Yesterday, I went to see the presentations from World IA day. One of the attendees was deaf and they provided CART (communication access real time translation.) I’ve seen a real time interpreter before, but never actually typing the words on a screen real time. I found this interesting from a speaking point of view.

One of the speaker used a lot of filler words which got me looking into how the CART stenographer handled it. He typed “so” and “you know” with consistency.  Once in a while, he’d type “um”. He left most of those out though. Which is fine. They don’t add any value to understanding.

Which of course, is why we are trained to avoid them in the first place. Filler words don’t add understanding to hearing listeners either.