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The Collaborative for Communication Access Via Captioning Invites You to Join
ADVOCACY FOR QUALITY CAPTIONING UNIVERSALLY is the CCAC mission. We invite you to join us in one of the most significant and meaningful new grass-roots advocacy communities in the world. If you support the CCAC mission, hearing or not, deaf or not, individuals and groups, come on board. The CCAC is doing great advocacy on many levels every day. Access to information in all the places we need it is vital. Captioning inclusion for the many benefits for mega-millions of people is a human necessity. We have more to do together!
Captioning speaks to us all – it’s our language, and it is missing in too many places. Many of us cannot comprehend speech well in group situations, even with other resources and technologies. We require quality captioning/subtitles in many places, and the CCAC outlines ten places we call ten CCAC categories of life, from education, employment, and entertainment to government, healthcare, transportation, and more. Moreover, captioning benefits many others for different reasons – for language learning, literacy, translations and search online, and also for different listening and learning styles. The CCAC is not another deaf, deafened, or hearing loss group: we are a consumer captioning advocacy non-profit organization, all volunteers, users and providers together.
In the autumn of 2009, it was decided that a new focused captioning advocacy project was needed. It started first in the USA and quickly attracted international members. It is an international advocacy community to raise awareness, educate and advocate on many levels for inclusion of quality captioning where none exists now. The CCAC builds bridges among all individuals and groups for captioning advocacy.
CCAC membership has a nice balance of “consumers” and “providers” – all working together to encourage and create new captioning inclusion projects, as well as many interested others from education, technology, disability, and accessibility fields. Consumers are all who use captioning, all the time, or sometimes, or support the mission due to an understanding of disabilities, technologies, accessibility issues, and more.
Any captioning advocacy project, from a small local one, to a regional or national project, and collaborations internationally too, are encouraged.
Sharing questions and knowledge in the CCAC group is very effective. In year one of the CCAC, captioning inclusion achievements included CART for Court, requests for CART for professional conferences, captioning reminders for Internet videos, captioning advocacy for live theater and museum videos, and much more. Year two continued expansion of the same. In year three (2012), the Captioning Advocacy Projects (CAPs) were so numerous that the summaries in the newsletters are informative (on the CCAC website now).
While many established organizations advocate for captioning (and CART, real time captioning or “speech-to-text”, with various names in different countries), those organizations have wider agendas (they advocate for many other resources also ) or wider constituencies (they advocate for people with many different disabilities). The CCAC focuses on one single theme, inclusion of quality captioning universally. Collaboration is invited!
Consumers “drive” progress by asking for captioning, sometimes facing many “no’s” and often a long process that requires persistence and a “do not give up” attitude. The CCAC provides encouragement, support online, and valuable information and exchange.
Building bridges in the CCAC – “the place to be for captioning advocacy” – we invite you to join, to work together, share your experience or new advocacy questions. We educate, advocate, and aim to join forces for captioning inclusion that sometimes takes too many years.
The CCAC has helped members with “CCAC Action Requests,” not only for specific information, but also with “letters of support” when any member is seeking real time speech to text. The CCAC also offers public data-collection documents on its website, for all to submit information about local and broader captioning advocacy, so others can be inspired, and share advocacy experience. CCAC volunteers even provide (free) captioning for selected requests among CCAC members. It’s all part of the CCAC package to educate, advocate, and collaborate.
In most countries, real time captioning is thought to be “expensive” and we aim to find ways to demonstrate how important it is. Captioning is our “ramp” for equal communication access, similar to wheelchair ramps which are generally accepted and provided in many countries in the modern world.
There is much more information about the CCAC on the website, including the membership form. We welcome your interest and support. The web address is http://ccacaptioning.org, and e-mail is ccacaptioning@gmail.com.
NEW: CCAC now has a service to expand it’s educational and advocacy mission called CaptionMatch. The goal is to make it easier for anyone, anyplace, to ask for captioning needed and find a provider. See http://captionmatch.com for more information, to register as a consumer or provider, and expand communication access for yourself and others.
