Television Captioning

Here's a report on the TV Captioning workshop from the 2003 TDI Convention in Las Vegas.

Cheryl Heppner of NRVC hosted the workshop. The panelists were:

- Jay Wyant is a deaf consumer and active caption user. He is the Secretary of the Alexander Graham Bell Association and a member of CaptionMax's advisory council.

- Jeff Hutchins is a captioning pioneer from way back. He was one of the first people hired by WGBH's Caption Center, was involved in one of the early caption decoders, and started his own business, which eventually became VITEC.

- Deborah Schuster is the Executive Vice President of the Burbank office of Closed Captioning Services, Inc. She has also been involved in the captioning industry since the early days.

- Mark Turtis is the Director of Captioning for CBS and a long time captioning advocate. He also has a long history in the captioning industry and has been involved in many of the industry firsts.

Question. As captioning demand increases, voice recognition (VR) technology is developing. What changes do you see coming?

Jeff: VR has been in development for many years. It is not likely to be capable any time soon of automatically converting speech from a TV program into captions. But it will be similar to real-time captioning using a court reporter. Instead of using a computer that understands every voice, we'll have a single person repeating what is being said into a VR system. The advantage of that method is that the computer only needs to recognize one voice. We're already seeing applications of this technology. In England, the BBC is using VR on some programs. RIT is experimenting with it in the classroom. I expect to see it used for some broadcasting in the US in the next year. There is a growing shortage of captioners and I think VR will help resolve that.

Deborah: Captioning companies have a need for this technology. We and others are looking into it. As long as the end result is a quality product, the method of getting the captions is immaterial.

Mark - I am a large volume buyer of captioning services. We think VR will be appropriate when we see the 98.6% accuracy rate that we demand.

Question: What are the benefits and challenges for the vendors who provide captions?

Deborah: I started at WGBH in open captioning ABC News. The FCC mandates will increase the number of captioned programs. They have also changed the industry, and this is a transition time for the industry. It created a marketplace of more companies and people to get in the captioning business.

Today there are 25 companies who are part of the captioning industry. We compete fairly ferociously. That, combined with the economy and some of the economic and political issues, has made the climate very different. Some clients are very committed to providing a quality product. Others are working to cut costs wherever possible.

Running a company in an environment where we have to deal with increased competition and cost pressures is a challenge. When I started, the payment rate was $2200 per program hour. Now some clients are demanding rates that are 75% less than that.

The caption agencies are working to address the issues that are of interest to you. I think we're all dedicated to solving the issues.

Jeff: When we started VITEC, I had many Deaf friends who complained that they thought it was wrong to try to make a profit from captioning. At that point the only captioning companies were NCI and WGBH, both of which are non profit.

One of the benefits to the vendors is that they can make money. That's a benefit to consumers also, because it fuels the growth - money for outreach, for research. So companies like CBS now look at captioning as a service that they want, and they are willing to pay a decent price for it.

Mark: From the perspective of one who purchases the services, the non-profits are competitive with the for-profits. Captioning has become so mainstream that the TV business sees it as just another part of the production process.

Jay: I'm the consumer here. I've done some surveys. I have a question for Mark. In your relationship with other organizations, how aware do you think they are of the importance of captioning?

Mark: On the network and cable side, everyone is aware of the importance of quality captioning. There are so many vendors now, and many people don't know what they are buying and how to buy it. By and large, they also care very deeply about it.

Question: Jeff, I consider you very involved with the new trade association and I'd like you to speak about that.

Jeff: Captioning companies are coming together to form the Accessible Media Industry Coalition (AMIC) to work together for the benefit of consumers. As one of the members has said, by calling ourselves AMIC, we can claim to be amicable. Twenty-two companies have signed a contract to be part of this.

This is the result of a lot of work from a lot of people. It started because of 9-11. On that day, the networks provided news coverage starting at 9AM and continuing for 100 hours. It was a huge effort of networks and captioning companies. It was a great opportunity for captioning companies to work together. For the most part it worked well.

The captioning companies realized that some things needed to be addressed. In early 2002 a few of the companies got together to discuss that experience. We decided to bring additional companies into the discussion. We had a conference called the Caption Quality Initiative last September. Twenty-two companies and 128 people (with their consumer advisory panels) came for a full day of discussion. We focused on the things that affect the quality of service.

We came up with several priorities. The top one was that there should be an association. Number two was to encourage FCC to be more active in ensuring compliance with its rules. The audience thought the FCC was not doing all it could to enforce its rules. They were especially concerned about emergency captioning. The third priority was a desire for consumers to have single point of contact when they have complaints or questions.

So the companies created an organizing committee, which consisted of 25 US captioning companies. We tried to create a Trade Association, but discovered that we can't afford that; many of the companies are too small. Some were concerned that if we can't be a full association, we would do nothing. But we decided to continue to meet and work towards becoming a full Trade Association.

I was the chair of the Organizing Committee. As of last Friday, the companies have agreed to create the organization and to hire me as the chair. I will be working to bring them together, establish bylaws, and establish priorities.

Question: The FCC has standards for how much captioning is required. Do you feel we've reached those requirements?

Mark: It's hard to speak for other networks. CBS and UPN are in compliance with the final 2006 benchmark. CBS was 100% pre-compliant on Jan 1, 1998. CBS is unique; it was the first and I think still the only network to caption 100% of regional sports events. This is voluntary and many years ahead of the end benchmark.

Deb: I think the industry in general has done a great job. I can't say it's 100%, but I'm not aware of any violations.

Jay: I did a quick survey of deaf and hard of hearing people of AG Bell. Of the responses, the biggest complaint was inconsistency in the quality of captioning. CBS has high quality and compliance. The biggest complaints were captions stopping in the middle of the show, missing dialog, and complaints that listings are not correct.

Most of the responders listed themselves as moderately knowledgeable. They complained about the placement on the screen - making sure it doesn't obscure descriptive information like names. The other issue is that there is a difference between national organizations and local affiliates. The transition from national to local is very tough.

Consumers ask what to do when they see a problem. It's often difficult to reach the local affiliate, because we get voice mail. There needs to be increased awareness of how to complain.

Jeff: FCC mandates are wonderful, but the downside is that a lot of producers really don't want to caption. It does level the playing field, because all companies must caption. The problem is that those companies that caption because they must sometimes lose their concern for the quality. Some believe that the lowest cost captioning is good enough, regardless of the quality. Companies get away with it because consumers don't complain. If you're not satisfied with quality, you owe it to yourself to complain. Producers say that they assume what they're doing is fine, because they never get complaints. Because of the growth and the mandate, you will see a steep decline in the quality of the captions on TV.