Now that the Canberra Deaf Club is sending out more frequent emails about upcoming events around Canberra and further afield, I'm finding out about more opportunities for me to practice and learn things related to Auslan. One of these opportunities last week was an ACT Government town-hall-style meeting for people to have their say about accessibility issues for disabled people. The event was advertised as Auslan-interpreted. So I went along, and sure enough, the interpreter was there. I arrived slightly late and was puzzled to see that the interpreters' hands were still - it turned out that none of the punters who had turned up needed access through Auslan. The other student who had also turned up for the same reason as I did, must have been just as disappointed that we couldn't get a good hour and a half of practice in. The other student stuck it out longer than I did - I stayed for half an hour and listened to citizens' frustrations and the standard responses from government officials and the private consultants to whom they palm the issues off to, at greater expense to the public.
Before I get too cynical, I should mention the most positive part of the event for me - I got a chance to watch the CART system. CART stands for Communication Access Real-time Translation or Computer Assisted Realtime Transcription (whichever you prefer). Although I am an ex-captioner of closed-caption TV, I never did real-time captioning, for which you need stenographer's skills (like for court reporting or hansard). The captioner simply typed the speaker's words into their specialist machines and, via a laptop and a project, the words appeared printed on the big screen for all to read with only a few seconds' delay. For some reason, I had thought that CART was way more complicated - possibly because of the acronyms or long words in the title. Yay - one more mystery solved!
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