Meet the team

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Caption Nerds, LLC., is CART captioning company, founded in 2018. We’ve grown organically (mostly) through word of mouth and recurring clients. Caption Nerds is an LLC., but sits on the intersections of business, volunteerism, and advocacy. We believe that equitable billing practices, educating the general public about CART captions, and honoring language access preferences are all vital to our business model. 

Caring about the human elements of captioning beyond regulatory concerns is our superpower.  

Human-powered captions for human clients needing language access and reasonable accommodations are the foundation for everything we do. Quality CART captions are a part universal design, opening up more venues and events to more consumers. 

Thomas (he/him) studied stenography at the award-winning College of Court Reporting for the majority of his education before transferring to and completing his studies with a specialty in captioning from the American Captioning Institute.

Thomas started working as a freelance captioner in 2016 and still provides business-to-business support for some of the biggest names in the CART industry, as well as CART branches of various ASL firms. Caption Nerds was founded in 2018 to address gaps in the market and to elevate CART to more venues and events -- big and small-- to be more inclusive and deploy captions in more places.  

Methodology behind the man? Thomas has always embraced cutting-edge technology within stenography, using Eclipse software, current steno machines including both the LightSpeed and Xpression writers and uses the NER formulas (Number Edit Error) for accessing live subtitles in television broadcasts and events that are produced using speech recognition. 

The three letters stand for number, edit error and recognition error. It has been promoted as an alternative to Word error rate (Word Error Rate) which is a more objective measure.

The overall score is calculated as follows: Firstly, the number of edit and recognition errors is deducted from the total number of words in the live subtitles. This number is then divided by the total number of words in the live subtitles and finally multiplied by one hundred. 

Christopher Peny (he/him/his) is our Executive Director.  He has bachelor’s degree in hospitality management from Jonhson & Wales University and years of experience in administration and customer service including roles at The Plaza Hotel and Tribeca Grand Hotel in New York City  as well as over a decade as a travel consultant with American Express and AAA Travel.

More interesting than administrative tasks, Christopher is the eye behind the lens, capturing real-life moments for Caption Nerds and our clients. His pictures and videos drive our Instagram account that’s thus far garnered almost 138,000 views for captioning and language access businesses and clients that utilize human powered CART captions. 

While Thomas is the Lead Captioner, he does have a wonderful, trusted network of freelance colleagues that are available for larger jobs, overflow work, et cetera. 

All captioners that freelance for Caption Nerds have years of experience, captioning for broadcast television, higher education, corporate and government workplaces, conferences, expos, and more. 

We make sure to match a provider that aligns with your needs.