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.

Francis Barrett

BIVR Member

About

I qualified as a Fully Accredited Court Reporter with the Association of Professional Shorthand Writers (APSW) in 1992 after working in Liverpool Crown Court since 1989 and later transferred to the British Institute Of Verbatim Reporters (BIVR) after dissolution of the APSW in 2000. I regularly work with various deafness organisations such as the RNID (Royal National Institute for Deaf People) the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission), NLHF (National Lottery Heritage Fund) and many large conferences for both disability and commercial organisations.
I passed the Deaf Awareness examination with the Council for the Advancement of Communication with Deaf People (CACDP) in June 1995. I passed the CACDP certificate in British Sign Language Stage One in February 1999.
In 1991 I qualified as a court reporter' with APSW (Association of Professional Shorthand Writers). In June 1994 I passed the 210 words per minute examination. I became a CACDP accredited Speech To Text Reporter (STTR) in August 1998 after passing two endorsements with deafened examiners. In September 2001 I qualified as a QRTR (Qualified Real Time Reporter).
With the advent of online working since COVID I support many clients for Zoom and Teams meetings via the user-friendly StreamText platform. Although I support lots of clients online I am probably the only STTR who actually prefers on-site work and still support clients all over the country in this.

  • Member
  • NRCPD Registered, Qualified Realtime Reporter - QRR, Realtime, Verbatim STTR/Captioning - Remote, Verbatim STTR/Captioning - On-site
  • UK
  • Merseyside

Contact Details

Email

palantype@verbatimreporting.co.uk

Phone

07970 438088

Website

http://verbatimreporting.co.uk