Like many other working mothers, Sally Bennett starts her day by checking on the kids, going into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and catching up on the news. If she were to miss a news story on television, however, the ramifications would extend far beyond her kitchen. Bennett, often working from her home in Cambridge [Ohio], provides closed captions for local and national TV newscasts.

Begun as a service for the estimated 28 million people who are deaf or hard of hearing in the United States, closed captioning has a more diverse audience today. It also helps viewers of varying ages learn English, develop reading skills and watch television in noisy environments such as bars, gyms and airports.

The captioning job — still "one of the best-kept secrets there is," Bennett said — is held by an estimated 500 people nationwide. That number is likely to rise as networks and stations seek to meet the federally mandated goal of providing captioning for essentially all new programs by 2006.

Since 1976, when the Federal Communications Commission set aside Line 21 on the standard TV screen for the transmission of encoded captions, the real-time captioning of newscasts and captioning on VHS copies of films and TV shows have grown steadily. [Real-time captioning was actually introduced by NCI in 1982.]

"The response has been amazing," said Gary Burgard of Professional Reporters Inc., a Columbus company that has provided closed captioning for live broadcasts of the governor's State of the State speech as well as local newscasts. "Hearing-impaired people used to have no clue what was going on." "You know you're doing something useful," said Patty Geissler, a captioner for Caption Colorado, which serves WCMH-TV (Channel 4) and WSYX (Channel 6). "People are getting news in a timely fashion who otherwise might not." "You don't think about it," Burgard said. "But working here I've' become very aware that people with hearing or vision impairments need to be put on an equal footing. They're not handicapped; they just don’t see or hear as well as the rest of us."

Stations caption their newscasts in two ways:

Reporters and producers type the script into word processors. The script, which news anchors read on teleprompters, is simultaneously transmitted electronically to viewers.

People such as Bennett provide the translations. Such a method, which involves two telephone lines, is used most often for live, unscripted shows or live segments such as weather reports.

"Viewers without hearing problems can easily discern the difference between the methods," said Marvin Born, vice president of engineering at WBNS-TV (Channel 10)[Columbus, Ohio]. "If you're listening to an anchor and the words appear the second they say them, it's from the teleprompter. If there's a delay of a few seconds between when the anchor says the words and when the words appear on screen, you'll know it's live captioning."

Like many other captioners, Bennett learned her skills as a court reporter — a job she held for 16 years. "I used to love court reporting, but I burned out hearing about all those sad things going on." She turned to captioning in 1996 after being certified as a real-time reporter.

Minutes before a telecast, Bennett calls a number that ties her into the live audio line. She uses another phone line to link her computerized equipment to that of the news studio, which transmits her transcriptions to viewers.

Bennett uses a court stenographer's machine that ties into a laptop computer. The computer monitors the average number of words per minute as well as the percentage of correctly transcribed words.
She is qualified at 280 words a minute, a good clip faster than the 230 words a minute that newscasts average. She types correctly at least 99 percent of the time.

Spelling names correctly in live segments can be difficult. Mistakes involving the names of local places, Burgard said, may be the result of stations' increasing use of national companies whose captioners are based all over the country. Out-of-state captioners are "not familiar with the Olentangy River, for instance, and the misspellings that come up are pretty funny," Burgard said. "It's good to do closed captioning locally if only for that reason." Yet even a local captioner may seem to trip up.