University of
Maine Commencement 2009 Captioning Coordination
The University of Maine 2009
Commencement added many high-tech features, greatly enhancing the
audience experience and, more importantly, increasing access to the
speakers' text.
Alfond
Arena has a new four-sided digital screen hanging from the center of the
ceiling and two large rectangular digital screens hanging of the goal
cages at either end. These electronic additions allowed the display of
pre-taped videos and live video of the stage on the center screens and
the display of text on the end screens. The two end screens can be
viewed from every seat in Alfond Arena.
The Commencement Committee hired a CART
captioner, Shari Majeski of
Maine CART and Captioning
Services,
to caption the Commencement proceedings. She captioned all of the
speakers' text except for the student names during the conferral of
diplomas--nearly two hours of captioning during both the morning and
afternoon ceremonies.
The system that drives the new video
screens is supplied by the Daktronics Company. Claude Junkins, UMaine
Engineer, established a virtual private network (VPN) for Shari to log
in to. As she operated her captioning software, it dumped her text to a
plain text file that was continuously uploaded to the Daktronics through
the VPN. Shari and Claude spent many hours in the weeks and day prior to
make their two systems play well. They succeeded!
There
were many positive comments from attendees about the captioning and
about finally being able to understand what the speakers were saying.
The Disability Services director reported that this is the first year
ever that she received no requests for ASL Interpreting services. She
usually receives at least a half dozen requests. This suggests that the
community read this year's Commencement notices about captioning.
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