Delayed Access: Challenges to Compliance with FCC Closed-Captioning Rules
Despite a rule that all new television programs must run closed captions, complaints about poor to nonexistent captioning continue to pour in to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and advocacy organizations serving the deaf and hard of hearing. Currently, 31 million Americans have some form of hearing loss and as baby boomers age, captioning will become even more vital, especially during emergencies.
As of January 1, 2006, 100 percent of all new programming must be captioned, with some exceptions (see “DHHCAN Caption 2006 Information and Action Guide,” p. 36). The FCC has already proposed fines for several local stations for not running sufficient captions during natural disasters that threatened life and property.
“We’re not completely there,” says Jack Gates, president of the National Captioning Institute (NCI), a company with about 100 employees that provides captions for television broadcasts. Complaints about captioning have ranged from misspelled words in captions to garbled, unreadable captions to no captions at all.
Gates says that while national broadcast networks and cable channels have virtually fulfilled the 100 percent rule, many affiliate stations responsible for local newscasts, including coverage of emergencies and severe weather, have not. “In a lot of areas of the country, the deaf and hard of hearing have had to make do,” says Mark Golden, executive director of the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA), a trade organization whose membership includes television captioners.
With experienced captioners earning six-figure incomes and able to pursue less stressful careers writing captions in areas other than live television captioning, local stations are facing financial and recruiting challenges just to keep captions onscreen. In response to the captioner crisis, the Senate passed the Training for Realtime Writers Act in July 2005, pending legislation that would allocate $80 million over four years for grants to train captioners. The House has not yet acted on the bill.
Captions Can Save Lives
“You glance out your window and see your neighbors throwing stuff in their car and driving off!” wrote one participant in an online forum, reflecting on the predicament of a person with hearing loss during raging wildfires that destroyed wide swaths of Southern California in October 2003. “You try to talk to them, but you’re stressed and they’re in a hurry, and you don’t understand what they’re saying. You try to give them a paper and pen, but they shove it away, jump in their car, and drive off!”
Acting on complaints, the FCC proposed $65,000 in fines for three San Diego stations for failure to provide captions or other visual information in a timely manner during the wildfires, which killed several people and burned thousands of homes.
One complaint stated that one of the stations ran captions about the opening of an evacuation center more than three hours after a news announcer read the information over the air. The FCC found numerous other instances of stations displaying written information about evacuations and road closings hours later than the information was broadcast. An FCC report noted that any visual presentation of emergency information must be simultaneous or nearly simultaneous to spoken information.
Shortcomings in captioning during coverage of tornado watches and severe thunderstorms in May 2004 resulted in proposed FCC fines of up to $16,000 against three stations in Washington, D.C. The FCC found that one station displayed no captions as one of its weathermen told viewers to move away from windows during high winds. Nor did the stations provide an immediate text crawl along the screen or other visual information that would inform non-hearing viewers of potential dangers.
Two stations in Florida were also given proposed fines of $24,000 each for not providing sufficient captioning during a hurricane in August 2004.
Several of the stations have contested the proposed fines.
Captions also provide crucial information to some news events that may be extraordinarily frightening and disorienting without captioning.
“I remember this kind of frustration like it was yesterday!” wrote another online participant in March 2005. “Watching the news programs the morning of 9/11, no captions, and constantly having to ask my hearing boyfriend, ‘What is going on? What did they say?’ All the while feeling the grief of the events that took place.”
Technical Difficulties
Captioning difficulties can stem from both viewers’ and broadcasters’ equipment, as well as human error. Captions may not be seen due to viewers’ inoperative equipment or other problems with their televisions.
“We tell people to make sure they’ve got a good strong signal for their cable television,” says Bill Stark, director of the Captioned Media Program in Spartanburg, S.C., which provides captioned educational materials for schools. Viewers should also make sure their captioning equipment is working properly. Any new television set with a screen larger than 13 inches is required to be equipped to display captions.
Captioning may also be lost in transmission somewhere between the television studio and the viewers’ television or simply not show up on a screen due to faulty or inoperative captioning equipment. But even a foolproof technical setup is no guarantee; Gates says there are some instances where a national network will break into a local broadcast for a big news story and the national story may not be captioned.
Captioners themselves are under pressure. Kathy DiLorenzo, a 20-year veteran with VITAC, a captioning company in Pittsburgh, recalls that when she entered the field, “We had what we called production coordinators, who monitored the video and audio and assisted the captioners with spelling and transmitting captions.”
However, today most captioners work at home, according to Jim Hall, a captioner supervisor at NCI.
Unlike center-based captioners with onsite supervisors, DiLorenzo says, “Home-based captioners have to be trained to look up and make sure the captions are transmitting correctly and make sure all their (equipment) is working properly.” And do so while typing as fast as 225 words a minute.
Captioners use the same type of machine used by court reporters, which provides some shortcuts for syllables and common words. Nonetheless, working as a live captioner is extremely demanding, says Golden of the NCRA. An experienced captioner may take 15 to 20 hours to perfectly caption a one-hour prerecorded program but live captioners must maintain correct spelling while keeping up with real-time programming. “You have to write it right the first time,” says Hall.
Besides being whizzes at spelling any words that pop up in televised dialogue, captioners also must be intimately familiar with the names of newsmakers, celebrities and anyone else who appears on television. Though they have electronic dictionaries that list spellings for noteworthy places and public figures, the list of sports figures alone can top 25,000 names, Hall says. Further challenges come from foreign names and words needed when captioning news stories from around the world.
Local newscasts present their own unique challenges to captioners. “The news in Omaha should be captioned by someone in Omaha,” says Tom Apone, director of services for the Media Access Group at WGBH, a Boston-based captioning company.
Yet recruiting – and paying for – captioners in Omaha and other smaller television markets can be a struggle. At $100 an hour – a typical fee for a trained, realtime captioner – local stations may find it easier to rely on using technologies that simply print scripts of newscasts and other programming, leaving them unprepared when a disaster strikes their area and unscripted emergency news is broadcast. The FCC does allow some broadcasters to run emergency information in a text crawl or other visual display onscreen (see DHHCAN Guide, p. 36).
Even if television stations can afford to pay for trained captioners, the supply of captioners is also far from certain. Captioning companies are in competition for graduates with court reporting firms and other users of captioning technology. “We’re always looking for new captioners,” says Apone.
Though earnings are above average, working hours are not always desirable, with many live events taking place in the evening or early morning, leading to high stress and burnout. Additionally, some captioners develop carpal tunnel syndrome due to repetitive finger and wrist movements.
There is also a bit of an image problem: Captioning is hardly thought of as an exciting career, when it’s thought of at all. “So few people are aware (of captioners),” says Golden. “A lot of people assume that text just magically appears on the television set.”
