What is broadcast captioning? How does it relate to court reporting?
Broadcast captioners, also called stenocaptioners, use court-reporting skills to provide captions of live television programs for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers through RealTime technology that instantly produces readable English text. Stenocaptioners work for local stations, national channels, and networks captioning news, emergency broadcasts, sports events, and other programming. The Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 has specific mandates for closed captioning of local programs around the country with phase-in dates in 2002, 2004, and 2006. What this means for the reporting community is an enormous increase in the demand for RealTime captioners to cover local news broadcasts all around the country — mornings, afternoons, and evenings.
