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The Art of Captioning
The requirement by the Federal Communications Commission that broadcasters provide closed captioning for 100 percent of new programming is creating even more demand for captioners—particularly broadcast or real-time captioners, who create captions for live shows such as news programs and sports events. Yet many believe that with the demand for captioners outstripping the available supply, the quality of the captions themselves could be suffering.
Captions are created by people trained as court reporters who use stenotypes to capture not only the words being spoken onscreen, but also other sounds heard during the course of a program, such as the ring of a telephone or a knock at the door. Unlike a typical computer keyboard, a stenotype does not have keys for each of the letters of the alphabet; instead, the captioner types in words phonetically. The key strokes are then translated by a computer into recognizable words. While typing using a stenotype is much faster for a trained captioner than with a QWERTY keyboard, errors can occur, especially with words that are homophones and sound alike but have different spellings, such as right and rite.
With hundreds of hours of programming a week required to be closed captioned, even captioners working on prerecorded shows need to be fast. Being able to keep up and capture words accurately is even more important for broadcast captioners, who cannot go back and fix incorrect words or misspellings. They are often expected to be able to type up to 250 words a minute. According to the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA), which represents both the court reporting and captioning industries, it can take up to four years of training for captioners to master the skills necessary to become a broadcast captioner.
While working as a captioner can be well-paying work, there may not be enough qualified captioners to fill all the necessary jobs. Estimates on the number of qualified broadcast captioners working in the United States range from 300 to 500, while the number of captioners believed to be required to meet the current demand is much higher: 3,000.
Organizations such as the NCRA blame the limited number of qualified broadcast captioners on a dearth of training programs and a lack of awareness among the general population about the availability of captioning as a career option. To help overcome these problems, federal legislators introduced the Training for Realtime Writers Act of 2005, which was designed to provide funding for training programs for captioners and court reporters. Even though it was passed by the Senate, the legislation stalled in the House.
Some believe a relatively new technology might help fill the increasing demand for captioners: voice recognition. Rather than typing out what they hear, captioners could speak into a microphone attached to a voice recognition system, which would then generate the captions. Captioners repeating what they’re hearing may seem like an unnecessary step, but it’s essential, since each user’s voice recognition system is trained to understand the user’s speech patterns so that it can accurately interpret the sounds he or she is making.
According to the National Verbatim Reporters Association (NVRA), voice writers—the NVRA’s name for people who are trained to use voice recognition systems for court reporting and captioning—can work as quickly and achieve the same accuracy rate as people who use more traditional stenography equipment. On the other hand, training as a voice writer takes far less time and the cost of equipment is cheaper.
Despite these benefits, stenography still remains the system of choice for captioners. But as the demand for their skills continues to grow—not just for captioning TV programs, but also for providing text for multimedia broadcasts and movies and during live events such as meetings, lectures, and ceremonies—they may begin adopting new technologies in the not-too-distant future.