CART captioning explained

You may have heard of CART captioning, usually alongside other terms like live captioning or Speech-to-text. So what is CART captioning? Why is it useful? And why is it different from those other terms?

What is CART?

CART stands for Communication Access Realtime Translation, which is a fancy way of saying subtitles.

CART is simply the American version of Speech-To-Text reporting, or live captioning. They all do the same thing; translate live speech in real time to subtitles on a screen.

A regular typist can’t type fast enough to deal with someone speaking in real time, so a specialist is brought in to handle CART – a stenographer.

Stenographers can type up to 300 words per minute, easily keeping up with someone speaking normally.

Why would you need CART Captioning?

There are many reasons why CART captioning is necessary outside of a courtroom.

CART captioning for education

CART captioning services can really change lives in an educational setting.

By writing live captions at a rate of 300 words per minute, deaf and hard of hearing students can have an equal learning experience with their peers, asking important questions, and keeping up with the rest of the class.

This service is also carried out discreetly for those who do not wish to draw attention to their struggle to hear.

CART captioning for business

Live captions are not just for deaf people. As the pandemic made everyone work from home, it wasn’t long before we discovered that online work meetings bring their own problems.

People talking over each other, microphones cutting out, delays in the stream and background noise making it difficult to hear what’s going on. CART captions are a way to cut through the noise, reach everyone, and ensure all your staff, clients and associates are on the same page.

Subtitles can help in other ways

Live CART captions are great in real time, but not not everything needs to be live. Offline captioning is also useful, not just for those with hearing difficulties, but from a technical perspective.

If your business produces videos, either on YouTube, TikTok, or Vimeo, then captions can help get them noticed. YouTube is owned by Google, and they want the best websites on their results page.

If you have a video online explaining what you do, then Google’s crawl bots can’t watch that video and decide to move you up the results page.

If your video has subtitles however, then those same bots can read the transcript of what’s being said in the video and place you higher on Google’s front page.

Even if your short, 5-minute video is content-heavy, then the captions might contain the equivalent information of a small website.

Google loves this, especially if the video is related to a specific question. If your video answers a query someone has typed into Google, then Google will bring it up as the first result.

CART captioning your business event makes sense from an SEO point of view as well as helping people there on the day.

Call us for all your CART captioning requirements

As one of the best captioning companies in the world, we pride ourselves on customer satisfaction.

1-2-1 founder Tina Lannin has assembled an experienced and professional team, including court reporters and captioners, professional lip readers, certified lipreading teachers, deaf awareness trainers and sign language interpreters.

Hand-picked from across the globe, our CART captioners can type word for word as fast as someone speaks – and in multiple languages!

121 Captions has years of experience live captioning events, lectures, and conferences, all over the world and in many different languages.

Some of our clients are famous and respected names around the world, including the BBC, Facebook, the Foreign Office, the University of Oxford, and many more.