relationships where I always feel like I can say what my access needs are, no matter what…. It has looked like able bodied people listening to me and believing me …. It has looked like people investing in remembering my access needs and checking in with me if there are going to be situations that might be inaccessible or hard disability-body-wise. (2012)

As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) points out, access intimacy as a term has become synonymous with "naming the experience of crip-on-crip understanding of each other's access needs as a place of love and communion" (p. 153). However, she pushes this boundary, articulating, "I want to argue for access intimacy as a process and a learnable skill …. I also think it's very important to state that abled people can and do commit to learning access intimacy" (p. 154). It is this learning and sharing of access intimacy between abled and disabled, service provider and receiver, through institutionalized and non-self-selected interactions that are built into dynamic relationships, that I want to highlight as an expansion of our understanding of access intimacy.

During my master's program I built partnerships with several of the captioners and captioning-adjacent staff who had been assigned to me for years. Even though these are professional relationships, there is so much life experience that is tied to CART captioning for me personally. Every anecdote that is shared in class, whether spoken by myself or one of peers, is captioned so I can read it. Every joke that is told is captioned so I can read it. Almost every piece of information has been live-captioned so I can read it—thus in my mind, it's all connected. I cannot split my academic experience, and all that comes with it, away from CART captioning and the humans who diligently provide me access day in and day out. In some sense, my academic experience is my CART captioning experience. Blankmeyer Burke and Nicodemus (2013) validate this experience, explaining,

Interpreters are witness to many of people's most personal moments in life—receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer, the passing of an aged mother, the birth of a child …. Interpreters and participants in an ongoing professional relationship can also become close. This is not unusual; professionals do become close to members of the population they serve — consider longstanding relationships between a physician and a patient with a chronic medical condition, or the lawyer monitoring a family trust. (p. 16)

In reflecting on my own experiences, I propose access intimacy is linked and founded on the acknowledged humanness of interpersonal interactions within institutional contexts. Fundamentally, I claim access intimacy is built from ongoing, interpersonal processes of knowing, sharing, supporting, learning, and engaging. In my experience, this access intimacy is both constructed by and enhanced through the human-generated nature of CART captioning, and as such, acknowledging its presence within these institutional relationships can deepen our understanding of the depth and quality of access we provide.

Teaching First-Year Writing by Reading CART Captioning

As a hard of hearing person, I frequently find myself in situations where I have to depend on auto-generated (AI) captioning—which has a lot of pitfalls. For example, AI-generated captioning often struggles to capture speech in the same situations a hearing-disabled individual would, such as with accented speech, during overlapping conversation, or from a distance. People comment on how AI captioning is human-less and not accurate, but we rarely discuss the humanness of human-generated captioning. As Zdenek (2011) comments, it is important to develop "a way of thinking about captions that goes beyond quality (narrowly defined in terms of visual design) to consider captioning as a rhetorical and interpretative practice that warrants further analysis and criticism from scholars in the humanities and social sciences'' (p. 2). CART captioning, in addition to offering more accuracy, also has the ability to capture tone, mood, and communicative intent beyond simply the words spoken, which enriches the transcript with a humanness that offers me a greater opportunity for engagement. This humanity also translates to teaching in the classroom.

Reciprocity in the teaching of writing through CART captioning is a fundamental goal for my pedagogy and professional relationships with the captioners who provide these services. My positionality as a disabled, hard of hearing, bi-racial Taiwanese graduate student adds a complexity to my teaching experience. As Carter et al. (2017) notes, "graduate students with disabilities, therefore, encounter significant barriers to participation. Not quite 'novice' and not quite 'scholar,' disabled graduate students must navigate a complex web of power" (p. 96). The duality of being both an instructor and a student at the same time opens up opportunities for education beyond instruction through the process of disclosure. The duality of my experiences and positionality makes disclosure even more imperative. Specifically for graduate students who take coursework and teach, disclosure is a never-ending cycle. Disclosure, in a disability context,

is intended to represent the emergence of a perception (and perhaps, but not always, an interpretation) as a result of intra-actions (Barad) in the world. That is, signs and other material objects intra-act with perceiving beings to participate in acts of disclosure. These acts of disclosure contribute to emerging and dynamic cultural orientations to disability. (Kerschbaum, 2019, para. 9)

In other words, teaching through captioning and transcription is a unique experience that becomes even more layered as a graduate teaching assistant. Even though CART captioners provide much needed and appreciated access for beneficiaries, the physicality of another person, stenography machines, tables, and tablets to provide access creates complications for disability disclosure. As Blankmeyer Burke and Nicodemus explain, "working with an interpreter to gain access "outed" me as a person with a disability. Instead of having a fair amount of control regarding the choice of when to disclose my status as a person with a hearing loss, my cover was blown the minute I sat down in the classroom and faced the interpreter" (2013, p. 4). And this somewhat involuntary disclosure, brought on by the presence of my accommodations, then must be balanced with potential risk:

Whether or not academics choose to disclose their disabilities and illnesses is, in practice, a risk–benefit analysis of consequences associated with the specific concern or issue. In order to access support, workplace adjustments, potential financial benefits and allowances, academics do need to disclose their conditions. However, disclosing could potentially mean being categorised as a non-deviant within the normed and normalised society, which in turn leads to being stigmatised. (Brown & Leigh, p. 987)

These material objects intra-act with student assumptions and positions towards disability, my own identifications, and other societal orientations toward disability that have implications for my day-to-day choices, and authority, as a teacher.

However, it is also the case that CART captioners are often only seen as signifiers of disability and are not engaged with as humans who are there to support learning. In my years as a CART captioning user, I have witnessed the lack of respectful etiquette towards CART service providers. As a writing instructor, I try to model appropriate behavior and humanize this process. Most CART captioners I have worked with in higher education have either been former broadcast captioners or former court reporters. The high level of training, ethical standards, and need for professionalism for both types of jobs are easily translated to higher education and classroom accessibility (Pennington, 2020). However, the influence of AI captioning, and the lack of general knowledge on captioning often reduces captioners, who are rigorously trained, to be misrepresented as "elephants in the room," or individuals who are simultaneously impossible to ignore but who we never reference or acknowledge. I cannot tell you how many times students (and colleagues alike) have mistaken the captioners who accompany me as my assistants, my teaching aides, or a parent. Teaching as a graduate student is already pretty anxiety-inducing, at least for me it is, especially when you're first starting out. By educating departments and students about CART captioning and how captioning improves the quality of life and education for deaf and hard of hearing individuals, we can start to normalize human-generated accommodations without reduction.

Teaching in (Pandemic) Partnerships

In 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic made its way to the United States, many institutions of higher education began the transition to online learning. As Ellis et al. (2020) points out, much of the transition online was rapid and presented additional barriers for marginalized students, including those with disabilities. The authors state that "these accessibility issues are exacerbated because of forced moves to online but are not unique to our experience of education during the pandemic. These issues are instead a continuation of the difficulty always faced by this cohort" (p. 18). For me, the transition to online was relatively accessible since it meant that all of the sound I would experience in the classroom came from one speaker on my computer rather than having to swivel around or look for visual cues. I will note that I believe the transition to online was mostly accessible for me because I already had much of my captioning support already put in place prior to the pandemic. Most of my captioners seamlessly transitioned from in-person captioning next to me in the classroom to being a box in the Zoom virtual discussions. Right as the pandemic hit the United States and I had already transitioned to online learning, my classmates and friends suffered an additional, personal, tragedy together. I'll never forget the professionalism and empathy that my CART captioners showed me during that time. Whenever we talked about the tragedy openly in class, my captioners were respectful and captured every emotion. [IM SO SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS] I read. I sat at home with tears streaming down my face looking at the transcript of that class period. After that tragedy and my experience with CART during it, I thought a lot about how the humanness of CART captioning is rarely focused on within academic scholarship.

Due to the demand for more audio-related access in the online environment, the beginning of my CART captioning experience online during the pandemic included a variety of freelance, part-time, and full-time CART captioners. I was able to experience captioning providers from different parts of the country and from different professional backgrounds: some were previously employed as television-broadcast captioners, some worked in sports captioning, and some worked in the judicial system as courtroom reporters. Even though I had used CART captioning in face-to-face classroom contexts before the pandemic, the transition to online modalities gave me more insight into captioning as a partnership. Since the pandemic largely shifted these previously largely in-person and interpersonal relationships to an online-distanced environment, it shaped the interactions I had with captioners and brought out more of the humanness of the access intimacy and accommodations. For example, in reaction to this modality switch, I facilitated more direct communication with the captioners I worked with. Together, we formed a partnership in which we facilitated accessible live online instruction amidst a worldwide pandemic.