Back from Hiatus and Presenting at TechCon!

Well, it's been over four months since I last blogged here. Phew! I must admit that last semester was a bit of a blur. Captioning at a dental school is great fun, but pretty intense. Still, I've managed to get a few things done since last fall.

First off, I'm going to be presenting at NCRA's TechCon in Atlanta on April 12th. My talk is from 3:30 to 5:00 pm, and is on "wearable realtime", with an emphasis on captioning through Google Glass. The bespoke captioning app I've been working on with a deaf programmer is sort of in limbo at the moment, so it may not be ready by then, but the Glass firmware has been improved considerably since my first post on the subject, and now works with both Streamtext and 1CapApp, so while a customized Glass-native captioning application might be nice, it's not a prerequisite to using Glass for captioning anymore, which is great.

Second, I've been practicing my Cued Speech since I took a four-day workshop on it last June. I think I'm finally fluent enough to post a video! It's not perfect, of course, and there are certainly more than a few mistakes, but I'm definitely a lot faster and smoother than I was only a few months ago, so I'm encouraged by my progress. I've been cueing a few pages per week out of whatever book I've been reading, and also getting together weekly with a friend over Skype to practice cue reading. My production is still a lot better than my reception, but I'm getting there.

Here's me cueing They Can't Take That Away From Me, as sung by Billie Holiday:



(As you probably guessed, that is not a clarinet during the instrumental interlude. It's the sopranino recorder I keep in my steno bag for practicing during my lunch hour. But I don't play clarinet, and it was the nearest thing to hand.)

Speaking of videos, I also recorded a short little number demonstrating the difference between a captioner with considerable medical experience and a robust medical dictionary when confronted with medical material and... The opposite of that:



Well... I think that's enough of an update for now. I'm going to try very hard to keep updating this blog more regularly in the future. I hope to see some of you at TechCon! Please always feel free to find me and say hi, or to send me any questions or comments you might have in the mean time.