Gary D. Robson


Gary D. Robson is an American author from Red Lodge, Montana. He is best known for his children's picture book series entitled Who Pooped in the Park?, which teaches children about animal scat and tracks. The series currently comprises 20 books, mostly set in United States National Parks. The 20th book in the series was released in 2016, covering Central Park in New York City.
Robson is also an expert in closed captioning and subtitling technologies for deaf and hard of hearing people.

Biography

Robson was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1958 and grew up in Colorado, where he graduated from Boulder High School in 1976. He began writing for technical journals in 1984, and wrote a series of computer manuals before writing his first book in 1996 with Richard Sherman. He continued to write while working in the electronics industry until 2001, when he and his wife moved to Montana and purchased a bookstore. He was the publisher and editor-in-chief of the monthly alternative newspaper in Red Lodge, The Local Rag.
Currently, Robson is the Executive Director of the Yellowstone Wildlife Sanctuary in Red Lodge, Montana.

Closed captioning

Cheetah International, the company founded by Robson and his wife, began producing software and equipment for closed captioning in 1997, and Robson published articles on the subject for a variety of publications, including the Journal of Court Reporting, Newswaves, and Nuts & Volts. He holds two patents related to closed captioning: U.S. Patent #7,360,234 and U.S. Patent #8,245,252 B2. He was presented with the Andrew Saks Engineering Award for "outstanding contributions in improving visual accessibility to information via realtime captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans" by Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc. in 1997.
He wrote three books about closed captioning, most notably The Closed Captioning Handbook, published by Focal Press, then an imprint of Elsevier.
He presented a TED Talk at TEDxBozeman in 2014 entitled, "Does closed captioning still serve deaf people?"

Works

Children's picture books

The Who Pooped in the Park? series is published by Farcountry Press in Helena, Montana. Each book in the series focuses on the indigenous wildlife of a particular National Park or ecosystem in the United States. Robson has used two different illustrators. Elijah Brady Clark illustrated the first six books, and Robert Rath has illustrated the rest.