Breaking Barriers? Open Steno Leads the Way

Yesterday, many professional stenographers came together with hobbyist stenographers from the Open Steno Project. Open Steno proponents presented how they have brought the cost of trying and using steno from the thousands of dollars it used to cost down to about $100. One example of this is the Uni, which is now, according to members from the community, in mass production mode. Please get involved in the various Open Steno communities, but especially the Discord chat. For anyone that missed the meeting, you can watch it here. The entire event was put together over the course of one week by Dineen Squillante, and without her, the event would not have happened. Captioning was provided by Open Steno founder Mirabai Knight. Moderation was performed by Quaverly Rothenberg. Check out my timeline of events below:

11:00 Dineen Squillante begins the meeting.

14:47 Mirabai Knight speaks about how the community has continued to grow and captions at the same time.

15:56 National Court Reporters Association President Debbie Dibble spoke about the honor of the invitation to join and noted she would be taking vociferous notes.

17:00 British Institute of Verbatim Reporters President Leah Willersdorf gave us a breakdown of BIVR’s membership.

18:06 New York State Court Reporters Association President Dom Tursi presented to us the history of machine shorthand. 1827 in France is the earliest attempt to mechanize shorthand that Dom has been able to unearth.

After that lineup, the Open Steno Community members spoke and shared with us several important things.

28:30 Software Engineer (140 WPM) Sammi De Guzman gave us a great introduction. Sammi spoke about the financial barriers of getting into stenography and talked about how the Open Steno Project has eliminated or substantially reduced those barriers through cheaper hardware and free software (Plover). She also mentioned how this barrier reduction allows everyone to use stenography and not just those in court reporting and captioning. Sammi also mentioned the large ecosystem of plugins/tools available.

38:14 Aerick, Open Steno Content Creator, spoke about hardware options for hobbyists. Aerick has over a thousand subscribers on Youtube!

44:00 Peter Park from Stenokeyboards.com spoke next. Peter is currently a law student, and he designed the Uni keyboard mentioned at the top. Peter spoke about his background and how he got into stenography.

48:45 Abby, a high school student and hobbyist stenographer (60 WPM), talked about the Stenogotchi by Anodynous.

51:26 Crides, a keyboard designer, spoke about embedded steno and a custom-made steno engine that can run on keyboards, as well as its pros and cons.

54:10 Ted Morin, a software engineer and Lead Developer of Plover, was up next. Ted created Art of Chording, just one way for people to learn stenographic theory for free. Ted spoke about the challenges of people learning stenography on their own. Ted also talked about Steno Arcade!

1:00:15 Joshua Grams, hobby programmer and the creator of Steno Jig was our next speaker. The exercises create pseudo-sentences that keep users on their toes and vary what they hear.

1:03:34 Diana MacDonald (Di), creator of Typey Type, spoke about the history of tools that existed to learn when she started and her creation of Typey Type for accessibility.

1:07:26 Sammi De Guzman spoke again. Fun fact, the meeting is hosted on her YouTube! Sammi got into various tools available, including Steno Explainers.

1:12:16 Quaverly Rothenberg, a stenographic transcriber and intern reporter, was up next and spoke about more tools for learners, including Anki flash card decks and Plover cards. She also spoke about Kaoffie’s steno font tool, recently used by Dineen Squillante with Team Turtle. We also got to hear about stroke frequency analyzer tools by Emily (EP L HREU).

1:28:13 Sammi gave us more information about decentralizing stenography and creating accessibility to more people in more places. The work of various creators was mentioned at 1:34:17, including SanSan by Sammi, Hachidori by Kaoffie, and Thai Steno by Parnikkapore.

1:34:32 Jim McAllister spoke about his work to create theory in other languages, including Spanish, and introduced his Spanish theory language group on Facebook.

1:41:16 Elizabeth Tremmel, an official court reporter in Ramsey County, Minnesota was the next presenter. She spoke about the Plover demographics survey. She spoke about schools and community, and how Plover helped her achieve working speed. One very important point made by Elizabeth was that NCRA’s testing policy is ambiguous.

I need to hijack the point Elizabeth made. Because of the nature of the Open Steno Community’s work, they need clarification on “special accommodations” and “stenographic writer” in NCRA testing. “Stenographic writer” is incredibly important because of the wide variety of writers that Open Steno has produced. Thanks to modern technology, people can swap out square keys for steno keys on an NKRO keyboard and perform stenography. When I took board training, I learned that associations don’t exclude vendors because that might cause antitrust complaints. If OSP has to crowdfund a lawyer to engage with NCRA to get these answers or represent people lost in the shuffle, it will be a dark day in the history of our profession. I have to ask my colleagues to help legitimize this community rather than illegally exclude it. I believe that’s where we are headed, but I must insist we be proactive: Let’s not be shy about pushing for a better, more-inclusive organization.

1:51:54 Matt “Sooty” Morgan spoke about his quest to teach himself stenography and how scarce stenographic writers are in Australia. Without Plover, Matt would not have made the professional milestones he’s made. He has hope for the future of shorthand in his country thanks to Open Steno. Knowing the

1:54:12, Stanley Sakai joined us from outer space. He talked about teaching himself stenography, the infancy of Plover, and how that evolved into work with coding an app for accessibility and captioning at Coachella with Isaiah Roberts. In Stanley’s words, any way someone can appreciate our craft is a beautiful thing.

2:07:30 Aerick came back and showed off the Discord chat, which professionals are encouraged to join.

After the conclusion of the Open Steno presentation, professional stenographers got a chance to speak.

2:13:16 Yvette Heinze spoke about Team Turtle and the importance of community. Main takeaway? Working together and surrounding ourselves with people that challenge us to learn and grow is vital to the profession’s survival.

2:19:21 Rich Germosen spoke about the court reporting practice community that he runs and how they support each other and keep the drama and politics low.

2:22:18 Christopher Day got to speak about how there’s a tech buzzword going around, the democratization of technology. He pledged to use Stenonymous to boost the community. He also mentioned how dummy pages were put up to lure students away from stenography with lies published about NCRA projections.

2:26:28 Traci Mertens, a stenographer of 34 years in nearly every area of the field that works as an Official Legislative Reporter for the United States House of Representatives. We need voice writers, Plover people, and everybody on board was the core of Traci’s message.

2:30:33 Mirabai Knight was the official close to the meeting, noting how she was blown away by all of the contributions made and how she loves being able to use Plover for captioning, as she has for almost a decade.

2:32:10 Dan Glassman got to come in and explain his experiences and knowledge from the last four decades in the history of stenography. From there, the meeting floated to general discussion and Q&A.

In only one week, Open Steno pulled together this monumental presentation. That, by itself, makes it worthy of our support.

The transcript of the event is available publicly.

Notably, I failed to mention StenoMasters, a speech club open to everyone and run by my best friend, Joshua Edwards. For those that want to sharpen their skills in speaking, it’s worth the $146 first-year cost. StenoMasters is very much like Open Steno in its quest to be accessible and open. Most of the fee goes to Toastmasters, the umbrella organization over StenoMasters, and the rest goes to club expenses.

I also failed to mention Glen Warner’s Cheap & Sleazy blog. My blog, is the biggest blog in the industry commercially. Glen’s is arguably the best blog in the industry, and if you’ve never seen it, it’s time to take a look. His work inspired my work. I hope to inspire others the way he inspired me. His work in the Open Steno Community and promoting the Facebook page cannot go unnoticed.

What Law Offices Need To Know About A Court Reporter Shortage

There’s been a great deal of marketing and many press releases about “disruptive” technology in my field. I’ve been a stenographic court reporter for a decade. I’ve worked right next to reporters who have been working for three or four decades. All of us concede that technology, on average, is getting better. Computers today can do things that few could have imagined in 1970. Computer programs used to be written on punch cards. Try inserting one of those into your iPhone. It’s no wonder that when people see some of the older stenotypes, they ask where the punch card goes.

You write on a stenotype but type on a typewriter. Can’t explain that!

Of course there’s no punch card. But we end up getting a pretty bad rep because the keyboard layout we use is a hundred years old. It’s easy to look at that and forget there’s a whole arsenal of technology attached to that keyboard layout. By 1963 we were using magnetic tape for computer transcription. By 1987, our stenotypes were rocking floppy disks. Today’s stenotypes are so damn good you can read my notes off the screen without any special training.

You would be able to read the notes off the screen, if I ever took any.

There was no secret that there was a court reporter shortage coming. Our field first learned this shortage was coming towards us in 2013. By 2019, the entire country knew there was a shortage. There is a court reporter association in almost every state, a National Court Reporters Association, and myriad nonprofits and other initiatives aimed at solving the shortage. Since 2013, we’ve seen things like Open Steno, A to Z, and Project Steno all aimed at meeting the demand for stenographers in their own way.

With even a gentle push from the larger corporations in our field, things would have been fine. But we started to see some strange moves in our industry by some companies. Some companies started to ask law offices to change their deposition notices to allow for audio recording. Some companies started saying that reporters were unavailable even when we were all sitting at home on social media chatting away with each other. Some companies started completely fabricating news, saying things like “…this world hasn’t been digitized…” Some companies say AI is making things better even though AI only gets 65 to 80 percent of what’s being said. Some companies started to push “digital” court reporters. Digital reporters, while they are nice people, are just recording your deposition and taking some notes. They are being used by those companies as part of the record and transcribe method. These companies are literally taking people who could fill the stenographic reporter gap and telling them “no, do this instead, it’s newer.” They don’t bother to tell them that stenographic reporting utilized the record-and-transcribe method several decades ago with Dictaphone technology and has since evolved to be far more efficient. Stenography has been digital since before some of us were born.

Eventually, you have to ask yourself, “what’s the deal? If there’s is a shortage, why does Veritext, or Planet Depos, or US Legal advertise that they’re hiring digital court reporter positions in New York, but almost never a single ad for a stenographic reporter?” Well, reporting firms, like just about any other industry, make a good deal of their money being the broker for the buyer and seller. You buy our services, we sell them, and the court reporting companies make money by knowing how low we’ll go and how high you’ll go. I started out as a deposition reporter in 2010 and was offered $2.80 a page. Years later I learned that was almost the exact same rate given to reporters in the 1990s and far lower than the page rates that court reporters working in court got. Court reporting companies told me reporters were a dime a dozen and that law offices wouldn’t pay a penny more. Meanwhile, I was taking depositions where the attorneys were telling me how expensive our services were. On a deposition with a lot of copy sales, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was taking home 20 percent of the total invoice. That’s a lot of money to a company to market and print, bind, and mail a transcript that takes hours of reading, research, and transcription on my part.

Our entire profession is in a state of shock because we placed a great deal of trust in reporting firms to market our skills. This is similar to the trust you put in them to find you a qualified stenographic reporter. Yet we find ourselves compiling state databases, national databases, and nonprofit databases dedicated to helping you find stenographic reporters because some companies can’t be bothered to connect consumers with the service they want. They see the education culture that stenography has as a threat. They see it as an expense to do away with. What happens when you take a field with 60 nonprofits and dozens of schools dedicated to the welfare and training of court reporters and replace it with people that have no such support system? You get workers that are easier to intimidate and lowball in the long run. How do I know? It already happened when the Federation of Shorthand Reporters in New York collapsed. Worker pay stagnated while the invoices to attorneys skyrocketed; this is the same situation on a national scale.

What law offices need to know is that they alone decide what happens next in our industry. Ultimately, law offices set the demand. It’s you, the attorneys, office managers, paralegals, and secretaries. You can trust us to recruit enough to fill any shortage. You can trust us to adopt the latest technology. You can trust us to continue over a hundred years of tradition, value, and service by making sure your record is accurate and turned around quickly at the best cost. We have to trust you to demand a stenographic reporter every time so that steno schools can keep pumping out graduates and promising jobs. We have to trust you to look at claims that a stenographic reporter could not be provided with skepticism. We have to trust you to be smart consumers. We have to trust you to let your colleagues know what’s going on in our tiny industry. Don’t just do it so that I have a job in ten years. Do it for your clients. Do it for your consumers. I guarantee that if the demand for steno slips, you’re going to be looking at some crazy deposition bills and hearing some new excuse.

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PS. This article comes after a great satire (image here) was done on this topic by a reporter under the alias DigitalByHumans. In that satire, posted to Craigslist, the writer describes a world where a company does this same sort of thing to attorneys, deciding to use “digital” attorneys, and goes on to note that the company makes a lot of customer comfort moves to hide the fact that they aren’t using actual attorneys. While my post here tries to focus on getting straight to the facts I know and the conclusions I draw, I really think that it was something special and illustrates the frustration a lot of us have on this topic. There are states where we are very heavily regulated and the regulating bodies have, through inaction or inability to enforce the law, allowed people to come in and record as “digital court reporters” without any regulation, whereas a stenographic court reporter doing pretty much the same thing would be fined or reprimanded. It’s not the digital reporters’ fault, it’s the companies’ fault, but until consumers and consumer protection agencies stand up and say “no,” the situation will continue.

Do You Log Your Practice?

Steno students, do you keep track of how much you’re really practicing? Some of the most successful stenographers out there practiced at least 2 to 4 hours in addition to school to reach their goals. It is a whopping time commitment, and there are simple things you can do to increase your monitoring of practice and progress.

One easy, old-fashioned way to do it is a practice log. The one I have here will take all the hours you input into column B and add them together to give your entire month total of practice. A really solid month of practice and good goal to have for speed students is 100 hours a month. So take this log, or design your own, and take the next step in holding yourself accountable and living up to your potential. (DROPBOX)

Steno Speed and the Youtube Angle

Going back a couple of years ago, if you YouTube’d stenography, you’d get pen shorthand reporting from India. Happy to report that that paradigm is taking a hard shift. Today, at the top of the list is Stan Sakai’s Quick and Dirty Steno, with over a quarter of a million views. You’ve got way more than that, though. Today you’ve got Ken Wick’s court reporting videos, Katiana Walton’s podcasts, and content from tons of other creators new and old. Bottom line is American stenography and stenotype machine shorthand reporting is expanding its online presence in a big way. There’s also always been a healthy presence for stenography off of YouTube, including favorites like Mark Kislingbury, Mirabai Knight, or Marc Greenberg.

So many of these content creators are on my resource page, and I encourage professionals and students to write and comment if there’s a resource, blog, or content that you think should get added there. If you’re a content creator who’s like, “damn, why am I not mentioned anywhere on Stenonymous?” All I can say is the chance of that being intentional is pretty low. That all said, we’re pushing further along on the YouTube-Steno front. As some know, I have been working on my own YouTube channel in my spare time. There’s a multi-pronged goal of creating free resources for students so that they can have dictation available even when they cannot afford the amazing premium services out there and also introducing the idea of stenography to anybody who happens to stumble across a video of mine. Thanks to the generosity of Linda Fisher from StenoSpeed.com, down as of writing, I’m able to add over a hundred dictations to my YouTube. These dictations helped me very much as a student, they were free prior to StenoSpeed.com going down, and I am happy to put it in writing: They will be available and free once again. Simply go over to my playlists and look for the playlists marked STENO SPEED.

As of posting, these videos are still being worked on. Expect all Steno Speed audio to be posted by August 4, 2019. A great deal is already up, so don’t hesitate to spread the news and keep sharing resources together.

To anybody thinking of jumping into the mix of content creation, I recommend it. This is a vibrant field with a very loyal audience and a lot of people out there who just might need to read what you write, hear what you have to say, or watch how you do it!

Finger Drill Generator

ATTENTION WINDOWS USERS: Click and play version here. NO INSTALLATION REQUIRED. Download the .zip, unzip it, and double click the .exe.

After a bit of reflection on the best way to handle this, I’ve written a free computer program to help create finger or word drills for students and educators. The program has about 10 preset lists and allows you to create and load your own custom finger drills.

The video tutorial is here.

If you hate computers, I created about 10 drills using this program and I share them here.

For a quick text tutorial:

Download and install Python 3.
Get the program text at this location or this location. Copy and paste it into a notepad file.
Save the notepad file, preferably in its own folder by itself.
The program should say something like name.txt. If you don’t see the .txt, you need to look up how to show hidden file extensions.
Change that .txt to a .py. Double left click and the program will launch.
The black box will give you a series of 13 numbers and their corresponding “drill list.” You can enter the number of the category you want, or create your own custom list. At this time, custom lists only work properly if you use single words.
Once you’ve chosen a category or created a list, you choose the wpm and number of minutes. The program will then create a text file by multiplying wpm * minutes. AKA, 225 wpm * 10 minutes is like 2,000 words. If you enter a very large number here, it may cause problems, like a computer freeze. I would not advise entering more than 300 wpm for more than 300 minutes (90,000 words). As a matter of fact, do not do it.
Having a finger drill by itself is useless. You can use my transcript marker or Todd Olivas’s slasher to automatically mark the program for speed dictation.

Educators and students, if you have not already, feel free to check out the transcript marker and written knowledge test randomizer.

Written Knowledge Test Randomizer

ATTENTION WINDOWS USERS: Click and play version here. NO installation required. Download the zip, unzip it, and double click the .exe.

If you support projects like this, feel free to show it by buying a Sad Iron Stenographer Mug, donating, sharing this post, or suggesting questions to increase the variation in mock tests.

I’ve created a computer program that chooses preselected questions at random and creates a WKT-style test. It also creates an answer key. It uses .txt format so pretty much every computer since Windows 95 can run it. Note that for all of this stuff you should use a laptop or desktop. Using a mobile phone will make using these materials much harder. The program will change the numeral of each question every time, as well as randomize whether its answer is A, B, C, or D.

Basically, take a practice test or two, see how well you do, and if you see things you don’t know, look them up. You’ll be doing yourself a huge favor for your next written-knowledge style test.

See my previous comments on studying for legal and medical terminology.

If you hate computers, you can get 26 randomized tests here in a .zip folder.

If you want to use the program for yourself but don’t know how it works, check out my video tutorial here.

If you don’t like video tutorials, try the following:

Download and install Python 3. It probably won’t matter if it’s 3.6, or 3.7.
Go to the code for my computer program. Copy and paste it into a notepad file. If you are confused, the computer program is the text labeled 001 WKT Generator v1.py.
Save the notepad file and close it. You can name it anything. I suggest you call it ChrisDayIsAnnoying.
Change the .txt that you just saved to a .py. Read this if you do not know how to show file extensions or do not see .txt.
Now you have a .py file. It’ll look something like ChrisDayIsAnnoying.py. Take that .py file and stick it in a folder by itself. You don’t have to, but it’ll make your life easier.
Double click the .py file, or right click it and run/open it. It’s going to come up with a black box, say some words, and then you’re going to press enter, and the box is going to go away.
When the box goes away, in the folder with your .py file will be two files, Mock Test.txt and Answer Key.txt. You now have a random mock test and its answer key,
Special note, if you intend to run the program again, you must change the name of the Mock Test and Answer Key. The program creates a new Mock Test.txt and Answer Key.txt every time, and it will overwrite any files that have the same exact name as Mock Test..txt and Answer Key.txt.

NYSCRA Test Prep Opens To All

As many know, NYSCRA is conducting prep classes for the upcoming court exam. It has reaffirmed its commitment to stenographers in and around New York State by opening up the classes to nonmembers for a nominal fee of $50.00. Even further, according to President-Elect Joshua Edwards, the classes will not be canceled regardless of the registrant numbers.

There are lots of ways to show gratitude for such a move. Shoot them an email saying thanks, sign up for the class, sign up for a membership — do whatever you’ve got the time to do. But don’t let this kind of thing go unnoticed. For a long time, many of us have felt a need for associations to reach out, to show they care about nonmember reporters too before the nonmember reporters make that leap to become members. Here’s our sign.

We’ve had a lot to say about engagement here. But one thing holds true throughout: The engagement starts with us, as professionals, reaching out, giving feedback, and pushing for our associations and fellow stenographers to continue to thrive. It is never too late to start that process, express approval, or suggest how things might be better. So for today, great job NYSCRA, its ED, and all the board! Continue to be a force for every reporter to turn to.

Live Steno 4U Review by Joshua Edwards

Below is a mostly unedited review of Live Steno 4 U by Joshua Edwards. I will say that I’m glad to have this firsthand review on Stenonymous and would love to see more people write in about things they use or experience.

Joshua has posting privileges here at Stenonymous and we welcome people to engage, but for now, I’m simply posting it on his behalf:

“Hello fellow reporters, I am pleased to recommend this live steno dictation website: livesteno4u.com. The owners host a three-hour session live every Tuesday evening. (They’re in California and it starts at 6pm their time/9pm ET, so I stayed on for the first two hours.) I figured let me sign up and give it a try. I was impressed with the whole experience, beginning with the message on their website which says, “Two ingredients are vital to success: long hours of consistent, quality practice, and the guidance and support to keep you moving toward the finish line.” That is so simple and cannot be overstated.

The session takes place on Zoom which is easy to use. The material was well-prepared, structured, and sounded just like something you might hear in a deposition. They started with lower-speed 2-voice dictation (170s), then pushed the speed up (200s), then brought it back down again. The second hour, they read 4-voice courtroom dictation, going up to 225. Even though I’m certified at 260, taking down a 225 still isn’t easy. That reminded me that I have to focus intently and listen to each and every word and be able to write them automatically.

They had four live people on video playing the usual roles. Everyone was easy to hear and understand. I am impressed that they manage to bring four people together for three hours on a weekly basis, and also have fresh material timed and distributed. And yes, they do readbacks, simulating the real world where you could be asked at any moment to repeat what was just said. There are other features to the service, but these are just some highlights.

The pricing is extremely reasonable, but the value is tremendous. I would recommend this for high-speed (at least 180-200) students who want extra practice, and also working reporters who want to brush up on their skills. You can buy a single session or a package. If it has been a long time since you’ve done an old-school dictation, you will be surprised how good it feels to put yourself back in that mindset.

Again, here is the website: livesteno4u.com.

Warm regards,

— Joshua B. Edwards, RDR, CRR

Court Reporting Instructor/CART Provider

NYSCRA President-elect

NCRA mentor

USCRA associate member

“Committed to providing excellent realtime translation of the spoken word””

Typey Type Introduction

Hello readers. It’s come to my attention that someone in the Open Steno world created Typey Type. This is an interesting tool where users can do text-to-text practice similar to a typing game. If you use a traditional steno software (CaseCAT) then you should output your text so that you can type in the web box. If you use Plover, Plover pretty much automatically types in the web box. For professionals that are watching, you can also upload a spreadsheet of words and the corresponding stenographic notes, and they can be included as a lesson on Typey Type.

The program/website also has an option for the words to be spoken. I cannot seem to get that to work, but that may be an upcoming feature or a problem with my web settings as of writing.

I am a traditionally-trained stenographer and I believe in the power of formal schools and practice dictation to help people learn stenography, but I do support alternatives and I believe that this is an alternative that is worth a glance, particularly if you are a visual learner.

Do remember, though, that if you are training to be a court reporter, in the end it is paramount that you hear and take down the words, so any use of text-to-text training materials is probably best coupled with some kind of audio or dictation training.

Dictation Marking Program

Previously I wrote about my dictation-marking program. I had written it after listening to a friend and mentor talking about how many hours he’d spent marking dictations for reading. Fortunately, I am not the first to have this idea. Todd Olivas has a free and more intuitive program for use over here.

It is important for us to broadcast all of these options for steno educators and volunteers to help bring more dictation to more students. In my view, as of writing, we have some serious problems. There’s a resurgence of stenography in India. That’s not inherently bad, but what’s happened is that there are many more Indian stenographic resources popping up than there are English or American resources; this is probably making it harder for our students to find material, and any barrier to practice is unacceptable. Hopefully now that dictation can be marked quickly and freely we can see an uptick in the amount of content.