Every Word on Screen: Notes and Sources About Live Captioners

Jada's Research Folder: Who Types the Captions?

1Jada's class is writing reports about jobs in their town, and each student must choose a worker most people rarely see. Jada thought about a Sunday at her grandfather's apartment. Grandpa Ray is hard of hearing, so he keeps captions turned on when he watches the evening news. During a live weather report, Jada noticed that the words showed up on the screen just after the reporter said them. Someone had to be typing them right then, but who? Jada wrote down what she remembered. Then she went looking for sources.

2Source 1: Hidden Jobs in Television, a library book by Marisol Ortega. A live captioner types on a machine called a stenotype. This machine has far fewer keys than a computer keyboard. Instead of pressing one letter at a time, the captioner presses several keys at once, like a piano player pressing a chord. Each press is called a stroke. One stroke can stand for a sound, part of a word, or even a whole word.

3Source 2: "How Live Captions Work," a page on the Riverbend Captioning School website. A computer program reads each stroke and matches it to a word in the captioner's own dictionary. Captioners build these dictionaries over years of practice. Before a show begins, a captioner often adds names and hard words that might come up, such as the name of a new street or a visiting speaker. Live captions usually appear on the screen a few seconds after the words are spoken.

4Source 3: "Words for Everyone," a short video on a public TV station's website. In the video, a captioner explains that captions help people who are deaf or hard of hearing follow the news. Captions also help people watching in noisy places, such as a busy restaurant, and people who are learning a new language. Recorded shows, such as movies, can be captioned ahead of time, but live news must be captioned as it happens.

5Jada now had details from her own memory, one print source and two digital sources. Her teacher, Mr. Okafor, reminded the class of three research rules: write notes in your own words, keep each note short, and list every source at the end of the report.