It’s Court Reporting and Captioning Week and Stenograph is celebrating along with every reporter, CART provider, captioner, and everyone who works with them to provide an accurate record for all and access for the deaf and hearing-impaired community. Like you, we are grateful for this opportunity to share what we love about these professions. There’s a reason that we are the number one supplier of products and services used by court reporters and captioners. There’s a reason that every employee genuinely cares as much about the quality of our products and services as our customers. Because an accurate record matters.  Because access for those who are deaf and hearing impaired matters.

We are very proud to provide the best possible tools to the trained, skilled individuals who ensure that it is possible to have an accurate record and/or realtime display of live proceedings. We know that we are safer as individuals and as a society knowing that what happened in legal proceedings is being taken down and preserved by an impartial third party, someone with no personal agenda or interest in the proceeding.  Simply put, the existence of an accurate record means accountability and the possibility of justice. The knowledge that there will be a permanent record preserved of every moment helps form the arguments, concessions, admissions made, and the positions taken by parties and their counsel. When all information is recorded accurately the risk of misinterpretation or injustice is reduced and there can be proof of and consequences for deliberate falsehood.

There are those who don’t understand why a video or audio recording alone will never be a sufficient record in and of itself, or why there must always be an accurate transcript. I suspect that people who think this are mostly people who have the privilege of being able to hear clearly and/or who have never attempted to accurately transcribe an audio recording and fail to comprehend the extraordinary difficulty of the task. They’ve also probably never had to review an audio or video recording to search for specific information to be able to learn something they urgently need to know. They’ve certainly never considered the potential impact upon the possibility for justice when one cannot guarantee that there would never be a failure of the recording device(s), sources of interference that could garble a recording, and/or a corruption or manipulation of the media post-event. They’ve never wondered how, even if all of those elements worked 100% correctly every single time, a person who cannot hear would access those recordings. I suspect they’ve never imagined what it would be like not being able to clearly hear every word that is spoken in a civil or criminal proceeding where they were an interested, involved party.

This lack of perception or appreciation is exactly why Court Reporting and Captioning Week is so important, and why we use this opportunity to tell the world the facts about what we do, and make sure they understand how much they need all of us working together to ensure that everyone in our society is given the same opportunity to participate.

Everyone at Stenograph – literally every person in every department – is part of a dedicated team that works together to ensure that every reporter and captioner has the tools and resources to preserve the record and provide accurate instant realtime translation in any setting in which it is required. We have developed and sold steno writers for more than 80 years, each one offering the most advanced, innovative hardware technology and cutting-edge software available to provide the precision, comfort, and support required by reporters and captioners.  The Luminex II writer and our software products: Case CATalyst^®, Case CATalyst BCS^®, Case CATalyst VP^®, CaseViewNet^®, iCVNet, and CaseViewNet Browser Edition; Yes Law^®, and Reporter Suite™ serve the current and changing needs of reporters and captioners. Plus, Stenograph is always thinking ahead, always working on what will be needed tomorrow as well as enhancing and improving the tools you use today.

Happy Court Reporting and Captioning Week! Let’s go out there and celebrate who we are and educate everyone who needs us. Because an accurate record matters.  Because access for those who are deaf and hearing impaired matters.