YouTube Video – Captions Available
Lauren is the founder and president of “The Collaborative for Communication Access via Captioning” CCACaptioning.org (This will open in a new Tab). After becoming deafened about 15 years ago, and learning more about hearing loss and deafness, she saw the need for greater focused attention on captioning that so many millions need for inclusion. While sign language was generally understood, captioning seemed buried under pressure for many other resources, and captioning advocacy was only one among many goals of long-established deaf and hearing loss groups.
Late in 2009 she created CCAC as an informal online discussion among seven colleagues. It quickly grew to hundreds of participants in its own online exchange, described by some as the most intelligent online discussion or “list” they’d ever encountered. CCAC attracts several thousands on social media now, and became an official non-profit organization in 2012 (NGO, charity). It’s sole mission is “inclusion of quality captioning universally” and during the five years of CCAC life, huge progress has been made, building on those efforts of many other groups over many years, and now with renewed energies and interest in captioning globally.
There is still a long way to go to see access with quality captioning on all media (including everything on the Internet) and for live events of everyday life from education, medical appointments, job interviews to conferences and entertainments, also including conferences and presentations online (webinars and streamed live events of all sorts).
Her background is in medical and clinical psychology with a Ph.D. from The City University of New York, post-graduate studies in New York and London (UK), and four decades of clinical practice, supervision, teaching, research and writing (e.g. Clinical Faculty, Psychology, Harvard Medical School, 1987 to 2003), with special interests in group dynamics, intercultural communications, women’s issues, social gerontology, and online behaviours. She has worked with many individuals, organisations and companies to foster development, better communications and change. Family and professional threads have influenced her interests in social justice and human rights from early days in the suburbs of New York to later international experiences.
Let’s Caption the World!