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When I graduated from Southern Cross University in 2002 with degree in environmental resource management, I moved to Brisbane to find work in that sector. I narrowly missed out on a graduate position in water policy, but when I got the call I asked if I could do some voluntary work experience. The response was positive. At the time I was signed up with what used to be the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service, so my workplace insurance was already in place and they just need to complete some paperwork at their end. I did three months in a volunteer capacity, learning all about water reform, and was then offered a job as a policy officer. That kicked off my first career, working in various capacities in water management, waste reform, mining and service delivery until 2012. I left government due to burnout and a profound sense of disappointment with the politics going on at the time. Despite developing some great friendships and professional relationships, I had nothing left to give, and it was time to look for something different. In my last few years in government, I developed an interest in assistive technology. At the time, services like the Captel captioned telephone service was being trialled by the Australian Communication Exchange, who had the contract to run the National Relay Service. For verbal deaf folks like myself, Captel and WebCaptel was a game changer, allowing me to make and receive captioned telephone calls. I was involved in providing some feedback on the service through their community reference panel. The handsets were landline phones with a screen to read the captions. They worked pretty well, although their main drawback in a large organisation as I found out, was that every time you moved desks or floors (as I did quite a bit for different roles) you needed to have the IT guys port in a new LAN line to your desk, which sometime meant I couldn't use the phone for a week. And they couldnt be configured to fit into the existing Cisco phone system. Eventually Webcaptel allowed me to make calls via my iPhone 3 - albeit with a very clunky web interface.
My government roles required that I attend various meetings. Some of these were high profile meetings with our interagency counterparts, others were regular team meetings. Because I am profoundly deaf in one ear and completely deaf in the other ear, I was finding it increasingly difficult to follow group conversation. Concentration fatigue from attending these meetings would impact my mental and physical health, and it felt like I was working twice as hard as my colleagues to stay on top of my workload and produce the high quality policy work I was known for. So I started trialling live captioning providers in my work meetings, using my Employment Assistance Fund. I had also seen live captions at a Mental Health and Deafness conference I attended in 2009. For me, live captions were another game changer. Instead of sitting in a meeting trying to very hard listen, I could relax and read the captions to follow the conversation. This had a profound effect on me. Usually I would enter a meeting room feeling apprehensive and anxious, but with the live captioner by my side or listening in via a phone link, I could just concentrate on the meeting content like my colleagues did. And I could even refer back to the captions or transcript if there was something I missed. When I trialled various captioning service providers, I learnt that most were either court reporters or TV captioners. Some, like Ai Media were employing speech to text technology and trained human "respeakers" to produce the captions. Others, like Bradley Reporting and the Captioning Studio only used human stenocaptioners. At the time, speech to text technology was not as accurate as it is today, and still needed human intervention to fix errors. I preferred the human captioners. Sensing the need to move on from my government career, I had also enrolled in a Masters of Counselling at Queensland University of Technology. I managed to convince the disability liaison officers to let me try live captioning in class. At first they insisted I try an FM receiver with my hearing aid, and a lapel mic for the lecturer (which predictably failed dismally) and then they wanted me to try a notetaker typing on a laptop. She quit after the first class. To their credit the DLOs agreed to cover the extra cost and try a live captioner at my two evening classes, and eventually in the clinic during our practical sessions. I was the first profoundly deaf person to graduate from Masters of Counselling course. The live captioning was incredibly helpful and with an iPad I could simply move around the classroom or clinic easily. We addressed any confidentiality issues by instructing captioners redact client names and delete transcripts. So in 2012 I took a leap of faith and quit my steady government job for good. I was briefly employed by Vision Australia as an assistive technology consultant, but for various reasons I decided I wasn't ready to go back to full time employment. Instead I took some time out to start my own consulting business and ended up doing some business development work for Jason Bradley of Bradley Reporting (BR), who was one of the captioning service providers I had trialled at my government job. The late Michael Lockery was a good friend of mine and very active in the live captioning space. Michael, Jason and I collaborated regularly on developing a live captioning service because we saw how good it could be for deaf people and the mainstream community. I really liked Jason's approach - flexible service delivery built on a quality service rather than the proprietary technologies competitors were using. It meant we could integrate captions very into most existing platforms and as a consumer, what really mattered to me was captioning accuracy and speed, and that was what set BR apart. We were really fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. One of my roles at BR was to establish and develop relationships with key stakeholders in the deaf community. This is how I met Brent Phillips, who at the time was a manager at Vicdeaf (now Expression Australia). Brent was keen to provide live captioning services as part of the newly branded Auslan Connections booking service. Auslan Connections provided Auslan interpreting, live captioning and note taking services for Victoria and Tasmania. To his credit, Brent was very forward thinking as live captioning services were not very well known in those days. I flew down to Melbourne to meet the Vicdeaf team and demonstrate our services, while
Jason provided the captioning remotely in Brisbane. We also met with a university and I spoke to a room full of very interested disability liaison officers. Those meetings were successful and the rest as they say, is history. The icing on the cake was when we were asked to caption the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) Conference in Sydney in 2013.
WFD was an unforgettable experience and really lifted the profile of live captioning in Australia and internationally. This led to ongoing partnerships with Expression Australia and the former Deaf Society of NSW and Deaf Services Queensland (now Deaf Connect). We also had much interest from universities and government departments, as accessibility became more or a fore thought, rather than an afterthought.
During my time at BR, I had the privilege to work with some very talented and dedicated people. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with them, and it never ceases to amaze me how the captioners could transcribe at 220+ words per minute for hours at a time. Like interpreting, it is a skillset that not many people can master easily. I am fortunate have managed such a great team for the past six years. I wouldn't have predicted becoming an operations manager and dealing with the logistics of supplying hundreds of hours of live captioning each week, but it has been a great experience.
If there is one thing that sticks in my mind about the last decade, it is how different peoples approaches to disability access are now. In the early days, when I started working for BR, every second conversation I had with prospective clients was about their legal obligation to provide access and how much it would cost. When I left BR in January 2024, those conversations were few and far between. We went from providing live captions to a very specific cohort (mainly non signing deaf people in workplaces), to captioning in online university classes, webinars, public events and conferences right across the community, government and private sectors. No doubt the internet, smartphones, tablets and Covid pandemic have shaped this too, but it is great to see captions are now very much part of our everyday life.
As a disability inclusion consultant and user of assistive technology, I am excited to see what the future holds, particularly for those of us who have to advocate for our needs in the workplace, in education and our communities.
If your organisation can benefit from my experience and expertise, please drop me an email to discuss this.
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