Caption Quality Initiative transcript

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Caption Quality Initiative transcripts and documentation → Caption Quality Initiative transcript

Posted 2003.11.05

This transcript of the first Caption Quality Initiative conference held September 14, 2002 was adapted from real-time captions created at the conference.

MS. McCANN: Good morning. My timekeeper said if I didn’t start on time, I was going to be in trouble right out of the box. So here we are. My name is Jo ann McCann and on behalf of the Department of Education I want to thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedules to come and join in this exciting event today. It’s very, very exciting, and I’m sure you all can feel the energy in this room. For some of you who don’t know something about my history and how I got involved with captioning, my parents are deaf, so I grew up as a CODA in the Baltimore area.

And I started working in the field of captioning with Mac Norwood back in 1986. I started – one of my programs was the early design manufacture and distribution of the Line 21 decoder. And some of the deaf consumers may remember the $20 rebate coupons that you had I was involved in that project. I’ve worked with designing priorities for children’s programming, daytime programming, syndicated programming, anything from 1986 on, that has to do with captioning. I am the project officer for captioning. As a result, of the very exciting things that came about long after 9-11, when the group of captioning agencies decided to get together and pilot this meeting.

It all came together and thank you all for your hard work, in providing captioning as well as taking time for today. My co-chair is Jeff Hutchins. Jeff has been involved with captioning since long before I was. And very exciting times. And Jeff said I have about a minute and a half and I’ve had it. There you go. Jeff? We’re going to stay on time, on schedule today. Captioners are always on time. The Department of Education can’t figure that one out.

MR. HUTCHINS: Well, good morning. I can’t believe today is here and I’m here and all those faces I’ve been looking forward to seeing and we’re going to see if we can make this work, Jack. This is NCI technology we’re testing.

MR. HUTCHINS: The first thing I have to do is take your picture. No flash? Oh, well. Another piece of technology – I think, was this from you, Jack?

MR. HUTCHINS: I wanted to tell you that, you know, today really is sort of the first day of the end of summer for me. And I wanted to tell you, Jack’s been dying to find out why I have this slide here. Jack, I’m telling you. My summer was spent doing two things. First of all, planning this event and looking forward to meeting all of you. The other part of it was my older daughter got married in the beginning of the summer and a lot of people have asked me did I bring pictures of her. So I did. I brought a picture of her and her new husband. They live in France. Thank you. So my summer began with my daughter getting married and it ended with her actually having her first child. So I’m a grandfather. Now do you understand what that was?

MR. HUTCHINS: We’re going to get there. I am so delighted to welcome you all here today to this amazing, historic, and, some would say, overdue conference. Thank you for being here. We have much work to do today and the task we set for ourselves may not be done when today is done. How far we get today is up to each of you. We need your intelligence. We need your attention. And we need you to respect the strict time limits we will impose on those who speak. So that we can hear from everyone and I do mean everyone.

I really hope that all of you have come here, ready to participate and share your ideas. Most of all, we need you to understand and support the mission of this conference. For the viewer who cannot hear, the extent to which they must trust the accuracy of the captions is overwhelming. If the wrong word is given, or if words are misspelled or missing, the viewer will probably be less informed than we intend. Or, be less scared by the scary movie, or laugh less at the comedy. Or weep less at the tragedy.

Captions, unlike words in a book or a newspaper, are not permanent. Typographical errors in print media may cause momentary confusion but the reader can pause and piece together the correct information by reviewing the previous text. When the caption reader becomes confused by a mistake, they do not have the luxury of pausing and looking back over previous words to deduce what was actually meant. They have only one chance to receive the correct word and comprehend it. Part of the art of captioning is the presentation, the manner, placement and timing of the captions. Manner, as I use that word, refers to several different parameters of a caption. It refers, first to the style, which could be pop-on or roll-up. The justification of the words. Left, center, etc. Of and the shape and row division of the captions.

The other major factor that affects the quality the consumer receives is the delivery. And, we can go ahead – these are the three most important factors, here. In readability. The manner, the timing, the placement on the screen. But that’s not the only thing that affects what you consumers might receive. There may be failures of technology. Fouling the path from program production to reception on the consumer’s TV. When this happens, errors in the caption display may be introduced in either of several points. Along the distribution path. First, during encoding, at the time the caption data is inserted into the video signal. Or during playback from a captioned videotape. During uplink to a satellite, during the reception via satellite dish in the local station or in the consumer’s home, and during the input to the consumer’s TV set.

Our conference today is not concerned with those failures of technology which we as service providers and consumers cannot control. As much as we might wish to do so. In this one day, today, hopefully the first of many, we will do well if we can set our sights primarily on those quality issues that we can control. Service providers must strive to provide the complete text in which every word is the correct word. Correctly spelled, appearing at the right time. With enough time to be read, and with a clear understanding of who said the word.

Of course, the devil is in the details. We may today in this room agree on the goals of captioning without necessarily agreeing, at least not yet, on how to achieve those goals. Should there be standards we agree to follow? Do we even need standards? If so, what standards? Set by whom? Monitored by whom? With what, if any, penalties for noncompliance? Do we even know yet the scope of what we are up against? What do we mean when we talk about caption quality? And why is this the Caption Quality Initiative? I believe we will answer those questions today and I believe when we talk about caption quality, we’re talking about those factors that affect the ability of the non-hearing viewer to get the same information and the same viewing experience as the hearing viewer.

Those factors are the stylistic goals set by the captioner – stylistic goals, the accuracy and the faithful delivery of those same captions to the consumer’s TV set. The questions we face today are these. Which of those factors are in need of our attention? Which are within our control? And what, if anything, should we do to exercise that control? In other words, what does it take for a program to call itself captioned? Some days, our job as service providers does not feel important. Not so important. We are not pulling people out of burning buildings. We are not curing disease. We are not building homes to shelter people or growing food to nurture their bodies. Or giving them guidance to nurture their souls.

Or are we? When the industry captioned 100 consecutive hours of news coverage of 9-11, 2001, we were bringing deaf people into the fullness of how our world is changing. When we caption a children’s cartoon show, we are helping a deaf child acquire the language skills they will need to survive and to thrive when they are no longer children. This year’s graduates of Gallaudet University and NTID and other colleges that serve deaf students are among the first deaf people who have never known a world without captions. Without access to all the good and the bad that mass communications has to offer. Deaf people today are entering careers that not very long ago were thought to be off-limits to them and captioning has played a significant part in that success.

We don’t pull people out of burning buildings, we pull them out of ignorance and limited opportunity. We don’t cure disease, we cure illiteracies, we don’t build – illiteracy. We don’t build homes. We nurture minds. What we do is important. When we do it badly, we say to the world that captioning is not important. That the people who rely on captions are not deserving of full understanding, that almost is good enough. That better than nothing, is good enough.

And I would maintain to you that better than nothing is a poor standard to set for our industry. The example that I gave in the letter you have in your folder in front of you is a real caption that I saw one week ago on a commercial. The caption should have read “one call can save you more on insurance.” But instead it read “one call can save you moron insurance.” I want to sign up for that moron insurance. God save us from the morons. Most of us here today are – or many of us know exactly what caused that error to appear. It was not a bad captioning job. It was the result of a so-called paired error in with which letters are lost because of bad TV reception or a problem at the TV transmitter. We know that. But the consumers sitting at home do not know. That and they should not have to know what made that error appear on their screen. It’s up to all of us in this room today to do all we can to make sure such stupid words do not appear on TV sets across America.

There’s nothing the consumer can do to prevent that. We must act in our companies and in our consumer organizations, in concert with the broadcasters and TV manufacturers, so that the captions we work so hard to create actually do the job that we set out to do, which is to make video programming fully understandable. To people who cannot hear these programs. We are entrusted with this responsibility. We must not fail. Had that is your mission – that is your mission for today.

Now, I have to move ahead with the program and to do that, I first have to thank and introduce a few people. Our captioners today are provided by the generosity of Vitac and NCI. And Vitac has paid for my time and expenses to organize this conference and be here. I thank them for that. But I am not here today to represent Vitac. I’m here today as your facilitator and be as impartial as I can be in moderating today’s conference. NCI’s engineers helped to set up the equipment you see here today. Those contributions are the full extent of corporate involvement in this conference. Vitac has allowed me to work completely independent of their control. They have had no more input to the agenda of this conference or its rules than anyone else in this room has had. I’m not here as their representative or the representative of any other company. I will do my best to be fair and impartial and I tell you all this because I do want to disclose to you all the facts of my involvement.

Our sign language interpreters are paid by the fees that you paid to be here. There are no advertisements of any kind in the folders that you received. No equipment vendors are represented here. In other words, this is your conference. You set the rules of who could attend and who can vote and how long each person may talk. You voted to allow an observer from the FCC to be here with us today. And I would now like to introduce her. Her name is Traci Randolph. She is with the FCC’s disability rights office. And she’s going to speak with you now. Traci?

PARTICIPANT: Good morning. I don’t have anything prepared so it’s kind of a hard act to follow. I understand some people are having a hard time seeing Felicia because she’s not as tall as Mark. I think they’re working on that. My name is traci Randolph, as Jeff said. For five months I’ve been in the disability rights office in the FCC, I know many of you in my former life as her, I am a full-time sign language interpreter, I’ve been in the Washington, DC area interpreting all kinds of issues including captioning and telecommunications issues for the last 11 ½ some odd years. I’m now in the FCC functioning as an interpreter but I have other hats, too. One of my hats in the disability rights office is to work on captioning issues.

There are no issues right now – captioning issues right now being worked on, the FCC, no open proceeding. That does not mean the issue is not still on the plate and we’re not concerned about quality, accuracy and any other issue on captioning. Specifically me. It’s something very close and near and dear to my heart due to my ties in the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. You hear my voice wavering. I’m used to her role. It’s a little bit of a role shift for me. You are allowing someone from the FCC to come, we appreciate that. We look forward to – I look forward to listening to everything you have to say. Taking notes and taking it back to the powers that be at the FCC as I said, there is no open proceeding right now so everything is open. For discussion.

And if there’s anything in particular that you’re looking – that you’re wanting us to look at, please file a petition for rulemaking with us because as many of you know, that’s the quickest way to get things started with the FCC, it is the government so regardless to how much we as individuals care about this, it’s the government. So if you can help us get something started that, would be appreciated as well. I will do my best to answer your questions. If I don’t know, I will be honest to tell you I don’t know. But I will get back to you with the information you’re looking for. I guess that’s it.

MR. HUTCHINS: This has never happened in a place where I’m invited to speak. We’re early. Anybody who knows me knows that when you put a microphone in front of me, it’s a dangerous place to be.

MR. HUTCHINS: It won’t last long. One of the things that we did in planning this conference and one of the things we did right was to invite two court reporters to help provide the real-time services. And the reason I say that we did that right is because, as always happens, one of the computers failed this morning. So, right now, you’re enjoying the captioning of Lisa Greenberg and we hope a little bit later today we’re going to have Kathy DiLorenzo, also providing a break for Lisa. But, this just, I think Joe said just before we started, this plays perfectly into your conversation today – our conversation today, the importance of planning ahead and redundancy, because if we had gone with just one court reporter today, we would probably not have any captioning for you. And that would be really pretty embarrassing at a captioning quality conference. I would like to actually stay ahead of the schedule here a little bit.

Now, the next thing we’re going to do is invite the – we have two panelists for you today. Now, the purpose of these panels is not to elevate any among you to a different status. What happened is that this conference, the idea of this conference was born in a small meeting in February. And Jo Ann talked about that a little bit. The idea was that we would have some discussion among service providers and consumers about what constitutes quality. A couple of meetings happened and of course, I was not at them which is why I am the co-chair today because when you’re not at a meeting, you get volunteered and that’s what happened. I received a phone call that said, guess what, you’re chairing a conference. And I’m actually delighted that that phone call took place, but what happened was that there were some – several hours of discussions that took place even before the conference was planned. I think it’s very important that we not waste those hours, that the people who participated in those hours fill you in on what we already know about captioning quality. Because we could spend a lot of time here revisiting and hearing from consumers about things that we already understand, part of the issue. Our part of the issue.

When I say “part of the issue” that assumes something that may not be true. We have no standards today that measure caption quality. We cannot sit here today and say that captioning today is worse or better than it was before, because we never measured the quality of the captions in the 30 years that captioning has been on the air. So it’s awfully hard to say something is worse or better or the same as it used to be. All we can measure are our feelings. Some people have expressed a fear that captioning quality is not today what it once was. That’s not a fact, that’s an opinion. It’s an opinion that may be shared by many, but not everyone in this room. We need to explore that. Is there an issue? Is there a problem of quality in captioning? If there is a problem, what is the nature of that problem, how do we measure it? If we measure it, and we find that there is a problem, how do we solve the problem if we choose to? All of this begins with an assessment of where we are.

It doesn’t mean we want to hear that last week on NBC, five minutes of captioning were missing. The problems, if we face them, are bigger than any one show. They affect us as an industry. And so, what we want to do is to hear from the people that have already spent time discussing this. We are going to have two panelists today. The first panel will address the issue of quality in live captioning. And the panel will be led by Mark Golden of the National Court Reporters Association. Joining Mark will be Joe Karlovits of Vitac and Jack Gates of NCI. Somebody asked yesterday, is Bill Gates here? No. It’s his brother, Jack. We will then following – they will have approximately a 20-minute presentation that the three of them will make at the table here, and then we will open the floor for your questions. And we’re going to – I will come back up and moderate the Q&A portion. I would ask that deaf people that come forward and sign –

PARTICIPANT: You need to stop saying deaf, deaf, and leaving out 90% of the population.

MR. HUTCHINS: OK. I will – I’ll try to – do better. Those who use sign language to communicate. I would ask to step back from the microphone so that the interpreters can reverse-interpret what they are signing so everyone can see them. Those who will speak will have an open microphone. Please use that microphone in the center and face the audience and speak clearly into the microphone. And, now, without further ado, I will ask Mark and his panelists to begin.

MR. GOLDEN: We’ll see if I am any less technology-challenged than Jeff was. Good morning, it is certainly my pleasure to be here. As mentioned, I’m Mark Golden, I’m executive director of the National Court Reporters Association. I am pleased to see a number of familiar faces for a number of people, what the heck, somebody who runs an organization of court reporters, has to do with captioning, may not be obvious but hopefully we will get to that. In addressing live real-time captioning quality, we’re presented with a kind of unique problem. And Jeff touched on this briefly.

In a typical provider-consumer environment, the consumer and purchaser has a direct relationship with the entity they’re going to to get their services. That offers a number of advantages. You have, you can communicate directly what your needs are.

MR. GOLDEN: This is more than a little intimidating. OK. In your typical consumer environment, you as a consumer with a particular need communicate directly with the provider, the provider has direct access to your concerns and to understand your needs. And, very significantly, if the provider fails to satisfy your needs, you have the power to withhold future purchases. In the captioning arena, there we go, it’s a little bit different. The consumer and the person who actually controls the purchasing decision are separate entities.

This is not to try and shift blame. It’s simply to recognize a dynamic which service providers have to cope with and accommodate and – and which creates, or can create some frustrations for you as consumers. It makes it more difficult for service providers without going to rather unusual ends, like arranging meetings like this and having consumer advisory panels, it makes it more difficult for them to communicate and interact with consumers and it makes it more difficult for you as consumers to get to the person who controls the purchasing decision to exercise changes in quality. That’s the environment within which we deal.

There are also some other factors which affect, complicate the quality question. The first is that the captioning industry itself is far from homogeneous. On the panel today, you have two captioning companies, they happen to be among the largest. I don’t think either Jack or Joe would present themselves, though, as typical, or certainly they do not represent the entire range of the captioning profession. There are several dozen companies across the country providing services, about 16 if I counted correctly present in this room. They range in size from two or three people to employing 50 to 60 captioners. So there is no typical company. It’s not like the automotive industry where there’s fairly standardized or typical profile of the company. They’re very different.

NCRA, National Court Reporters Association, represents our membership consists of the individual captioning providers. But there is not any organization in which the captioning companies themselves are members. They may have some memberships in common in – and some broadcasting associations, for example, but there is no organized place for captioning companies to come together as an industry to work. Our issues are further complicated by the fact that the actual purchasers of captioning services, the programmers and networks that control the decision or how captioning are provided and by whom, are also very varied in their sophistication and understanding of the captioning process.

It is very difficult for us, there’s no standard office within a programming company that’s involved in this. Sometimes you have to push and call and ask and get a lot of false starts before you get to the right person. Within a particular network or programming provider, to simply find who knows and is in control of the captioning decisions. And often, unfortunately, it’s improving and there are certainly exceptions, but often, they have a very, very low level of understanding of both the importance of captioning to this community, and how important and how large an impact their decisions can have on the quality of the captions you receive or don’t. Next slide for me. That’s the bad news.

The good news is, things have gotten better in the last several years, or over the last year, there have been a number of efforts by the captioning companies to figure out ways to reach and work together with each other. And to reach out to consumers. Consumer advisory panels, which this audience represents, are a very good and one of the better examples, but there are certainly other areas where we try to work with each other as a profession and try to work with you as the consumers of the service provided. Talk about these issues. And as Jo Ann and Jeff both touched on, September 11, 2001, served as a catalyst and really demonstrated, I think to the profession’s credit, how well they could work together under extraordinary circumstances, and how quickly they pulled together under those unreal circumstances. And performed very well.

And there has been a residual effect in terms of saying, we worked well under crisis, what can we do to ensure we work well going forward? I am going to address two broad issues affecting captioning quality and then turn it over to Joe and Jack to run through some of the other issues. But really, and this is my – the thing that keeps me awake at night, the one that I lie awake staring at the ceiling over, and it is a real problem and it has real impact on the quality of captioning you receive, and that is, simply, the shortage of captioners. The majority of today’s captioners are retrained court reporters. Retraining court reporters is not going to produce a sufficient volume of qualified providers to be employed by the companies in this room to provide the services you want and deserve.

So we have had to focus and we have invested an incredible amount of time, energy, and money at the National Court Reporters Association in trying to reinvent, resign and reinvigorate the education system that produces captioners, so that we will go beyond retraining court reporters to attracting new entries into the profession to train them specifically to be captioning as well as cart providers. That includes employing a full-time educational consultant who is traveling around the country, working with schools that teach court reporting, to help them develop captioning education programs. It includes lobbying effort over the last two years which has so far been successful in getting $6.25 million to the U.S. Congress for court reporting schools. Money that is now in those schools’ hands and is now being invested in real-time captioning training programs. And we are pressing for additional and sustained funding so we can complete that job.

Assuming we even – we are successful in – and continue to recruit students and train good captioners and cart providers, there are also – there is also, excuse me, the issue of the qualifications of the provider. It is a – an extremely challenging art that the ladies over here are performing to get my words turned into text that you can read instantaneously. And there are no firm standards for those skills. Now, national court reporting association or – for a lot of years, since 1935, has been certifying court reporters and we do have a certification. It is the CRR, that is, the certified real-time writers, a certification test which tests their ability to write at 180-220 words per minute at 96% accuracy. That is a test purely of writing skill. Of getting the fingers to turn the words into text.

What is missing, but is currently under development, is a certification, specifically for the captioning and cart environment, that will test not only their skill at perform the – performing the translation function, but the mastery of the content they need to perform their jobs effectively. That is under development now and God willing, if the creek doesn’t rise by november of 2003, we will be offering the first test, so that captioning companies, when making employment decisions, and captioning consumers, will have an additional piece of information to help them assess the qualification of the providers. Let me now shift to Joe. And he will discuss some of the issues of captioning quality from the company perspective.

MR. KARLOVITS: Thanks, Mark. Great job as usual. I am going to be covering some of the issues that deal with delivery. The delivery of real-time captions. And, of course, I’m looking at them from the perspective of how Vitac does it, how we used to do it and how we do it now. And a lot of the other companies, I know that Jack and at least the Caption Center and other companies do it the same way or used to. So when I talk about a lot of these things they are, from my knowledge of how we do it at Vitac.

The key ingredients to closed captioning quality are, number one, as with any business, the competency of the staff of the people who work for the company. The experience of the company. Because if you did it before, assuming you take on a new project, you know what you’re doing, and you’ll do it right the second time. The training programs. Over the years at Vitac, we’ve had in-depth training programs, and those programs have evolved as time has gone on, from the time we started our company until today. As we’re trying to evolve as the industry evolves into a new direction. The training programs involve a cost. They’re not free. And depending on the width and depth of the program, they can are very expensive. Equipment and systems. Of course, that goes with any business. You have to have the right equipment. You have to have the right systems to generate quality captions.

And in the early days, I remember testing out many new software programs for closed captioning and a lot of those systems back in the early days really did not deliver what you get today. Personnel redundancy and system redundancy would creep. We got the best example of that this morning when we had the failure of one of the PCs that we weren’t able to generate captions on to the screen. But because Jeff and his – in his infinite wisdom in following the practices that we tried to do over the years, instead of having one captioner, Jeff decided to have two in the event of such problem, plus to give the captioners a break.

Telecommunications. Redundancy in telecommunications is important in the early days of Vitac, we – I think one thing that all of the captioning companies will agree on this is one of our major problems, because we really don’t have any control over the telephone signals. We deliver or captions over telephone lines. Normal voice telephone lines. And there are failure points at either end. And there isn’t a day that goes by that a modem does not drop and we lose data. That’s not because of the incompetency of the captioning companies, it’s just something that we have not been able to correct. And hopefully some day we’ll be able to do it.

At Vitac, what we’ve done is we’ve put in two separate telephone systems, so if AT&T fails, we jump over to Sprint. But on either end of the long distance telephone system, we have local companies. And you can have failure points there. And customer support. How do you support the clients, the buyers of captioning? And, how do you support the consumers of captioning? How do we answer the problems of the consumers? And I think that’s important in doing a quality job. We certainly have a lot of new challenges. All the companies have a lot of new challenges, and by far, one of the greatest challenges we have are downward prices. There are a lot of reasons for that, and of course, how many companies are here?

PARTICIPANT: And more were invited that could not attend. So competition has lowered the cost of captioning. Which is good. But, caption quality, to some of the buyers of closed captioning, is secondary to what they’ll pay for. So, everybody wants to have the best captioning for their network or for their program, but they’re not necessarily willing to pay for it. They’re willing to take a shortcut if the shortcut’s available. And of course, we’re in a situation right now where the economy has been down. That has definitely affected all the national networks. Advertising has been down. So it has a great effect on the quality of captioning.

We’ve have a dramatic increase in captioned programs, which is great. I remember back in the 1980’s, when there were three or four hours of captioning every day, on a few networks. And today, at least as far as the FCC standards are concerned, we’re at 50% of everything, we hope. And of course, there are networks that cover much more than 50%. The national networks cover virtually around the clock, except for maybe a few hours. And Mark mentioned this. This is a tremendous challenge for all the captioning companies. And we’re all affected by it and so are the consumers. Is the shortage of qualified real-time captioners. How times have changed and certainly for all of us as we get older, times change and we change.

And in the – in the technical specifications for captions, those are changing, but in the 1990’s, the national news, I’m talking about how we do captioning, the 1990’s, national news programs are all captioned in-house, out of control rooms that had redundant systems. There were captioning teams that recovered and edited news scripts and these were combined with the real-time as the program aired in the overall quality of the captioning was very high in the 99% range. This is kind of a example of a control room at Vitac where you see the real-time captioner on the left and the person on the right is a caption coordinator. Her job is to output scripts if we have them and also to correct errors as they occur. So that if, God forbid, an error occurs in an important name, they’re able to correct that so that the next time it comes up, it comes up correctly.

Every program had a quality control review by a real-time supervisor. Back in the 1990’s, Vitac had three real-time supervisors plus senior-level captioners who reviewed all programs and worked with every one of the captioners to improve their accuracy. Because that was our goal. Our goal was – my goal had always been as a captioner, to be able to some day write a program with no mistakes. And that is still a goal that all the captioners that I know are still striving to achieve. Every captioner went through a three- to six-month training program and they did not go on the air unless they were qualified to do a minimum of 98% accuracy. In the 2000s, captioning prices have come down and I talked about that in the beginning. From 100% to 500%. That’s coming down. But we have more captioned programs. That’s going up. Customers negotiate for the lowest price. And some customers treat quality as second.

At Vitac, 30% of our captioning now is done in-house where back in the 1990’s, 100% of the captioning was done in-house in a controlled environment. And 70% of the captioning is done remotely. That would vary between all the companies in this room. Downward pricing has forced cutbacks on the number of supervisors that we have and support personnel. Depending on the program and what the client is willing to pay. You don’t have that second person in the room entering on-line corrections as an example, or downloading scripts so the overall quality of the program is enhanced. And the quality control reviews are less frequent. We can’t look at every show, every day, for every caption.

In the 2000s, most real-time training is done remotely. And that’s not all bad, because we’ve been able to use technology to be able to reach more people. real-time captioners are less mobile and prefer working out of their homes, and really, how can you blame that? I mean, we are a telecommuting society today. In many industries, their professionals are working through telecommunicating. Court reporting schools are closing their doors in record numbers. This is a major, major concern, and I have a graph to show you here. In the 1990’s, we had 500 court reporting programs. Today, we have roughly 170 court reporting programs. And projections going forward is that that number is going to continue to decrease. And that is a major, major problem. The fact of the matter is, we are at crossroads, in many areas.

Cutting prices has been – cutting prices offset by expense reductions and less attention to detail does affect quality. And every captioning – can every captioning company do a better job than they do today? I guarantee it. But there’s a cost to doing that and you have to weigh that against what a buyer is willing to pay and what a consumer is willing to accept. And it really comes back to the consumers. What you are willing to accept. And, in my view, the – to serve the needs of the consumer, we need guidelines. That must be established and enforced. And Jeff kind of talked about that. And there are all types of issues around that. And how we do it, who does it, when we do it, but, I believe that it can be achieved. It’s amazing that we were able to achieve getting all these people into this room. And I think that’s a compliment, Jeff, for being able to coordinate the meeting as he’s done. I’m going to turn it over to Jack Gates of NCI.

MR. GATES: You told me it was NCI technology. What I’d like to talk about is the technical issues that impact things. I speak frequently about real-time captioning as being magic. Because that’s the only way you can describe what actually happens. So, what I’d like to talk about this morning is the mystery and these are the things that are behind the scenes that are causing something to not work right. See how easy it is, guys?

MR. GATES: No captions showing up. No captions were there because the show wasn’t captioned, even if the TV guide says it was. Also, something in the equipment path, or the video path is not hooked up. So the captions may be there but they’re not coming out on broadcast. They’re being stripped or the equipment is out. And there’s infrequently, but there’s possibilities of captioner error. Somebody didn’t remember that they were supposed to do a show, unfortunately, that happens sometimes. Looking at captions being intermittent or start late or end early before the show. Some of the things with that, as Joe mentioned, we are delivering the captions by a – via telephone lines. The U.S. has the most advanced, excellent telecommunication network, I think, in the world. At least we did. However, the telephone lines have noise on them, they drop the lines, there are periodic failures. And part of the problem is that the phone lines are dirty.

Equipment failure, either at the broadcast end or at the captioner’s end. Compatibility, the stuff they’re using here to create the real-time and the encoder at the broadcast facility, sometimes those just don’t talk to each other very well. The captioner coming in and testing for another show and not enabling, not releasing the captioning, the encoder, so that – it rocks the captions that are running. The broadcaster making a change. The broadcaster does periodically move things out of one control room into another and they forget to let the caption path follow that. And lastly, the captioner drops off to allow the next captioner in, if there’s somebody that’s following, or to get to another show. The white boxes, the infamous white boxes, when you see the caption and it’s nothing but a space of white, those are characters that the decoder doesn’t recognize, so it’s putting in a null at that point. That shows up as a white box. And usually, that has to do with poor reception, some noise, or something. Periodically, there’s black boxes, no characters there and that often is at the viewer end because the decoder chip is not – does not support the new advanced character sets. Missing or strange characters.

The gremlins. Noise on the phone line, improperly aligned equipment, some place in the video path, and that can be anywhere from the captioner through the phone lines, through the broadcaster and to your television set. Any place in that path. And it can result in some strange things showing up. It could be wrong letters, symbols, other things, boxes, who knows what will be there. Poor reception can happen. Depending on how the signal goes. It can happen from sunspots in – where you happen to live, particularly if you’re drawing the signal down by air, or electrical storms.

And lastly, there’s an improper configuration. Some place, the broadcasters are trying to pass other information and it happens to hit Line 21 where the captions are. A lot of times that will be the URLs that are running behind or V-chip information. Captions race by sometimes. You are watching the program, everything is fine and then it pauses and all of a sudden it – that’s because there’s a buffer some place that’s filling up. And eventually it lets loose and just sends that stuff lightning speed. And, captions, there’s no caption on the rerun. You’ve seen the program. Maybe you see it again later, particularly like sports where you watch it at 2: 00 in the morning to see – what was it the Patriots? No, maybe I don’t – that, by the way, was in reference to a certain organization that is out of Pittsburgh. But, the captions aren’t there.

Why is that? Well, broadcaster didn’t record a program or did but somehow the recording of the program with the captions didn’t make it. Or, the local broadcaster is stripping. That term, stripping, is often not done intentionally. It’s not that the local broadcaster is trying to get rid of the captions. It’s that they’ve got some equipment in the path. Process amplifier or character generator or something is in the path and it’s just incompatible so it pulls Line 21 out, just doesn’t pass it. Stripping and dropping captions, same thing. Program airs with captions and you see it on another cablecaster network and it’s not there. That can be the encoder. Is disabled. Which means that the program that you’re watching actually has the captions but the encoder is not passing those because it’s expecting local input rather than off of the tape. Or the processor amp, there’sing? There that’s bumping or doing something with the bump – captions. Or not up to standards.

We’re talking about quality. In this case, we’re expecting to see captions. They look like captions but they’re actually not captions. They come from the electronic newsroom type of thing, a Teleprompter. They’re running it in to be captions. And those are really not intended to be captions. They are text, they do represent the words that are being spoken but they don’t have all of the elements that you’d expect. In watching captions. For example, they go to a live segment, and that’s not on the Teleprompter. Or if you have taped reports. One of the folks that I was visiting with last night was talking about just the frustration of, here’s a live news report, up to the minute, and they flash over to that and there’s nothing there. And the captioner doesn’t have access to prep materials in advance. That can also cause the end result to be less.

And this one is something that I’ll tell you, I do have a judgment statement in here. And it is that, we’re watching a program that is typically pop on. Captions bill all together and disappear and rebuild. And that seems to be appropriate for that program but the captions that we’re watching are the roll-up. They’re live captioning so there’s a two-second delay, they build at the bottom and they roll up. Yet, we’ve seen the same type of programming and it has the pop-on. So there’s a sync between the spoken word and the captions. Particularly important for literacy or learning English. Using captions to do that. But the providers, the folks that are saying, I want you to do captioning, there’s a growing trend to say, let’s do this using the live method rather than the pop-on method. And it’s – it’s driven by cost. Truly. So, that’s my part.

PARTICIPANT: Thank you, gentlemen, for helping us provide a foundation for the discussion on live captioning quality. Now, I’d like to ask, is Bill McGill, the engineer, is he in the room? Is he around? Because we are recording the proceedings today on videotape. For companies that were hoping to participate, could not be here today and they’ve expressed a desire to have a video of the proceedings. Some of you may also wish to take a video back with you – well, you won’t be able to have it today but to have a video you can show at your companies or to your consumer organizations or friends and we will have those available for purchase. There are a few forms out on the table, here. B

ut one of the things that recording on video requires you to do is stop and change the tape every once in a while, so I’m going to ask Bill to come in and change the tape, and while he’s doing that, because we still have about another 45 minutes before our first break and because Lisa is probably exhausted, I’m going to pause for a moment before we begin our Q&A with the panel and suggest that all of you stand up and shake hands with at least two people around you. While we change the videotape.

MR. HUTCHINS: We’re ready to start again and we ask everyone to take their seats. Our panel is – has made a very good presentation of many of the issues that we face in respect to live captioning. Now, I know that a lot of people in this room have concerns about many things related to captioning. But we’re going to restrict the conversation for the next 40 minutes or so just to issues related to live captioning. There are two kinds of live captioning. There’s the kind where you’re using a court reporter to create the captions at the same time you transmit them. And there are pre-scripted captions, where the captions have been typed or created in advance and are simply transmitted live during a program. We’re not going to make that distinction for this conversation.

But I would ask that people who have questions or comments would do two things. First of all, restrict your comments now to anything that has to do with live programming. Secondly, restrict your comments to 2 ½ minutes. I do have a very accurate timer and I will be timing and I will cut people off after 2 ½ minutes. But you need not ask a question. If you simply have a comment that you wish to share, whether you are a consumer or a service provider, this is your opportunity to speak. On live captioning only. So, I would ask that people who wish to speak, so that we don’t have a rush of people who might tend to block out people who use sign language and need to catch up. Form a line to this side and then take your turn at the microphone. That will make things much more orderly. So, is there anyone who wants to start it off? And those of you who may have other comments, please form a line over to this side and don’t block the monitor.

PARTICIPANT: My name is David Viers, from the Portland, Oregon area. I want to thank the presenters for doing a fine job of telling us some of the problems. I don’t know how much of this applies to what they were saying but I have a couple of areas that I have problems with.

I use captioning all the time. One item is regarding live captioning, has to do with sports broadcasts. In fact, sometimes the scores, that’s going on, are covered up by the captions. And, so that comes into where you place the captioning relative, so the scores appearing on the games, often the announcers don’t tell you what the score is, so you’re relying upon the score that is covered up. This is an interesting thing. I was using a Magnavox TV, that was about eight years old. There was no problems. It died on me. I bought a new TV. Which you would think, you know, is a big 32-inch TV, this would be better, I hit “volume change,” which I often do, with four women, my wife and three daughters. And so they were walking into the room, and I hit the mute button so I interact with them on the – if you’re hearing impaired, you can continue to read at the same time that they’re talking to you. They think you’re paying attention.

But the new TV, when I hit the mute button or the volume change to lower the volume or raise it, what it does it blocks out the captioning for anywhere between 1 ½ seconds to three to four seconds. Depending upon the TV. And they still put the bar up there but at least you can still see the captioning underneath the bar. I’ve been looking around on this, and doing some research on it. Others, especially the one I bought, doesn’t do. That so, that’s a major problem, and I see it, it has to go back to the TV manufacturer. So hopefully, this consortium of people will be such that we can all interact and work on it from all the angles that need to be worked on. That’s probably all my time.

MR. HUTCHINS: You were right on. That was perfect. Exactly 2 ½. Any comment from the panel on the issues that David raised?

MR. HUTCHINS: Well, there are two issues as I see it. Two issues that David raised. First, the placement of captions during live programs, such as sporting events. In the early days of captioning, all live captions could be placed only at the bottom of the screen. When the Decoder Circuitry Act got rolling and televisions in 1993 and 1994 were built with decoders built in, the standards for display changed. And captions could be displayed, roll-up captions for live, could be displayed anywhere on the screen. So captioners make an attempt to move the captions to an appropriate part of the screen to avoid blocking live action during sport events, sporting events or to avoid graphics in news programs.

But there are two quality issues that that addresses. Number one, if the captioner cannot see the video, and that is sometimes the case when remote captioners are working, they cannot move the captions to a different part of the screen because they don’t realize the captions are blocking. And, the captions simply – it’s also a matter of the skill of the captioner. Even if they can see what they might be blocking, it’s very difficult, given all that the real-time captioner is doing, it can be extremely difficult to react to the video, because if the captioner is watching the TV screen, they are seeing words appearing that they may have written two seconds ago.

It’s a real disconnect in the brain. It’s very hard for the captioner to do. That but I believe that, you’re right, David, the placement is a huge problem, and I think that this is one of the things that captioners should be trying to resolve in their – through the methods they use for producing the captions. As far as the TV set problem that you raised, unfortunately, that’s a manufacturer problem. But it is a real problem.

Now, I said earlier, we’re not going to talk about failures of technology today, but I do believe that belongs on the table of issues that this group will ultimately wish to confront. I believe our next comment is from Jack O’Keeffe. You want to come up? And anyone else? Did you have something to say, Jim and – in regard to what I just said? Can you get on line? I think it will be easier if anyone who wishes to comment will come and stand and take their turn on line. Because if I call from out of the audience, we’re just going to get chaos. Jack, want to introduce yourself?

PARTICIPANT: You just did. I’m Jack O’Keeffe. Missing captions of breaking news events became an issue in western Pennsylvania this spring. Row owen, is the TV editor of our major newspaper, he followed up and reported in his column on april 4, the news directors of the three VHF channels were all interviewed and told they were capable of live captions but it didn’t always happen. The news director of Channel 2 said, all we have to do is call and tell them to do it, from here on out, it will be on our list of things to do when breaking news happens. On May 31, breaking news happened and I tuned in to Channel 2 at 7: 00 PM expecting to watch CBS news, Dan Rather and all the pharmaceutical commercials had been pre-empted. The station was transmitting extended severe weather warning but there were no captions, no scrolls, not even ENR. No visual presentation of the information being delivered orally.

Later, I learned the severe weather included high-velocity winds, lots of property damage, personal injury to about 60 people and one fatality. Once a broadcaster transmits such information, an obligation is incurred, both, for putting six months now under FCC rules to make that information accessible to people with hearing and vision loss. I complained first to the station and then the FCC. FCC got back to me. Promptly. The station was served with my complaint. And another public notice was issued reminding broadcasters of their obligation on the rules. The CBS law department responded to my complaint acknowledging failure to present the numbering information excessively, not only for the half-hour I complained about but for an additional three hours and 14 minutes after that. The failure was attributed to human error, regrets were expressed and assurances given that steps are being taken so that it would never happen again. I wonder how many of us would be willing to bet on it not happening again.

MR. HUTCHINS: Thank you, Jack. Jack wrote his comments and time them perfectly. That was admirable. Any panelists care to comment on the issues that Jack raised of emergency captioning?

PARTICIPANT: As Jack points out, there has been, for almost two years now, FCC regulations, which creates the obligation on the broadcast station that the news station’s part, and the right to expect them. I think, unfortunately, his experience is not unique, that, and again, it’s different broadcast operations of different size and different sophistication, often that obligation, the entire captioning issue is something that is a responsibility buried somewhere in the station’s management, not always at the same place and not always easy to find. So, I think some of the corrective – a series of complaints will, over time, increase the awareness on the broadcasters’ part on what their obligations are and would hopefully begin to reduce those incidents.

But I do think and this is – I don’t know what the solution is to this error, but how and where, when the captions are being created and sent out, but they’re not being delivered over the air, how and where a consumer can make those complaints known in real time and get them addressed is simply a capacity that doesn’t – doesn’t exist. And I have no idea how we solve that. But boy, there would be a lot of captioners who would be happy if there was a way for you to do that. But it breaks their heart. It breaks our hearts when we know we’re doing the work and it’s just not showing up. And you’re trying to get them and you don’t have a good place to go to get it addressed.

MR. GATES: One other thought is, as an afterthought, if breaking news happens, each of us that provides captioning will try our very, very best to get somebody on air. But it’s a resource issue. So it’s planning in advance, that when there is breaking news, that there’s someone that is ready to jump on air. As opposed to calling and hoping.

MR. KARLOVITS: What it really comes down to is cost and stations who are willing to pay the captioning companies to have people standing by and available and if there is an emergency. And it’s also, as Jack said, the availability of personnel. Most of us don’t have somebody sitting around, waiting, you know, for something to happen. We would have to call somebody, bring them in or have them gear up to do that. And, there will be some time loss between the time we would get contacted by a particular station and the time we get captions on the air.

The solution to the problem is really to have some system of monitoring and people, captioners, who are standing by on line, maybe on a national basis, so that when things happen like in Pittsburgh, or, currently, there’s a tropical storm down in Florida, with the possibility of severe wind damage and rain, that, when the stations go to these emergencies, they can be captioned. But, it comes to the dollars, the cost, and if the stations are willing to pay for that.

MR. HUTCHINS: We have another comment now from Helen fleming from the Boston area.

PARTICIPANT: Thank you very much. First of all, I just want to thank everybody for the wonderful job that you have done, thus far. And I want to speak directly to Jeff, that I am guilty as charged because for so many – I grew up in a time when there was no captioning at all. So I have been of the mindset that anything is better than nothing. But you have made me realize today that that’s not true. I can keep on expecting things to be better. I used to watch TV, never knew what was going on, and had to wait for commercials so that my husband would tell me everything that had gone on prior to the commercial. So, I think you can understand why I have been saying, for years, that anything is better than nothing.

Now, my big complaint here, if you want to call it a complaint, I want answers about CNN. They have such a cluttered screen that it’s almost impossible to see some of the captions and I have to say to see – to CNN, I don’t know what company does the captioning, I stopped watching it. I just want to say to the company that does the captioning for CNN, shame on you. It has been an insult to the intelligence of deaf and hard-of-hearing people. To think that we were going to put up with the poor job that they do. I love Larry King, I think he’s a wonderful interviewer. But something has to be done to change the background where they show the captions. It’s impossible to read them.

And if you haven’t watched CNN, please do and I think you’ll agree with me. One other point, what happens for early-morning captioned news? Late-evening captioned news. Don’t the companies realize that deaf and hard-of-hearing people sometimes like to watch early-morning news programs? That we like to watch late evening programs? If you could find any, please let me know because I would love to watch them, too. I think that’s all, Jeff. But thank you, especially for what you said.

MR. HUTCHINS: Thank you. I’d like to just take a moment rather than asking the panel to respond, I want to say that one of the dangers of having a conference like this is the danger that the captions of a particular provider in the room are subject to the criticism of the consumers or the other service providers in the room. It’s inevitable that when we talk about the problems that exist in captioning quality, that we may, as Helen has just done, point to a specific example.

I want to say that I believe that every company in this room is sometimes guilty of not achieving the best we can do. I don’t want this conference to become a case of finger-printing. Because I think that every company in this room has also excelled in the quality that it has provided at times and if we don’t always live up to our own ideals, as Joe and the others pointed out, in the – their presentations, there are a variety of factors and reasons that that occurs. So, I would encourage you all, when you speak, don’t censor yourself.

If there is an example you wish to use of poor captioning, do so, and I would say to the service providers in the room, listen carefully. If you can learn something to improve the work you do, then accept that criticism, and if it’s not always warranted criticism, then you’ll know best how to handle that. But I don’t want people to avoid criticizing specific companies. I do want to say that I think every company here today has the ability to do, and often does, an outstanding job. And does provide good quality. The real question that we face is, what can we do to ensure that that remains true? That we don’t see a degradation of the quality that we are able to provide, number one, and actually do provide, number two. So, I thought it was important to point that out. Because I don’t want anyone in the room to feel uncomfortable. Panel has a response.

MR. KARLOVITS: Helen, I completely agree with you as one of the captioning companies that does CNN. One of the programs we do is Headline News. Of course, the beginning of the year Headline News went into a new format where 1/3 of the screen shows the anchor desk. And the rest of the screen is constantly changing information. The difficulty that we have, in fact, originally, CNN only wanted us to caption in that 1/3 of the screen. The problem there, and I saw that early on, is the captions were so fast and disappeared, it was impossible to read. Later on, I was able to convince them that we should move the captions to the top of the screen, and do a full row of captions, two lines. It is difficult.

And as far as the background on “Larry King” and any other show, not just on CNN, if – that’s a good point to raise with the network. Because we don’t really have any control of that. We don’t have any control about headline news. If you don’t like the new format of Headline News, I suggest you write CNN. Some people love it and some people hate it. So, really, as far as Vitac or, I know, Richard Pettinato and Pat are here from Media Captioning, we really don’t have a lot of control over what the network decides on how they’re going to present the program. But I encourage you to write CNN and say “I hate it.” They listen to that. They won’t listen to me, though.

MR. HUTCHINS: Our next consumer, I don’t know your name but come on up and tell us your comment. I should point out that the color of your name tag is significant. Red is for consumers. And blue is for service providers. And this is Elaine.

PARTICIPANT: I’m Elaine Dechter from Santa Rosa, California, about 50 miles north of San Francisco and I’m here with CaptionMax. First thing I’ve run into a new – I guess it’s a technical problem. I was watching Xena on the Oxygen channel. I won’t talk about the quality of the captions on that show. It’s a Canadian company doing the job. What can you say? But they do a chat room at the same time. And the other day, when it was on, the chat room comments were coming on over the captions. I have never seen this on a program before. But this is something that’s probably going to come up again as more and more things happen on the Internet. So I think that’s got to be looked into. And see what can be done about it.

I was also going to ask about – you were talking about real-time delivery with a bad phone lines. Are they using satellite or something going to help that or are there other technologies coming up that will help do better delivery than the phone lines are doing? Because I know the phones are bad. If we come up with guidelines today, who’s going to enforce them? Or how are they enforced? Like the ADA, it’s only enforced if somebody files a lawsuit. What is going to happen with all our guidelines once we come up with them? The last comment I had was, you were talking about court reporters and doing testing. Or certifying them, which sounds great, I love this with the interpreters. The interpreters often have special categories like medical or legal or something. Most court reporters are trained for legal. Maybe medical. Can’t there be categories for court reporters, too, in different areas, maybe somebody that knows political terms and how to spell names of countries and places so we don’t run into all these problems that we get? Thank you.

MR. HUTCHINS: Thank you, Elaine. Panel, you want to handle Elaine’s excellent list?

MR. GOLDEN: I’m addressing the last point first. Training captioners and testing their competence in subject matter, content. Being able to spell, misses the – this is the point in my presentations where the captioners always get scared I’m going to pull a foreign dignitary’s unpronounceable name and surprise them and I won’t. Being sure they’re aware of geography, place names, heads of state’s names, political science, also, sports and cultural events. I mean, it is exceptionally challenging if you don’t know football, to caption football.

NCRA’s education initiative and this funding from Congress, the schools are now receiving, we have an expanded curricula designed for captioning which does focus on the fact that they need to know more than the legal and medical terminology that a typical court reporter does. So, yes, and we will test for that in – and certification, the schools will train to that. As these programs get up and running but it’s a very, you’re exactly correct, it’s very important that a good captioner, and good court reporter for that matter is a whole lot more than their ability to write fast.

MR. GATES: I love to talk about phones. Going from – to satellite and all of the other innovations and changes that the telecom industry is trying to accomplish will help. But it’s really an issue of having a whole – a very complex system with a lot of components, a lot of electronics. Some of which are very modern, some of which are very ancient. And with what we’ve been reading in the news lately, of large telephone companies that are very rapidly going, I think, out of business or at least in hard times. It’s going to be harder to have that much more reliability with the telephone system. So, it’s a complex issue. Satellites, yeah, they’ll help. New equipment will help, as well, but it’s – it’s a geometric progression as it goes through the system. So, everything helps a little bit. You want to say anything about it?

MR. HUTCHINS: We’re going to try to – anyone who is on line in the next minute will get to speak before our break and then we’re going to – we are going to take our first break of the – official break of the morning.

PARTICIPANT: I’m Teresa rogers from caption media program. And one of the presentations, I was trying to look at all of the bulletins and I didn’t see mention of this regarding live captioning. When it – when you go to commercial, the captions cut off, it isn’t necessarily complete and we might miss because it’s a couple of seconds behind. So, that’s just a question I have, or concern regarding to that.

MR. GATES: I’ll be happy. Because of the – because of the two or three second delay in the live captioning, it does trail what’s happening on the screen. Many captioners will actually try to stop writing a little bit before the commercial break, if they’re aware that it’s coming so that you get the complete thought, although you would still miss that last couple of seconds of what was said. But it’s because of the delay of receiving the signal, creating the captions, out over the phone lines, back over the broadcast.

MR. GOLDEN: This is again, another area where how supportive and helpful the broadcaster is if a captioning company and the captioner, the more information they have in advance, about the nature and content of the programming, and when breaks are scheduled, the more prepared they are to do – to make the kind of reactions that would mitigate, if not eliminate that problem.

PARTICIPANT: Good morning. Jim House from TDF, also representing CCS, TDI. I have a question for anyone on the panel. You discussed the shortage of skilled court reporters. In the past, I’ve seen you have voice recognition that is used with cart and remote cart captioning. So, is that a possibility of using voice recognition? Could you apply that to captioning and perhaps save on cost and other things?

MR. GOLDEN: I think, first, there is – you need to recognize that voice recognition software is nowhere near being able to replace a trained operator. I mean, the software is a long ways away from where you could simply have what I’m saying and your questions and things like that run through a processor that does voice detects. There are some developments currently under way and some products, some of them only a couple of months old in which a trained user using voice recognition software can use that to produce something approaching real-time captioning. There are some limits to that technology and there are some limits to what I think that technology is capable of, but it’s under development and it is something that we are, at ncra, is extremely interested in.

And we in fact have a blue-ribbon commission that is currently working on trying to assess the technology, the systems, the education, in place for, we call it voice real-time and, we will – real-time and it’s coming and we’re watching it. But at the same time, I think its very important, and I know this is not what Jim suggested in any way but it’s very important, when you talk about issues like new developments, that that not be used as an excuse for doing some of the heavy lifting and hard work we’re doing to get more schools open, to get more students into schools and produce more captioners. In the hopes that this problem will go away because of some, sort of lightning strike new development in technology.

And also encouraging, it was a small gain, but this past year, for the first time in 10 years, there was a net increase in enrollments in court reporting programs. So some of the stuff that we’re doing is beginning to have effect and hopefully, you’ll begin to see more of those graduates flowing into the work force and helping out with some of these problems.

MR. KARLOVITS: Just a quick explanation of how voice real-time works. At this past ncra convention, I received two demonstrations of encouraging technology. Actually, there’s very little difference between how the voice real-time system works and how the stenotype system works. It’s a human being. In the case we have here, using a stenotype system, inputting code, shorthand, and having a computer translate it into data. With the voice real-time system, it’s a human who is repeating what is being said in a sound environment, in a closed sound environment. And the computer is translating that person’s voice that is trained in this system. To create the great in real-time.

The difference being is that the current stenotype system is highly accurate. Depending on the competency of the writer. Whereas the real-time voice writing is just at its infancy. And we expect that it will become more predominant as time goes on. But right now, the best and most accurate system is using the stenotype real-time captioner.

MR. GATES: One last piece with that. Voice recognition is being used on a limited basis over telephones and other things where it says speak or punch one. It has a very limited vocabulary. So it can have a fairly broad range of responses. If you have something that has an extensive vocabulary and the dictionaries that – the real-timers have got hundreds of thousands of entries in them. It will not respond to different voices.

So, the idea of taking where technology is now, which my theory is that the military already has this locked up, they just won’t tell us, but – where the technology is right now, to just run an audio signal through a voice rec type of thing – voice rec type of thing, we would be dancing in the aisles if we have a 60% accuracy. That’s totally unscientific. But that’s not acceptable at this stage. But it is evolving rapidly.

MR. HUTCHINS: So this could become a quality issue as that technology develops. Let’s go ahead with our next comment. We have, I think, two more commenters after that and then we’ll take a short break.

PARTICIPANT: My name is Dave Wein, with CaptionMax. The voice recognition issue. First. The key thing is, whatever technology we use encoding or voice recognition, the quality issues are separate from how we do it. Placement, timing, roll-up, pop-up, are all completely separate. So we have to be sure we’re consistent. With what we use. I they we can all recognize that. But the issue I wanted to address was regarding captioners. The ability of captioners. Declining enrollment and so forth.

A group of captioning companies – a way that they can work to market captioning, to fill the greater demand nor the resource, which would increase ability and quality. Some lawyers in the court are beginning to enjoy having real-time captioning in the courtroom. The court reporters. Is there some way we can make that – real-time court reporting is automatically becoming captioning? I don’t know, it’s something to talk about.

MR. HUTCHINS: I would like to make sure that we stay close to time today so if you could limit your remarks to just a minute or so.

MR. GOLDEN: Quickly, ncra and the court reporting profession has been working for 15 years to try and make real-time be standard in courtroom. So that it is a long, slow process, but you are exactly correct, and we believe, once a judge sees real-time, they will never accept anything less. And I think that is part of the process of spreading, evangelizing for this service, you’re exactly on point. The more people just come to expect it, the better off we are. And we are limited resources but, NCRA spends what we can on public awareness and PR. for the profession and the service itself. For exactly that reason.

And we’ve been helped, I should acknowledge by, for example, I should mention the benefit of generous donations of slots to do public awareness of Vitac last Christmas. Christmas before last, during that Christmas season, donated a number of slots on some of the programming that they captioned for us to get those, that PR message out and that helps. That makes people want their kids to become captioners, and that’s what we need to have happen.

MR. HUTCHINS: Perhaps that is a challenge for the service providers to find innovative ways to help recruitment of people and Mark pointed out one thing Vitac has done but I’m sure that other companies are doing things, and perhaps as the day progresses, we can hear from some of the other service providers, what steps they are taking to address this shortage. Sonny, would you like to make a comment or question?

PARTICIPANT: Good morning. First of all, I would like to thank the captioners that are here, because the captions have made my life much better in the past. I was in a world of isolation in the past. Many issues that were being discussed, I was never aware of but now I can participate in the dialog with the hearing world so I do appreciate that. Thank you all. I think a big problem here is that we’re in a world of hearing people. Hearing people take audio for granted. It’s unfortunate to say that but I don’t think the FCC has rules instructing people or the industry on how to use audio. Does the telecommunications industry or television studios, do they have an SOP? Standard operating policy? On how to handle audio? Do they listen to see if the audio is missing? Do they have instructions on – instructions on instructing people to listen for sound? It’s all automatic, it’s all given.

But then when it comes to captioning, do we have procedures in writing? Do we have the standard operating policies or procedures instructing TV people on what to watch out for? Often, when you watch TV and the captions are missing, you can call the television company and say – and their response is, I don’t know what you’re talking about. They don’t know how to handle it. Maybe we need to establish an SOP for the different settings or different situations for every company that’s involved.

MR. HUTCHINS: Gentlemen, can we go for about two minutes on this? Someone care to address that?

MR. KARLOVITS: Can’t speak for the networks. Just like the Canadians, right? But, of course, Sonny is right, that – there is a standard operating procedure at the networks and at people who produce television programs, that audio has to meet a certain standard. Or else, it doesn’t go on the air. It takes hours and hours of editing before a program airs. And on live programs, there are tests that are constantly done, monitoring the audio. So, this is what the TV industry is selling. They’re selling you video and audio.

However, when it comes to captioning, there is no standard operating procedure among the networks. And, that’s probably something that we should work toward as an industry. That we put together a standard operating procedures on the monitoring of captioning and making sure that the captions are there. So that every network and every producer follows those standard operating procedures. And I – applaud Sonny for that. I think it’s a good recommendation, that we should try to pursue.

MR. HUTCHINS: We’ll have one more comment and then just stay in your seats for a few second after Debra speaks so I can just tell you what we’re going to do next. Debra? While she’s coming up, let me tell you, this woman holds the world record for a number of captioning companies worked for.

PARTICIPANT: Well, I will say when Jeff and I started in captioning together, Rachel, whose picture you saw, was in diapers. My question is for Mark. Given the fact, I think we probably will all agree, the biggest issue that’s quality in real-time is the shortage of reporters and we have two more FCC benchmarks in the next four weeks that will dramatically increase the number of hours of programming that we need captions, do you think the programs that you have in place will actually get us ahead of the problem or will we always be struggling to have enough of a qualified labor force?

MR. GOLDEN: I am very hopeful. As I mentioned, we are beginning to see results already. We have been working on student recruitment, working on schools for a number of years and we’re – as I mentioned, this last year, enrollments were up marginally but that’s after 10 years of decline. So we have reversed that trend. The first schools that we were successful in getting money for got that money about six months ago, so money is currently being invested in the school programs, so things that we have been talking about are now actually beginning to happen. I am very hopeful and reasonably optimistic that we will catch up to this.

We may – we may be a little bit behind but I think we will be close and quickly catch up to hit those deadlines, and I think the type of programs and work that we’re doing now is putting an infrastructure in place that, hopefully, it will eliminate the problem in the future. Once we get up to speed, I think we will begin to produce a sustainable and renewable resource, like the energy folks like you talk about. And the type of fixes that we’re putting in are not Band-Aids, they’re going to create a foundation for ensuring the profession is adequately staffed in the future.

MR. KARLOVITS: If there’s one thing we agree on, I think it’s that we want more quality captioners, but I also think if there’s anything that we can do going out of this room at 5: 00, as a unified group, is to support the NCRA’s program where they have legislation pending with Congress to appropriate substantial funds to train real-time captioners and cart writers. You should know that the shortage that we face as captioners pales in comparison to the shortage of people that supply our court systems. There are court systems today who cannot fill the vacancies that they have. So this is not – vacancies. That they have. This is not just a captioning thing. This also goes into the legal end of the business.

A lot of people like me are looking at retiring from our court systems and you know, they’ve been in there for 40 years and these positions are staying vacant. So it’s a compounded problem, but supporting this legislation as a group will have influence on the Senators and Congressmen here and maybe what Mark can do is to send every participant here out information on this legislation so that we can write our Congressman and our Senators to support those appropriations.

MR. GOLDEN: Thank you for that, Joe, and also, I would be terribly remiss if I did not publicly acknowledge a lot of familiar faces in the room from some of the consumer organizations for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals and the support and – that NCRA has had from that community for this lobbying effort. The letters that have been written are phenomenal and have been a very important part of the success we’ve had so far legislatively. So, thank you.

MR. HUTCHINS: I see Pat Ferrara wants to make an exception and Kathy DiLorenzo, I’m going to ask them to keep their comments brief. And while pat is making her way up here, I assume you want to use the mike?

MR. HUTCHINS: I think it’s helpful if you come up here because we are videotaping the conference and the camera can shoot you when you come up here.

PARTICIPANT: Thank you for the opportunity to speak. And I didn’t want to let this get past. But in response to the comment about a problem in calling a station and not having them respond, I’d like to just state that it’s my experience with our clients and I totally applauded – they are talking a totally proactive role in captions because they are so visible today and you know yourselves, everybody is watching them in the gyms in the morning, watching them at night.

And if a station or a news director sees something that they don’t, and it doesn’t matter what anybody else, perhaps that captioner believes, oh, I’m doing fine, that doesn’t matter, and we have very strict monitoring standards that go on continuously. But, I really applaud the fact that the stations themselves if they see something that they don’t think is quite up to the standards that they believe it should be, it may be OK, but we don’t want to do captions, nobody does in this room, that’s just OK, they will call, pick up that phone and we’re very responsive to our clients and they’re always right. And if there’s something they don’t like, we get to the bottom of it. They’re not shy to call about it. Which I think is terrific. And I think – hopefully, that will pervade throughout the industry.

MR. HUTCHINS: Thanks for that comment. Pat. While Kathy is coming up to make her comment, I want to mention one of the things we have not talked about in this live captioning is Spanish-language real-time. That is, we only have, I think a very few number of Hispanic consumers in the room today, but it’s a growing audience, I think faces many of the same issues. I don’t want to separate Spanish and English real-time as two different issues. I think they are the same issue although some approaches and issues may be slightly different. But I want to acknowledge that we have Hispanic consumers as well as English-speaking consumers. Kathy, want to use the microphone?

PARTICIPANT: Kathy DiLorenzo, director of recruitment for Vitac. In response to Debra’s question about the future workforce and Mark’s response to her regarding NCRA’s efforts for public relations. Something that you should all know and especially in this forum, as a director of recruitment, I get many, many requests from court reporters transitioning in captioning. But in addition to that, probably 10 requests for information every week I get are from seeing captions and these are people out in the public who say, I want to know how to do real-time captioning. Mark, I probably send at least 10 people a week, again, to NCRA’s Web site. This is really important, that you have contact people at your organization that can send them their way. Captioning is the best way for the public relations part of all of this. And you need active people involved in that.

MR. HUTCHINS: Please. We’re talking now only about live captioning, right? And there are more opportunities this afternoon for everyone to speak. But please, tell us your name.

PARTICIPANT: Hello, my name is Terri Lozano from El Paso, Texas. I’m a Spanish rep for NCI. I’d like to say that in Spanish, the captioning is very limited. I don’t know if you would go into live captioning or not, but the Spanish community really enjoys soap operas. And there’s virtually nothing in soap operas. As well as talk-show programs. We would really benefit from, whether it be real-time or not. And I’d like to expand on real-time, too, in the local sector. Whether it be Hispanic or English. Right now, when you have newscasts or any other programs and you go into live captioning, they will introduce and elaborate and everything, and then the live captioning is off, there’s nothing. The same as the weather sector of the program. They introduce the weatherman and then there’s nothing. So, I’d like to see some kind of guidelines established for the local community as well as the national networks on captioning. real-time.

MR. HUTCHINS: Thank you, Terri. Before we break. We are running just a tiny bit behind this morning but we’re actually in pretty good shape. I would like to keep this break. To 10 minutes. Please step up, stretch, go out, when we come back, we’re going to be talking about offline captioning. This afternoon, after lunch, you’re going to be asked to vote on which of the issues raised on both live and offline and you’ll vote separately, which issues you consider to be the most important and we’ll talk about the voting procedures later. But keep that in mind. What you’re hearing now has to be reduced to the – so that we can prioritize our efforts later. Please take exactly a 10-minute break and then we’ll come back and do the next half.

MR. HUTCHINS: Would everyone please be seated. Everyone takes your seats, please. We’re going to talk now until lunch. Actually, this is my chance, when everybody gets seated, I got the flash ready, I can’t take your picture until you’re seated. We’re going to talk now about what we in the – we what we service providers call offline captioning or sometimes referred to as prerecorded captioning. And the distinction here, because not everyone knows this terminology, any program that is, for which we must create or transmit the captions live is called live captioning. Everything else is offline. That means that the captions are created before the program is broadcast. Or, in other words, it’s prerecorded programming. That could include commercials, it could include sitcoms and movies and dramas that you see on prime time. Soap operas, any prerecorded programming.

So now the conversation is going to shift from the live programs and the quality issues that we face during live to the prerecorded programming. And we have a different panel today. All right, everybody smile. There we go. I have to take advantage because you’re not going to sit still later. We’re going to have a different panel now. Chaired, or I should say, led by Judy Harkins. Judy is with the Technology Assessment Program? Technology Access Program at Gallaudet University and she has been around captioning for many, many years. With Judy on this panel, are Tom Apone from the WGBH Media Access Program? Group. I knew I would blow it. That and also Max Duckler from CaptionMax in Minneapolis. So, Judy, can you start us off. Didn’t work.

PARTICIPANT: Jeff has helped me out with introductory remarks by introducing the panelists, we’re going to lead today with Tom Apone who will give an overview of the problems and some of the sources. Tom?

PARTICIPANT: Thanks, Judy. A lot of what I want to cover is – has already been talked about a little bit in the previous panel, so I don’t want to duplicate too much of what was said there. But suffice it to say, a lot of problems occur in the – in the technical side of captioning and in the transmission of broadcast and reception of captioning for which we sort of get blamed. That’s not to say we are – we don’t bear any responsibility, I think it’s important to note that while it could be a broadcaster’s or cable company’s problem, we need to share in solving the problem. We get the feedback from the consumers and we need to help channel that feedback to the broadcasters and networks and help them figure out what went wrong, how they can make the system work better. I have a list of typical problems here that we see and we’ve tried to prepare this from the perspective of the viewer, the end user. These are things you might be seeing at home.

And again, most of these are caused by problems in transmission or reception and – but again, all of them are perceived as bad captioning. So, there are things we want to help solve. Most of these are true of real-time captioning and offline captioning. The last one in particular here, I want to talk a moment about. As Jeff said, the offline captioning is a process that occurs for prerecorded programs. A company prepares a program and it’s a – edits a videotape and provides us with a copy of that tape from which to do our captioning, our job. But while we have that copy, they may continue editing the tape before final air. That’s a problem we’ve run into a couple of times where we’ll prepare captions that reflect the audio on the tape that we got, meanwhile, somebody’s changing something back at the production studios and when the captions get put on to that tape, encoded on to that tape, they may not match for several lines or several parts of the dialog.

Frequently, it’s not a big problem but it is a problem and it’s something that’s very frustrating to us as we try to prepare those perfect captions and people are starting to change the rules as we go along. We had a fairly serious example of that a couple of years ago with a program, the last scene of the big season finale was the main character listening to a – an answering machine, a message on an answering machine. So the video didn’t change. It was the main character pushing the button on the answering machine and reacting to what he was hearing. But in our tape, he was trying to decide between two women, which woman he was going to do – pursue a romantic relationship with. When he pushed the answering machine on our tape, it was woman a telling him something. And he was reacting. On the air, it was the other woman. They decided at the last minute to change the storyline, or perhaps they even put that in there to throw the cast and crew and media off. They do things, producers and networks do things like that occasionally.

But we had to go through the process of, first of all, dealing with our frustration about how that could happen, and then getting back to the production facility telling them what happened, telling them how important it is for them to let us know when they’re changing audio, when they’re changing content like that, they’ve got to let us know, they’ve got to give us a chance to update the caption file and make that match. So, moving on from technical problems, let’s talk a little bit about things that we do have control over. Things that a consumer might see at home. That would be caused by a captioning company. Again, a fairly straightforward list, reflects closely to some of the things that Joe and Jack were talking about this morning.

PARTICIPANT: Tom, I hate to interrupt. For the visually impaired consumers in the audience, can you generally go over those bullet points?

PARTICIPANT: I’ll be happy to. I’m going to pass on the page one again because those are technical things that you talked about, I think in, general. Covered them very well. If the handout, if you have that handout, we’re talking about section two, here. Certainly, captions could contain spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. Those are things that will jump out at you. Now, sometimes they’re real spelling mistakes, sometimes they’re similar to the example that Jeff had this morning about moron insurance. That looks like a spelling error. That’s the – to most consumers, that’s, oh, my gosh, how could anyone be so stupid to put that caption up there?

But as Jeff said, not likely a caption company problem. But, the fact is, we do make spelling errors, we do make grammatical errors. And they’re not acceptable and we certainly want to avoid them and do what we can to avoid them. A second error is, captions don’t match what’s being said. And this is from the perspective of the captioner, the caption creator not understanding or misunderstanding what the dialog is. Not it being changed without them knowing. That can be a lot of simple things, just not hearing, not being able to interpret what’s being said.

It can also be, frankly, some generational and experiential things. We have a lot of 25 and 30-year old caption writers who are very sharp but if you start talking about World War II or jitterbugging or something from before their experience they don’t necessarily know so they make an attempt to interpret it. It’s something that makes sense to them in their experience. But again, not a good way to handle the problem. You got to ask some questions, you got to do some research. Captions can be timed inappropriately or placed inappropriately on the screen. This could be an example of a caption being under or below the speaker – below the person who is not speaking.

We always at the Caption Center and the Media Access Group try to place that caption below the person on the screen who is speaking. If they’re just placed in the center of the screen, you don’t know which of those two people on the screen are speaking. If the timing is way off, if someone’s talking but that caption doesn’t appear until almost the next person starts speaking, that can throw you off and be very hard to follow. Captions that are heavily or inappropriately edited. I would say this is something that’s not happening much anymore. That caption companies have all responded very, very well to strong consumer preference for verbatim captioning or much of that text as possible. So, we don’t see a lot of heavy editing anymore, but again, occasionally, we try to adjust the reading speeds or things just going so fast that there is some editing that goes on and it has to be done very carefully.

Speaker identification, is a critical issue. If someone is speaking offscreen or if there are many people on screen, placement is not going to give you that information. You have to have a speaker ID or some other technique to identify that speaker. And, important sound effects and other audio information. Again, very important to know that the doorbell was rung or the phone is ringing or a gunshot. These are, as far as, I think most of us are concerned, nonnegotiable, critical elements to a good captioning job. The final point on my list here is, sort of a catchall foreign features that a company is using that perhaps don’t adequately convey information or may even be a little misleading about the information on the – the audio information in a program. I’m not sure I have a good example right off the top of my head. There are some things that people misinterpret when they see captions. I can tell you, from our point of view how we, what we do to approach these things and try to prevent these things from happening, and again, follow closely to what Joe said earlier, these are good business practices for any company in any industry, I think.

You want to find good people, you want to train them well. You always look for people who we call wordsmiths, English writers, journalists, people with some experience in editing, or proofreading, people who really care about the language and want to make it right. We try to train them in the best way we know how with good, solid training programs, good documentation, good input from consumers so they know who they’re serving and why they’re doing what they are doing and why it’s important to the people who rely on captioning. We want to give captioners the time to do their job well. It takes some time to do this right. You have to be able to stop and think, go over to the dictionary and get somebody else to listen if you don’t hear it quite right or if it doesn’t make sense to you, you’ve got to do it once and then you’ve got to check it over again.

And that follows to the next point about having the resources. You’ve got to have access to the Internet to look things up and dictionaries and reference books and the ability to look at the script. Call the producers if you don’t know a character’s name or what’s going on in a scene. Very bad idea to be guessing about these things ultimately. We always want to provide after a captioner has created a caption file, we always provide a second review unless the time constraints, unless it’s so down to the deadline that that would be the only time when a second review doesn’t occur. It’s amazing how many things the best captioners will still miss and a second set of eyes will catch. And that is standard procedure in any newspaper, magazine, book publisher. You always have an editor, proofreader checking things, back check.

Finally, we want to be monitoring broadcasts to see if we’re seeing problems and feeding back information to the broadcasters and soliciting, taking in that information that we’re seeing seeking from consumers, if we did anything wrong or problems from the broadcaster’s end and helping educate the broadcasters. They’ve frankly gotten much better, certainly the major networks care about this now. I know at CBS and PBS and the other major networks, these are considered technical failures. If there’s no audio or video, it’s written up as a technical failure and if no captioning appears, it’s a technical failure, they want to know what happened and how and how we can prevent it the next time around. I want to turn it over to Max here and talk about stylistic issues.

PARTICIPANT: See what’s left to talk about. First of all, I want that say it’s an honor to be here speaking to all of you. To my colleagues and to you, the end users of our service. Who – as Mark and Jeff mentioned earlier, you’re not always included in the important decisions in captioning. It’s the nature the business. You are paying for it so it’s great to all be together. I also want to thank Jeff and Jo Ann for doing an outstanding job and for being able to be here. What I want to do today, as Jeff mentioned, we want to come out here with – we want to vote on what the issues are that are important to us that we want to dig into further.

So I’d like to kind of cut to the chase here, and propose some objective considerations and subjective considerations that would be the basis for the fundamental framework for developing captioning standards. And I have four fundamentals, which I’ll call them objective standards, and I think everybody here today has gone over these. One, that captions must accurately transcribe what is being said. That’s not reflect what is being said or reinterpret what is being said but to transcribe what is being said. Captions must include information a allowing the viewer to identify the speaker. Doctor to identify the speaker. Captions must transcribe sound effects and other audio components that are not dialog. In parentheses, man falls on floor is not a sound effect. Thud is a sound effect. So this would be a fundamental consideration.

The fourth one is captions must be comprehensible. The considerations would be including speed, punctuation and italics. So, while captions, and I’m sure most of the vendors in this room for captioning services will meet these four objective criteria. Even the best of us are going to differ on the following areas, stylistic issues. This is an area that I’ve heard time and time again through E-mails, phone calls, and my own reading and observations, it’s frustrating for the consumer. It would be wonderful to at least come out of some of these issues as some of the candidates for a group resolution and we might try to alter some of these things the same way. Italics, the use of italics, what should they be used for? Should they follow the common rules of writing? For example, titles, if there’s an offscreen voice. What about the distinguishing speech from titles of publications of books, movies, songs, etc.?

Placement of captions. Different formats that you currently see, of how captions are placed on the screen. Should they follow the speakers around the screen? Should captions be placed in one spot on the screen for each specific speaker? This is something that would be nice to be informed on, as well. Justification, a few of us talked about, how the captions are aligned, are they on the left side on the screen or aligned on the right side of the screen or the center, or a combination? Left but moved over to the right, or justified all the way to the right? This, you flip from station to station and you’ll see many different ways of doing this, and I have heard this is, like someone else said, it’s better than nothing that we have this, but it would be wonderful if we all did this the same way.

So this is a candidate that I would like to consider for something that maybe we can come together on. And a big one is verbatim. How do we define the word “verbatim” as it relates to offline captioning? Because we’ve said, OK, we all agree we want verbatim, but we also have heard today the term “reading rate” which is how many words per minute can you have up on the screen when you read and still understand what’s being said in the program? If we do decide on a reading rate that would be OK to have, what would the maximum be? Would we vary that rate for the programming type? And if we do have a reading rate, is it preferable to edit the captioning or be out of sync with the audio to conform with that rate?

There’s two different ways to deal with that reading rate. Should we have a minimum time for a caption to be on the screen? Another style consideration that varies is moving captions to match cuts. Especially in dramatic presentation where you have pop-on captions. We always tried, and most tried to make captions he is esthetically pleasing so that there’s – esthetically pleasing. Is that important? Does that matter. Does that take extra time to do? Is it something we all want to do? Do we want to include it in our standards?

Case. Is it preferable for captions to appear in all upper case or in sentence case? And if we do decide on upper and lower case or upper case, should all speaker IDs be upper, should sound effect be all upper and is it necessary to have this uniform from company to company? And this one has been spoken about two or three times and this is, I think, we’re really seeing a lot of, especially in the last two years, and that is, networks and program providers are trying to reach the FCC standards and get things as cheaply as possible and that is the issue of pop-on, roll-up and real-time. Do we need to make pop-on captions for prerecorded material. If we do have that reinforced as someone commented on before. And prerecorded captions are required on prerecorded video.

I noticed we were all seeing a lot of our clients come to us and they’re asking us to do dramatic shows, comedy shows, even movies, live, because they’ve done the math. They can see that live real-time captioning is a lot less expensive than pop-on or to do prerecorded. Is this something that we would like to propose as a requirement and who do we go to to make this a requirement? This is a real important one. This we’re seeing more and more. And if it’s something that is very bothersome to people to see shows that are prerecorded, that we obviously don’t need to be done live, who do we go to to complain. Judy will talk more about that.

One of the things that falls under roll-up captioning. We do it for prerecorded programs, that generally, if the program is a documentary, say it’s a voiceover and it’s that type of a show, we think that’s – we think that’s OK to do it that way and some of the other companies, too, is that OK? Can we come up with a standard of when it’s OK to use roll-up for prerecorded shows versus when it’s not OK. And if we do come up with a standard for that, should we say it has to be two lines, three lines, two lines at the top of the screen or two lines at the bottom of the screen. And if we’re going to move the two lines out of the way for graphics, for example, do we move it two lines at the very top, or just move it up out of the way of the graphics?

Again, what I’m doing here is not coming from me. It’s – this is coming from consumer feedback that we get every day via E-mail, our Web site, supervisory board and just in general conversation. Even going out and talking to people who are hearing and use captions for whatever reason they use captions and bringing them to our attention. And then the last point I wanted to bring up was that the United States is a multicultural country. Its main language, it’s spoken here. Spanish being one of the main languages now.

And we have programs that are mostly English that have Spanish portions in them. Now, should this be captioned in Spanish? Should this be a requirement? Should Spanish programs that have English portions in them have portions in English? And should that be just left up to the captioning company or should we try to set a standard of quality that we could all follow on non-English portions of the program? So, my conclusion is is we need to determine which of these things that I’ve talked about and that have been talked about by some of the other speakers this morning, which of these items do we need to discuss and how will we come to some agreement on at least a few of these? It’s my hope for the remainder of the day that in subsequent conferences that we will come to some conclusions on these things. I’ve been hearing this for years so I’m really excited that this is looking like it might happen. Thank you very much.

PARTICIPANT: Hi. Like everybody else, I went to – want to express my gratitude for the conference but especially being invited. I’m neither a advisory committee member nor an industry member. I’m from Gallaudet and have a colleague with me, Steve Weiner, who is an adviser. I teach a three-credit course about captioning to deaf undergraduates so that keeps me current with your industry and in terms of what young people are thinking and giving them an opportunity learn. So that if they came to this conference, they would understand what was going on.

And, one of the things I wanted to point out about the conference is that this is an example of leadership that we have come to expect from the Department of Education since the very earliest days of captioning. I hope that we can all do what we can to keep the Department of Education involved in captioning, because I think this leadership role is and continues to be very important. Even as the captioning requirements increase. I’m going to – I do a lot of work with other industries with regard to telecommunication accessibility and when we talk about setting standards, we’re very often in a difficult situation where we are in an industry where there’s a lot of innovation happening very fast. And companies are unwilling to standardize. I think we could all agree that for captioning, the industry is mature enough that it may be a good time to be able to standardize. And at the same time, recognize that new technology is coming in with the EIA-708 captions, so we’ll have a new challenge in terms of what the other, in those new captioning features to employ, especially in offline captioning.

Just wanted to mention some of the research that’s been funded by the Department of Education over the years, because as you know, when you have an advisory committee meeting, you may have 10 or eight people in a room looking at a comparison of presentations and you may get a lot of different opinions or split opinions in terms of what you should do. Sometimes it’s helpful to have a larger sample looking at the same material and try to at least get an idea of what overall preferences might be, although we know we will not have unanimity.

So I would like to, in some cases, if you’re going to work towards standards and consensus standards is, in some cases you may want to look at some of the research that was done that may help be tiebreakers, for example, if there is a disagreement with standards. Carl Jensema has done research on captioning. He did a 1998 study on rate and asked for users preferences as to rate on video material. It wasn’t a challenging, kind of eyes-busy kind of material but he tested it with people who are deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing, as well as children. And found that an average presentation rate of 145 is comfortable for a wide variety of viewers. Although higher rates can be sustained. And this also fits with the, a very common rate for offline captioning. So it’s, you know, a good statistic to have. Earlier in the decade, my group did a study on caption features and this was to celebrate the building in of decoders with new features into TV sets.

So we looked at different issues in offline captioning. We did not evaluate placement. We assumed placement was something that consumers wanted. And we tested some color features and other features and came up with some findings that might be useful to you as you consider whether or not there are some things you could standardize on. One of the things that was interesting to me in our study and continues to be as I talk with students, is that color does not test well, here and perhaps this is because our colors in our EIA-608 decoders are kind of garish and intrude in the viewing experience. That’s what people telling me.

With color coming into EIA-708 decoders, we want to see what happens in other countries that are using color with placement, for example. Australia, where consumers find this be a very good thing. And when they have access to our captions without color and theirs with color, I hear from them they appreciate color in that situation. So the use of color, I think we still can’t rule out, even though it’s been rejected, in some of your focus groups, for features with offline captions. There’s a study that was just done that, Alice just handed me this morning, a dissertation in California on comparing educational programming and news programming in terms of quality of captioning. So it’s another new piece of research to consider.

The final thing I wanted to say was to go back to the barriers to – barriers to consumer influence. On captioning quality. Because, when I teach this in my course, it becomes very apparent to me. I develop form letters for my students to use, I try instill in them the importance of complains as often as they can bring them. So to do it when something seriously wrong happens with captions. I’m going to use Jack O’Keeffe’s letter if you will let me in the future, a course as something that got a response from the FCC but consumers like everyone else, need someone that they can talk to, who understands what the issues are and that’s why they come to you very often, even though the problem may not be yours to solve. And this problem has to be fixed. I think this is really critical.

I think it was Mark who did a nice job of explaining how this is not a real job in terms of consumer’s ability to influence. So that problem, I think needs to be fixed by whoever has the power to do that. And then, secondly, specifically, with regard to complaining to the FCC, I was very gratified to see the response that Jack got, but I’ve heard of other circumstances where people write in and the information takers or the people who do the FCC info call-taking and query answering often do not have the knowledge that you have at all to be able to figure out what happened and will send a copy of the law or the regulation to the consumer. And so, that is another problem in terms of consumer feedback and I hope that in terms of moving ahead with quality initiative that that will be something that can be part of the solution. Thank you.

MR. HUTCHINS: Time to take this side of the room. [Takes a snapshot with camera] There we are. Everybody smile. I’m done. No more flashing lights. Just had to do that. Thank you all very much. I’m actually going to ask to you kind of shift over here and we’re going to do the Q&A now. The problems that we face in offline. Again, we’ll follow the same format. Asking anyone with comments to line up on that side of the room and I do have a request that we first allow Anita, I believe the last name is Flannagan, to come up because Anita is today nursing a problem with her leg and she cannot stand and wait for her turn to speak so we’re going to allow Anita to speak first and while Anita makes her way up to make her comments, I’ll again – thank the panel and remind that you after lunch we’re going to have easels up here and we’ll introduce it a little bit more right after lunch. How we’re going to vote and who gets to vote and so on. We will pass out dots you will use for voting. So do not vote during lunch. You will see the easels when you come back from lunch. But wait until we give you some instruction. All right, Anita. What’s your can comment?

MS. FLANNAGAN: I’m not sure if my situation, if this happened only in Rochester, New York, which is where I’m from. Lately, I’ve noticed that the format of television has changed. For example, watching a movie or some other TV show, then something comes up to the corner – comes up in the corner of the TV screen where they might have, like, election announcements. I’m wanting to watch the movie and not see this information about the election. Because I know I can catch up on the results of the election later. Second thing is, in Rochester, when there’s a storm warning, the captions cover the storm warning or the feed that comes across the screen, so, I’m just curious if those two things happen in other places as well.

PARTICIPANT: I can talk about that. In both of those examples, that you gave, it would be the local station that’s manipulating the video signal that has the captions on it, and the captions should be – if the TV station has the right equipment, stripped off, and then reinserted after the manipulation of the videos and the captions stay intact. That would answer the first part of your question. Where they say they squeeze this box into it or they squeeze the picture down into a box and at the same time, there’s, they’re maybe squeezing the captions, down, too. There’s equipment out there the station should have in their transmission path that would strip the captions off of the caption master and then reinsert it downstream of this manipulation.

That’s where it should be happening and if they’re not, this – it would help to talk directly with the local station. And on the second issue about when there’s weather information on the bottom of the screen and the captions will cover that up, same thing again. There’s hardware available out there and all the stations in my market have the ability and they do this, when the weather scrools across the bottom, they’ll take the caption data and lift it up one or two lines so then, again, it’s a hardware issue, the local station issue, I would suggest that, in the first place, you try talking to them.

PARTICIPANT: A small consolation but it is happening hundreds of times all around the country on local stations. It’s a problem that, where each station has to learn how to do this and no one has provided them with the – a plan or an approach to solving this problem. In effect, you’re asking them to do two different things and – in these two different circumstances, which again, complicates it a little more. But, as Max said, there’s hardware available to do this and there’s expertise if they call us or they call one of the other captioning agencies, they can get technical assistance and figure these things out. So, keep the pressure on them I guess is my best advice.

PARTICIPANT: My comment more has to, good morning, everyone. Has more to do with when you were talking about misspellings and language errors, I’ve seen an increasing number of inaccurate syntax use where they will use he – “hear” as opposed to “here” which completely changes many times the context. I would like your thoughts on, whether you see this trend, I see this happening at an alarming rate of increase, let’s say from the last five years. I don’t know why it’s happening because it’s happening in prerecord as well as real-time.

MR. HUTCHINS: Stay up here for a moment because I have a feeling you may want to do a follow-up once we’ve heard from our panelists.

PARTICIPANT: Again, the problems are mostly one of just the time to do the job right. Now, there are more and more instances where we have less time to work on a program simply because the producers are editing that program up to the last minute. We don’t get the copy that we need to start our job until the day before the program is going to air, sometimes even hours before it’s going to air. That didn’t happen five or 10 years ago. Editing equipment and digital editing on the production side has gotten so slick and easy to use that producers feel like they can keep working and polishing and editing right up to the last minute. That’s one factor.

The other factor is, again, costs going down, people being under some pressures to get things done and not having enough time t