Closed Captioning
AmeriCaption, Inc., provides closed captioning in realtime excellence that sets the standard high for the level of quality that can be achieved in realtime. Our well-informed captioners draw upon their skills of accuracy and speed to deliver reliable and consistent captions from start to finish.
What is Realtime Captioning?
Captions are the words that appear at the bottom or top of your television screen so that you can read what you may not be able to hear. "Realtime" captioning is done by a stenocaptionist using a steno machine, which you have no doubt seen used by a court reporter. The software in our computers matches our writing strokes on the steno machine to our personal dictionaries -- often well over 100,000 words, phrases, suffixes and prefixes -- and translates it at speeds often up to 280 words per minute and even higher.
How does the realtime captioning make it to the video?
The captioner connects to the encoder at the television station through a modem or an Internet connection. The encoder embeds the captioning into the video picture. By turning the closed captioning on in your television, you can view these realtime captions with less than a three-second delay.
What are pop-on captions?
Pop-on captions contain a phrase or a sentence and are timed to appear the moment the words are spoken. Pop-on captions are used in prerecorded television programs and movies.
What is open captioning?
“Open captioning” means the captions are viewable by everybody whether or not you have turned the decoder on in the television, and the captions cannot be turned off. “Closed captioning” is only viewable when you have the decoder in your television turned on.
Why is the weather not captioned on my local newscast?
Some broadcast stations use a newsroom software program which allows the viewer to read the newscasters' script files. These often contain cue symbols to the anchors and can contain many misspellings and information which is confusing to the reader. And, unfortunately, when they go to "live" news and weather, there is no script, and thus there is no captioning.
Why are my captions garbled?
Some may think captioners are occasionally really bad spellers, but there’s a good chance that the misspelled words are the result of a poor video signal into the home or a faulty decoder chip in the television resulting in “garbled captions.” Before giving up on using captions, view the captions on a different television in another room. If the captions are still garbled, ask a neighbor to check the captions in their home. If the neighbor is having a problem, too, then it’s time to notify the station and your cable or satellite provider.
