Separating Roles of the Official Reporter and CART Captioner in the Legal Setting

Heidi C. Thomas, FAPR, RDR, CRR, CRC, has been a court reporter since 1978, and a broadcast and CART captioner since 1989. A former director and secretary for the Georgia Shorthand Reporters Association and former member of the Board of Court Reporting for the State of Georgia, she has also served for many years on the faculty and training staff of the National Court Reporters Association. She served for six years on the NCRA Realtime Certification Committee, which developed the Certified CART Provider and Certified Broadcast Captioner certifications. She was also part of the team that developed the Certified Realtime Captioner certification. Since 2008, she has been a member of NCRA’s Council of the Academy of Professional Reporters, which deals with certification and education issues, and is a former member of the Board of Directors of NCRA. She has been a presenter at the Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Colorado, and various other state court reporter association conventions. She was involved in realtime training with the Caption Masters series, a broadcast captioning/CART captioning re-training/transition program, and is currently training with the Caption Quest program in Atlanta, Ga. She has mentored students and professionals for most of her career. She provides on-site and remote CART and broadcast captioning for local, regional, national, and international conferences; conventions and seminars; and classroom and business settings. She has also worked as a national broadcast captioner, including realtime captioning on ABC, NBC, CBS, ESPN, FoxSportsNet, and WAGA and WSB in Atlanta, and she was also part of the captioning team for the 2000 Summer Olympics on MSNBC. She has been a part of captioning teams who provide realtime captioning for conventions since 1990. She continues to travel both in the U.S. and internationally to provide on-site captioning services, and she has provided live performance captioning for national and regional theater groups.