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From: Jack.O'keeffe@p0.f89.n129.z1.fidonet.org (Jack O'keeffe)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Re: Problems with ABC's closed captions
Message-ID: <13487@bunker.UUCP>
Date: 14 Aug 90 13:45:53 GMT
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[This is from the Silent Talk Conference]

To: osmigo@emx.utexas.edu (Ron Morgan)

 RM> As a rule, I'm constantly frustrated by the abysmal quality of
 RM> the closed captioning during the evening news (Brokaw,
 RM> Jennings, Rather).

Welcome to the club, Ron.  Some of the gaffes are classic, but if
I wanted comedy I would be watching Jackie Gleason reruns.

Do you get the 'early' or the 'late' version of the network news?
The 'early' is captioned in realtime live and usually airs at 6:30 pm
eastern time.  NCI attempts to clean up the mess for rebroadcast about
one-half hour later.  We get the early CBS and ABC here, and the late
NBC.  The difference is quite apparent.

I believe this problem will be with us to some extent as long as
the captioning process involves using court reporters on stenotype
machines attempting to write captions in realtime.  Wouldn't the
precision of the captioning be better if the caption writer could
key captions in advance from the same script that the news reader
uses.  All we'd miss then are Rather's ad-libs, and those I can
cheerfully do without.

Two of our TV broadcasters use quite a different system for captioning
local news.  The caption text is extracted from the same teleprompter
script that the talking head reads.  It works better and is much less
expensive than the network system.  All we miss is live remote feeds
which are not scripted in advance for the teleprompter.

For a long time I thought that ABC did the best captioning job of any
of the three networks.  But all of them seem to be slipping lately.
Maybe the first team is on vacation and the apprentice captioners
are working the summer programs.

 RM> Is anyone else here seeing this? Please respond, as I'm preparing
 RM> to contact ABC and/or the National Captioning Institute about it.

By all means, contact them.  We'll not get quality unless we insist on
it.  Let us know what they have to say.

BTW, I thing Jennings is the easiest to speechread, with Brokaw a
close second and Rather a distant third.  It would be interesting
to have the opinion of other SilentTalkers on this.  Let's take
a poll.

... Jack.

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