Speech-to-Text Reporting (also more commonly known as captioning) is an area of realtime work providing communication support for the D/deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, as well as people whose first language is not English. Hearing people also benefit from the services of an STTR. Captioning assignments include meetings, conferences, festivals, museums, seminars, lectures, or one-to-one support. The captioner can be either onsite or remote.
The primary role of an STTR is to provide communication support, not to provide a legal, official transcript. If and when a text-format document is provided by the STTR, this is purely as an aide-memoir for the service user and has no legal standing, i.e., it cannot be quoted in the Court of Appeal, for example. A disclaimer to this effect will accompany an STTR’s transcript:
DISCLAIMER: Live captioning is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility. This document contains the real-time captions in a text format, and has not been edited, proofread, or corrected. It is not an official, legal transcript and is not certified to be true and correct. It may contain computer-generated mistranslations of palantype/stenotype code and/or electronic transmission errors, resulting in inaccurate or nonsensical word combinations.
