Hearing Loss Scam Spam

Yesterday, a multimonth experiment came to an end. I just couldn't take it anymore. See, ages ago I realized that certain vital work emails were being sent to my spam folder in gmail, no matter how many times I marked them "not spam" or "priority". Non-fishy, obviously legitimate things like the PEPNET or DSSHE mailing lists. More than once, it was an invoice or a job offer. I know that most of the time when someone gets an email from "The United Nations", it's part of a 419 scam, but sometimes the actual United Nations requires actual captioning services, y'know?!

After I'd discovered far too many important emails trapped in spam, I had to make a decision: Either I had to manually go through my spam folder every day -- which would be almost impossible -- or I had to establish a series of whitelist filters, where everything containing a specified word would go directly to my inbox, even if Gmail thought it was spam. The words I selected were:

steno
cart
invoice
transcription
transcribe
caption
captioning
stenography
disability
disabled
deaf


and...

hearing

The first 11 keywords have served me well. A lot of important stuff that would have gone into spam has been caught by those words and brought to my attention. That last one, though... That was the problem.

Regain Hearing Loss - Reverse Hearing Loss In Days in less than 3 weeks?
Why Amish Have Such Great Hearing
Proven 200yr Old Method To Reverse Your Hearing
Jailed For Finding Hearing Loss Remedy




And on and on and on, in infinite variations, hundreds of spam messages a day. Now, I've got a pretty efficient email sorting method. I strive to get to Inbox Zero as often as possible. When I wake up, I plow through everything at once, sorting messages into @reply and @action. Everything else either gets archived or trashed. Only after I've gotten to Inbox Zero do I start tackling the @reply box. But even with a pretty disciplined sorting method, deleting hundreds of hearing-related spam messages every day was getting really, really tedious.

I kept the keyword whitelisted for a long time, though, partly because I was worried about missing an important work-related email... But also partly because I felt weirdly bad about the whole phenomenon. Like I should be paying witness to the ways in which people with hearing loss are preyed upon, the ways in which spammers try to exploit and manipulate them. I tried to think to myself, as I was deleting this drek every day, "What if I'd just lost my hearing, and this landed in my inbox? Would I be tempted to click on it? How are these spammers making their money? Who falls into these traps, and what kind of snake oil is eventually sold to them? Is it actively harmful, or just expensive and ineffective? Are these sorts of messages tested for how well they target desperate people? Which ones work best? And what's their obsession with the Amish?!"

For a long time, I tried to use my thrice-daily spam-blasting time as a way to build empathy for the people I know who have had to deal with both the annoyances and frustrations of late-onset hearing loss and the neverending aggravations of both well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning people who insist that there must be an easy cure just around the corner, if only they'd keep looking for it. There must be a pill you can take, a device you can buy, an exercise method you can do, that's better than any hearing aid, that can make you good as new again, that can take care of all your problems. I'd think of the constant struggles my clients have to go through to get captioning arranged and paid for, to remind coworkers not to cover their mouths when they speak to them, to cope with the fatigue of lipreading for days on end, while all the time these shady companies are trying to stick their knife in wherever they can, constantly probing for a moment of credulity or weakness, all in the hopes of making money.

Spammers? Are freaking evil.

Finally, I realized I couldn't handle it anymore. I wasn't learning anything new about the attempted exploitation of late deafened and hard of hearing people. I was just getting angry and fed up with weeding out hundreds of lying messages every day. I took the keyword off my whitelist and resigned myself to missing any work emails that included "hearing" but not "captioning", "steno", or "deaf".

Today I woke up to a strangely quiet inbox and a feeling of intense relief.

New Bag, New Video

It's been a long time since I've posted a "what's in my bag" update. Back in 2012, I wrote a post as part of my CART Problem Solving series called Schlepping the Gear. At the time, I was using a Tamrac 5550 photo backpack. Since then, I've gone through a Lowepro DSLR Video Fastpack and a Burton Performer Elite Duffel Backpack. The Lowepro was nicely compact, but a bit too small to carry everything I wanted, and the Burton was massive, but far too long and floppy to be at all practical as a daily backpack.

Just as my Lowepro's zippers were gasping their last, I was fortuitously contacted by Christopher of Bagbot. We originally talked about the possibility of me commissioning a custom-designed steno bag from him, but then he pointed me to the Mission Workshop Vandal and said that it seemed to fulfill most if not all of my stated requirements. I bought one and have been using it for a little under a week, taking notes the whole time. I might send it to him for additional customization once I've collected enough real-world usage data, but even out of the box it's a far better solution than anything I've used before. Here's a captioned video of me showing off everything I've been lugging in it for the past several days.



I had to wrap up the video in a bit of a hurry because the university's AV guy suddenly walked into the room I was using, so I forgot to mention the two front pockets:



They contain a flat spool of gaffer's tape and my 4G hotspot.

Anyway, if you have any interest in acquiring a new bag, I highly advise checking out Bagbot. It's a fantastic resource, and Christopher is a ridiculously helpful and knowledgeable guy. It's a massive relief to have a functioning bag again, after several frustrating weeks. I'd recommend the Mission Workshop Vandal to anyone with a ton of gear to haul who wants a durable, flexible, relatively compact bag with a huge amount of potentially expandable space.

If you don't have any steno gear to haul, check out this dude using it for his groceries. (Soundtrack is instrumental music only; captions not required.)

Article on Captioning at SRCCON

Erika Owens has written a fantastic article for Open News on captioning at SRCCON last summer (which is rather less "gee-willikers" in tone than the one posted on Philly.com in August), and it stands alongside Lindsey Kuper's article Your Next Tech Conference Should Have Realtime Captioning as a beautiful explanation by a non-captioner of why captions are so great for a huge swath of conference attendees -- not just those who self-identify as deaf or hard of hearing.

I didn't get to provide captions for SRCCON last year, but the response to Norma and Stan's captions was so overwhelmingly positive that it looks like they'll be captioning it again this year, and I'm really hoping my schedule will allow me to come and help them out! I love seeing the momentum build for tech conference captioning. It seems like whenever it's offered at one conference, it kicks off a chain reaction in audiences and organizers alike. Perhaps in the future it'll just be de rigueur, and anyone who wants to attend or speak at a conference -- whatever their language fluency or hearing status -- will have it freely available to them without any effort on their part. Here's hoping!

Gratitude

Since I started this job eight years ago, I've been absurdly, ludicrously lucky in so many different ways. Not only have I managed to make a good living doing what I love, not only have I managed to commission and design the software I use for a fraction of what it would normally have cost to develop it, but I've found some seriously incredible people along the way.

I first learned of Norma Miller when I was still in steno school. Her blog, Now Norma Knits, was mostly focused around her knitting projects, but back when I spent most of my free time obsessively searching for steno blogs, a post of hers on the captioning work she used to do for the BBC came up, and I devoured it. She continued blogging intermittently about her work, and about the student she was captioning through medical school at the time, and then I knew I had to contact her. See, when I was a little kid, I was obsessed with all things medical. The Anatomy Coloring Book was my favorite coloring book, and I would spend hours pretending I was in medical school, making up tests and quizzes and homework assignments for myself, and then even more hours filling them in. At the time I figured that if I wanted to study all that weird, gross, glorious stuff for real -- anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, microbiology, and all the rest -- I'd have to become a doctor when I grew up. For various reasons, I eventually realized that actually becoming a doctor was not going to be my calling, but I still had that intense hankering to be a fly on the wall in medical school, and there Norma was, literally living my dream. I sent her some fan mail and we struck up a correspondence that kept going after I graduated steno school and went into business for myself. When I landed a remote captioning contract with a medical school a few years later, I realized I wasn't going to be able to handle it all myself (since I also had a few onsite clients at the time), so I got in touch with Norma and asked if she was up for pitching in. That led to me eventually giving the entirety of the contract over to her a few years later (as my onsite clients demanded more and more of my attention), and a few years after that, we began to talk about setting up the first realtime captioning firm specifically dedicated to serving medical, dental, veterinary, and pharmacy students and professionals. That, of course, became White Coat Captioning, and it's a fairly new enterprise, but already going strong.

Rewind a few years. Remember how I mentioned that my onsite clients were demanding so much of my time? I was the sole captioner for two art schools in the City, with new students who needed captioning coming in all the time, and I wasn't sure what to do. I couldn't cover all of it myself, but I didn't want to give up the contracts to another firm unless I could trust them to hire only solid, reliable, fully qualified providers. Unfortunately there wasn't anyone I knew in NYC who fit the bill. There was Jennifer Bonfilio's excellent company Coast 2 Coast Captioning out in New Jersey, but she had too many of her own clients to be able to do much work in the City. I didn't want to have to start my own company, since I've always been a sole proprietor by nature, but I knew I'd have to find someone to help me out in a hurry or risk putting my clients in a terrible bind. In a sudden and wonderful stroke of luck, I got a phone call out of the blue from a captioner named Cory, originally from the Bronx, who'd recently moved back to the area. He'd been doing television captioning for decades, but was looking to move into Brooklyn and switch to CART, and he wanted to know if I had any advice for him. We met for lunch one day and immediately hit it off. He was humble, honorable, and razor sharp. Most importantly, though, he could write beautiful clean realtime, and he could write it fast. He was also a lifelong reader, which I've found is the single best indicator of whether someone's cut out to do CART or not. I happily offloaded some of my excess work to him, and in a few years, he decided to start up his own NYC-based firm, Access Captions. Because he's been doing this work for most of his life, he knows the difference between a court reporter and a realtime captioner. He knows how to hire people who can interact respectfully and professionally with clients. Best of all, he's able to train people up from newly minted rookies into seasoned pros. Like any true captioner, he's a detail-obsessed perfectionist in the best possible way, and he's now running the firm I wish I could have sent my clients to, back before he first got in touch with me. He came along in the nick of time, and I honestly have no idea what my work life -- or the general state of academic CART in this city -- would look like if he hadn't.

Okay, back to 2010 again. I'd been working on getting The Plover Project off the ground, and (again, as a result of staggeringly good luck), I'd managed to find someone with a PhD from the MIT Media Lab to build the software for me. As Plover took shape, I started blogging about it, and a hotshot polyglot linguistics major from Seattle named Stan Sakai, who had taught himself pen shorthand on a whim, wound up stumbling onto my blog. He downloaded Plover, gave it a try, got instantly hooked, and immediately found himself a student version of Eclipse (since Plover wasn't quite ready for prime time at that point) and a Gemini steno machine. Over the course of the next year, he practiced night and day, and finally got up to 225 words per minute without having ever set foot in a steno school. He graduated with his Bachelors Degree, registered a DBA as Superlative Realtime, started doing CART at the University of Washington, got his CSR, RPR, and CCP certifications, and finally buckled under my insistent pestering to come out here and help Cory manage the huge amount of work that Access Captions had landed by that point. Always the adventurer, Stan packed his bags, found a roommate in Hell's Kitchen, and flew across the country. In the few short years that he's been here, he's worked at the UN, wowed tech firms and coding conferences with his white-hot realtime, and is currently whupping unbelievable amounts of butt while captioning an intensive German class. I couldn't have designed a better poster boy for the Plover Project if I'd tried.

Now Cory, Stan, and I are all here in NYC, covering as much onsite CART as we possibly can, alongside Cory's other contractors. Norma is holding down the fort in Vermont, with her medical-specialist captioners scattered all over the country, and the two of us are slowly but surely building up White Coat Captioning's client roster. We've all known each other -- or at least have known about each other -- for almost a decade now, but last Saturday was the first time we all had a chance to meet up in person. I'm just so unbelievably happy and grateful to have found colleagues like this. Whenever I send them work that I can't cover, I know with absolute certainty that they'll handle it brilliantly. And if at some point I ever get stuck in the doldrums, I know they'd be happy to send some work back my way as well. We trust each other, we like each other, and we're all constantly learning from each other. People talk about freelancing as an inherently lonely business, but I'm a heck of a lot less lonely knowing that these three amazing people have got my back.

Stump the Stenographer at the AMPHL Conference and Win!

I'm going to be representing White Coat Captioning at the Association for Medical Professionals with Hearing Loss conference in Ann Arbor on May 16th and 17th, and if you're going to be there, you'll have the chance to win an HP Stream 7 tablet running Windows 8.1.

All you have to do is come by the White Coat Captioning table in the exhibit hall and speak, sign, cue, or write a medical word or phrase of your choice. I'll have my captioning equipment set up at the table. If I'm unable to replicate that phrase, correctly spelled, on my computer screen within a few seconds, a card with your email address on it will go in a jar. At the end of the day, I'll pick a card out of the jar at random (assuming anyone's managed to stump me), and that person will win the tablet. It's portable, lightweight and versatile; a perfect handheld device for displaying wireless captions, among many other things. I'll be streaming captions to one at the table, so you can see how cool and compact it is.

To keep things fair, I'm going to give each person three chances to stump me. If I'm able to correctly write all three, tough luck. Your card won't go in the jar. If you stump me three times, you'll get three chances to win! So keep your textbooks handy, because I've got over seven years of experience captioning for Pharmacy, Medical, Dental, and Veterinary schools, plus several more years transcribing interviews for medical journals specializing in Ophthalmology, Hematology, Oncology, Hepatology, and Gastroenterology, among others. (A more complete list of subjects I've captioned or transcribed can be found here.) Hit me with your best shot!



White Coat Captioning is the only CART and captioning firm specializing in medical higher education and technical conferences. For a simulation of what medical captioning looks like when provided by a captioner with medical experience versus one without, check out this video:



The experienced captioner is on the top. The inexperienced one is on the bottom. But I'm pretty sure you already figured that out.

Some firms put captioners without any medical experience on high-stakes jobs, with disastrous results. When you work with White Coat Captioning, you know that will never happen. See you in Ann Arbor!

Strong Demand for Tech Conference Captioning

This blog has been neglected for far too long while I've been focusing my attentions on The Plover Blog, but I've decided to try and get back in the swing of things by posting at least an occasional update here every so often.

To that end, I wanted to mirror a Storify I made several months back after polling my Twitter contacts for feedback on conference captioning. I've been doing quite a bit of conference captioning recently, with several other conference organizers contacting me with at least tentative interest, and I thought it would be worthwhile to get many of the arguments for it in one place:

It's linked in the Storify, but I wanted to specifically point out the excellent article Your Next Conference Should Have Realtime Captioning, by Lindsey Kuper, organizer of !!Con, which I captioned back in March 2014. Many thanks to Lindsey for making it happen; it was a wonderful experience.

I also wanted to post my response to an organizer who asked me recently whether captioners or ASL interpreters could be interchangeable, because this is a common source of confusion for people who want to make their conferences accessible but aren't sure where to start.

"They have different but sometimes overlapping uses. Basically, if someone requests ASL, you should definitely provide it for them, because it's definitely possible that they're more fluent in ASL than in written English, and having to read through captions and then translate into ASL in their head might be really fatiguing. Many people are equally fluent in both, of course, but if they're requesting interpreters rather than captioners, there's usually a good reason for it. Also, a big advantage of ASL interpretation is that the interpreter can walk with the attendee and interpret conversations with other attendees between talks, which is much trickier to do with captioning.

If you don't get requests for ASL, I'd say it might not be worth providing proactively, because odds are there won't be anyone there who knows it, and then you'll be paying interpreters to interpret for nobody. (An estimated 95% of people with hearing loss don't know ASL, because most people lose their hearing later in life, after they've already learned their first language, and most forms of hearing loss fall into the mild/moderate range, whereas the vast majority of people who know ASL are in the severe/profound range, which is comparatively rarer.)

On the other hand, even if you don't get specific requests for captioning, I'd encourage you to provide it proactively, and not just because I'm a captioner. The fact is, hearing loss is extremely common -- 1 out of 7 people have it to one degree or another -- and conferences, where the presenter is at the front of a big room and usually too far away to lip read, can be among the most difficult for people with an amount of hearing loss that otherwise isn't too limiting. So people who are just fine speaking one-on-one with someone in a quiet room can be totally at sea in a conference situation.

Captioning is also really helpful for people who speak other languages and are more fluent in written English than spoken English, people who have attention deficit issues, and people who want to take notes. If you stream your captioning, you can also give people a chance to keep a live feed going on their phone while out in the lobby or wherever, which gives them more flexibility to keep tabs on talks they're really interested in while still being able to hack or socialize.

TL;DR: If you get a request for ASL, please do honor it, even if it means you then won't have enough funding to provide captioning (though obviously both would be ideal). But if you don't get any explicit ASL or captioning requests, please consider providing captioning anyway. In a room of 100 people, odds are that 15 to 20 people at least will get a substantial benefit from it. Live captions are also useful as a starting point for captioned video, if you're planning to post talks online, which is not only useful from an accessibility standpoint, but greatly improves SEO".

If you'd like to read more on this particular topic, please see the excellent Audio Accessibility Blog for the perspective of a deaf accessibility and user experience designer who frequently attends and presents at conferences.

I'm happy to say that Alterconf Oakland/SF, a conference I recently captioned remotely (after captioning their New York City session onsite) did have both ASL interpreters and captioning provided proactively, and I know for a fact that at least one person in the audience (Ian Smith, aka @metaforgotten, in the Storify above, a programmer and linguist whom I've known on Twitter for ages but sadly have yet to meet in person) made use of both the interpreters and the captions while attending.

I have him to thank for this picture:



Unfortunately there were some unforeseen technical glitches at the conference venue that prevented me from getting a clean sound feed from the AV board. I had to use audio from the laptop microphone as a last resort, which, as any captioner can tell you, will produce wildly variable results. Some speeches were as clear as daylight, and I got every word. Some were terribly distorted to the point of inaudibility. Fortunately AlterConf Atlanta has pledged to do a full test of their audio equipment before the event, so there should be no further problems on that front. Kudos to AlterConf for their indomitable commitment to accessibility by successfully finding sponsorship for both ASL interpretation and captioning! If only all conferences could follow their example.

Technical difficulties notwithstanding, we got some more great feedback from attendees, so here's just one more brief Storify:

Wearable Realtime Slides

[slide deck removed due to image rights issues]
I think my Wearable Realtime lecture yesterday went really well! I tried to discuss both my enthusiasm for the potential of Glass in captioning and my many reservations about the success of the Glass initiative as a whole. Then I passed my unit around and captioned the question and answer portion live to Glass using Plover and Streamtext. People really seemed to get a kick out of it, which made me happy, because the audience at TechCon attracts relatively few captioners and CART providers; most people there are court reporters, videographers, and other legal services people. I tried putting in a bit of legal material where I could, but of course accessibility on Glass is my main focus, so it was encouraging to see that people who don't live and breathe captioning still found it interesting.

The two most relevant pictures from my talk:

These were taken in my hotel room using the Glass Vignette tool. Feel free to email me if you want the Streamtext settings I used. I got them from Ian DeAndrea-Lazarus, a fellow Glass Explorer and Master of Public Health student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry.

Hopefully the complete video of my talk will be online in a few weeks. I'll caption it and then post it here, so stay tuned!