The Association of Transcribers and Speech-to-text Providers (ATSP) seeks to learn more about current trends and preferences among users of live captioning services. 

Rational

According to the 2022 U.S. Census, 6.1 percent people living in the United States report having hearing loss or deafness (CDC, 2023). Common accommodations for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) individuals in academic and employment settings include American Sign Language (ASL) interpreting, speech-to-text services (also known as live captioning services), assistive listening devices, and note-taking. Speech-to-text accommodations can also be used to address barriers due to neurological disorders and learning disabilities.  

The Association of Transcribers and Speech-to-text Providers (ATSP) is a non-profit organization dedicated to consumers and service providers of meaning-for-meaning (MFM) equal communication access services (also known as live captioning services). There are two types of live captioning services: verbatim or word-for-word captioning, most often performed by Communication Access Real Time (CART) writers, and meaning-for-meaning (MFM) services performed by TypeWell or C-Print providers. The field of verbatim services began in the early 1980s while the field of meaning-for-meaning services was developed in 1996.  

Meaning-for-meaning services convey the intended meaning and translates spoken English into written English. Much of communication is non-verbal and some of the intended meaning is lost when we only transpose spoken words into writing. Additionally, MFM services convey the essential meaning and eliminate redundant phrases, repetitions, false starts, and other utterances that do not impact meaning so users can more easily keep up with what is being said. In an ideal situation, the user would get to choose the type of service that would best meet their needs. Some situations are better served by verbatim services, especially where the exact verbiage is important, such as law, while other situations are better served by MFM services.  

Assistive technology and artificial intelligence is constantly advancing.  Automated captioning is offered on many media platforms and apps, such as YouTube, but the accuracy varies between 60-80% depending on audio quality, the number of speakers, specialized content, and accented speakers, as reported by 3Play Media's 2023 State of ASR Report.  Additionally, auto-captions have no way of capturing non-verbal communication, or clarifying what the speaker means when using pronouns or other referents. For example, a math instructor might point to the board and say "you take this and divide it by that and it equals this," which is meaningless to the user. As such relying on automated captions may leave DHH users without equal communication access to the content. 

A well trained human captionist can produce more accurate captions than auto-captions. However, it can also be difficult to arrange human captionists. In a post secondary educational setting, a student must meet with the disability services office to get approved for the accommodation, then they must request the classes and meetings for which they want the services. One or two captionists will either physically be present in the same room as the student, or will tune in remotely. Tuning in remotely requires that the student, or ideally the faculty or disability service staff, sets up an audio feed for the captionist. However, there are often technical difficulties and interruptions to the audio, which results in the captionist not able to capture all content. While students are supported by a coordinator who arranges services and ideally works with faculty on the implementation, an additional burden is placed on the student receiving the services. 

The objective of this survey is to:

• understand and analyze what is needed in the field of MFM services

• ensure consumer needs are met

• ensure that consumers are receiving equitable communication access services

• understand the impacts of how the field of live caption providers is dominated by white providers

• understand DHH opinions about auto-captions 

It is imperative that our field is responsive to consumer needs and that we develop structures and processes that will support service providers in meeting those consumer needs.