By Kathi Mestayer

That’s right, it’s not a typo! Where I live, Virginia Relay has just announced availability of captions for conference calls. No more worrying about that caller who is always multitasking and talking into their speakerphone from two feet away. Virginia Relay’s new Remote Conference Captioning service provides the captioning free of charge to Virginia residents, who can view the internet-based captions on their laptop during the conference call.

I learned about this new service from Clayton Bowen, the director of Virginia Relay, a program of the Virginia Department for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (VDDHH). Virginia Relay provides communications access to people who are deaf, hard-of-hearing, and deaf-blind, through a number of traditional and high-tech programs.

If you live in Virginia, visit the Virginia Relay website, where there’s also more information on the conference-call captions.

Which other states offer conference-call captioning? So far, it’s just a handful, but these states do:

• Arizona

• Colorado

• Florida

• Hawaii

• Maine (starting July 1)

• Montana

• New Jersey

• North Carolina

…and the federal government, for their employees.

To learn more about captioning, read my story on real-time captioning, which benefits from a blend of human input and voice recognition, in the Spring 2016 issue of Hearing Health.