TDI Conference: TV Captioning Issues – Part 2
By Lise Hamlin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Editor: Here’s Lise Hamlin’s writeup of Cheryl Heppner’s workshop on
TV Captioning Issues. This workshop included a bunch of captioning
pros, including: Moderator: Cheryl Heppner, Executive Director, NVRC
– Rosaline Crawford, Director, Law & Advocacy Center, National
Association of the Deaf
– Greg Hlibok, Senior Attorney, Disability Rights Office, Federal
Communications Commission
– Michael Schooler, Deputy General Counsel, National Cable &
Telecommunications Association
– Heather York, Account Executive/Marketing Manager, VITAC
– Marsha McBride, Executive Vice President, Legal & Regulatory
Affairs, National Association of Broadcasters
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
VITAC, A Captioning Provider
Heather York is the marketing manager for VITAC, a captioning
provider. Heather was there to talk about common types of viewer
issues received by a captioning provider and strategies to resolve
them.
VITAC captions about 150,000 hours of programming every year for NBC,
ABC, and most of the cable networks. While their customers are the
networks and the programmers, their goal is to please the people who
see the captions. One of the things Heather does at VITAC is respond
to questions and complaints from people who are having trouble with
captioning.
Heather reported that VITAC receives about 250 emails a year from
consumers who are having trouble with their captions in one way or
another. One of the customers told her that for every one complaint
they receive, they assume they have a thousand other people who
haven’t taken the time to comment but were bothered similarly by the
problem. So, approximately 250,000 households are affected by
captioning problems she has received. And VITAC is just one company
receiving these captioning complaints.
The most common complaints she hears about are:
1) No captions — on the entire TV show, at the start of the show, at
the end of the show, and on a whole network.
2) Bad captions: garbled captions, captions that jump up and down on
the screen, misspellings, or captions that don’t reference proper
names or places so you have no idea what they’re talking about.
3) Spanish caption problems from people who don’t know how to turn
Spanish captions off their TV when they pop up.
Heather does share these complaints with her customers, the networks
and programmers. She says, “If the screen went black, millions of
people would have a problem. Captions should be treated the same way.
In short, we tell them captions should say what they’re saying, no
matter what the problem is.”
There are three places where captioning problems occur:
1) At the production of the actual captions. This results in getting
bad captions because of sloppy captioning, poor training, equipment
failure or technical difficulties.
2) In the distribution of captioning. This presents a lot of
problems: problems with the network airing the program or at the
cable or satellite end.
3) A problem with the television set.
VITAC finds most consumers who have a problem end up getting bounced
around between three people. The cable company says it’s the TV, the
network says it’s the cable company, the cable company says it’s the
network.
Three steps that VITAC recommends to resolve captioning complaints:
1) Check your TV. If the same problem shows up on more than one set,
it’s not the TV at fault. If the problem is on one TV and not other,
it’s probably your TV is to blame.
2) Contact your local cable or satellite provider. Be very detailed
with what you tell them. Name, channel you were watching, program you
were watching, date and time of the problem. Description of the
problem and indicate that you confirmed the problem is not your
television. Give them 24 hours.
3) Contact the network on which you experienced the problem.
4) Contact the FCC
Apparently, emailing one party and copying the others — such as the
network, the cable company and the FCC — works well and helps the
people get responses. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes consumers
need to go to their elected officials. But it has worked well in
several cases.
National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)
Marsha McBride is the executive Vice President of the Legal
Department for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). She
was at the conference to talk about broadcaster issues with closed
captioning and how they’re being resolved.
Marsha noted that NAB has been participating in the rule making
process on behalf of the broadcasters of the United States. She said
the one place where consumers and broadcasters totally agreed was the
issue of notice about complaints and how they should be handled. NAB
would like to be in a position where if they did get an e-mail, that
broadcasters would know immediately whether it was their problem or
the cable system, and that they would be able to respond to that
quickly.
NAB believes there should be an easy way to know who to call or email
at the broadcast station. All of those things would facilitate not
only consumers getting better treatment and better captioning, but
also give broadcasters a better understanding of what kinds of
problems they could anticipate.
NAB also agrees that 30 days for a turn around is absolutely the
maximum that there should be for a response. NAB has polled their
broadcasters and found they would actually like to be able to fix
problems immediately when it can be done.
Marsha indicated the biggest frustration that broadcasters face is
that there is a limited number of realtime captioners and voice
recognition technology is not as good as they had anticipated it
would be by now.
Most of the members of NAB are small individual stations or group
owners in areas from Idaho to Kansas. The smaller broadcaster aren’t
able to purchase captioning for 15 stations the way the bigger
broadcasters can, so they can’t get as good a rate for captioning. In
some cases, those broadcasters end up buying captioning from a service
that perhaps isn’t as good as the service could be.
NAB is working with the captioning community to try to figure out
what to do until voice recognition technology finally catches up.
Marsha indicated NAB is concerned that a very high captioning
standard would be a problem because new technologies don’t have a
good performance record yet. NAB would like to be able to continue to
adopt some of the new technologies.
“I think not enough has changed at this point that I think that we
would agree that all of the changes that have been recommended by TDI
should be adopted,” Marsha said. “I think we are willing to sit down
and work with both the captioners and the community, the
hearing-impaired, to see are there things that we can do? There will
be things that we can’t agree on. That’s for sure. But if there are a
series of things that we can agree on and we can take that as a
solution, at least an interim solution for a three or four-year
period, then I think maybe we could sit down and get some of the
other problems fixed.”
Marsha also suggested she’d like to see more federal grants to
develop voice recognition and other new technologies to support
captioning.
~~~~~
(c)2007 by Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of
Hearing Persons (NVRC), 3951 Pender Drive, Suite 130, Fairfax, VA
22030; www.nvrc.org. 703-352-9055 V, 703-352-9056 TTY, 703-352-9058
Fax. You do not need permission to share this information, but please
be sure to credit NVRC.
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