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NVRC News 9/8/07 TDI Conference - TV Captioning Issues #2
Panel Discussion
By Lise Hamlin 9/7/07
VITAC, A Captioning Provider
Heather York is the marketing manager for VITAC, a captioning provider. Heather was there to talk about common types of viewer issues received by a captioning provider and strategies to resolve them.
VITAC captions about 150,000 hours of programming every year for NBC, BC, and most of the cable networks. While their customers are the networks and the programmers, their goal is to please the people who see the captions. One of the things Heather does at VITAC is respond to questions and complaints from people who are having trouble with captioning.
Heather reported that at VITAC receives about 250 emails a year from consumers who are having trouble with their captions in one way or another. One of the customers told her that for every one complaint they receive, they assume they have a thousand other people who haven't taken the time to comment but were bothered similarly by the problem. So, approximately 250,000 households are affected by captioning problems she has received. And VITAC is just one company receiving these captioning complaints.
The most common complaints she hears about are:
1) No captions -- on the entire TV show, at the start of the show, at the end of the show, and on a whole network.
2) Bad captions: garbled captions, captions that jump up and down on the screen, misspellings, or captions that don't reference proper names or places so you have no idea what they're talking about.
3) Spanish caption problems from people who don't know how to turn Spanish captions off their TV when they pop up.
Heather does share these complaints with her customers, the networks and programmers. She says, “If the screen went black, millions of people would have a problem. Captions should be treated the same way. In short, we tell them captions should say what they're saying, no matter what the problem is.”
There are three places where captioning problems occur:
1) At the production of the actual captions. This results in getting bad captions because of sloppy captioning, poor training, equipment failure or technical difficulties.
2) In the distribution of captioning. This presents a lot of problems: problems with the network airing the program or at the cable or satellite end .
3) A problem with the television set.
VITAC finds most consumers who have a problem end up getting bounced around between three people. The cable company says it's the TV, the network says it's the cable company, the cable company says it's the network.
Three steps that VITAC recommends to resolve captioning complaints:
1) Check your TV. If the same problem shows up on more than one set, it’s not the TV at fault. If the problem is on one TV and not other, it's probably your TV is to blame.
2) Contact your local cable or satellite provider. Be very detailed with what you tell them. Name, channel you were watching, program you were watching, date and time of the problem. Description of the problem and indicate that you confirmed the problem is not your television. Give them 24 hours.
3) Contact the network on which you experienced the problem.
4) Contact the FCC
Apparently, emailing one party and copying the others -- such as the network, the cable company and the FCC -- works well and helps the people get responses. It doesn't always work. Sometimes consumers need to go to their elected officials. But it has worked well in several cases.
Marsha McBride is the executive Vice President of the Legal Department for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). She was at the conference to talk about broadcaster issues with closed captioning and how they're being resolved.
Marsha noted that NAB has been participating in the rule making process on behalf of the broadcasters of the United States. She said the one place where consumers and broadcasters totally agreed was the issue of notice about complaints and how they should be handled. NAB would like to be in a position where if they did get an e-mail, that broadcasters would know immediately whether it was their problem or the cable system, and that they would be able to respond to that quickly.
NAB believes there should be an easy way to know who to call or email at the broadcast station. All of those things would facilitate not only consumers getting better treatment and better captioning, but also give broadcasters a better understanding of what kinds of problems they could anticipate.
NAB also agrees that 30 days for a turn around is absolutely the maximum that there should be for a response. NAB has polled their broadcasters and found they would actually like to be able to fix problems immediately when it can be done. Marsha indicated the biggest frustration that broadcasters face is that there is a limited number of realtime captioners and voice recognition technology is not as good as they had anticipated it would be by now.
Most of the members of NAB are small individual stations or group owners in areas from Idaho to Kansas. The smaller broadcaster aren’t able to purchase captioning for 15 stations the way the bigger broadcasters can, so they can’t get as good a rate for captioning. In some cases, those broadcasters end up buying captioning from a service that perhaps isn't as good as the service could be.
NAB is working with the captioning community to try to figure out what to do until voice recognition technology finally catches up.
Marsha indicated NAB is concerned that a very high captioning standard would be a problem because new technologies don’t have a good
performance record yet. NAB would like to be able to continue to adopt some of the new technologies.
“I think not enough has changed at this point that I think that we would agree that all of the changes that have been recommended by TDI
should be adopted,” Marsha said. “I think we are willing to sit down and work with both the captioners and the community, the hearing-impaired, to see are there things that we can do? There will be things that we can't agree on. That's for sure. But if there are a series of things that we can agree on and we can take that as a solution, at least an interim solution for a three or four-year period, then I think maybe we could sit down and get some of the other problems fixed.”
Marsha also suggested she’d like to see more federal grants to develop voice recognition and other new technologies to support captioning.
©2007 by Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing
Panel Discussion
By Lise Hamlin 9/7/07
VITAC, A Captioning Provider
Heather York is the marketing manager for VITAC, a captioning provider. Heather was there to talk about common types of viewer issues received by a captioning provider and strategies to resolve them.
VITAC captions about 150,000 hours of programming every year for NBC, BC, and most of the cable networks. While their customers are the networks and the programmers, their goal is to please the people who see the captions. One of the things Heather does at VITAC is respond to questions and complaints from people who are having trouble with captioning.
Heather reported that at VITAC receives about 250 emails a year from consumers who are having trouble with their captions in one way or another. One of the customers told her that for every one complaint they receive, they assume they have a thousand other people who haven't taken the time to comment but were bothered similarly by the problem. So, approximately 250,000 households are affected by captioning problems she has received. And VITAC is just one company receiving these captioning complaints.
The most common complaints she hears about are:
1) No captions -- on the entire TV show, at the start of the show, at the end of the show, and on a whole network.
2) Bad captions: garbled captions, captions that jump up and down on the screen, misspellings, or captions that don't reference proper names or places so you have no idea what they're talking about.
3) Spanish caption problems from people who don't know how to turn Spanish captions off their TV when they pop up.
Heather does share these complaints with her customers, the networks and programmers. She says, “If the screen went black, millions of people would have a problem. Captions should be treated the same way. In short, we tell them captions should say what they're saying, no matter what the problem is.”
There are three places where captioning problems occur:
1) At the production of the actual captions. This results in getting bad captions because of sloppy captioning, poor training, equipment failure or technical difficulties.
2) In the distribution of captioning. This presents a lot of problems: problems with the network airing the program or at the cable or satellite end .
3) A problem with the television set.
VITAC finds most consumers who have a problem end up getting bounced around between three people. The cable company says it's the TV, the network says it's the cable company, the cable company says it's the network.
Three steps that VITAC recommends to resolve captioning complaints:
1) Check your TV. If the same problem shows up on more than one set, it’s not the TV at fault. If the problem is on one TV and not other, it's probably your TV is to blame.
2) Contact your local cable or satellite provider. Be very detailed with what you tell them. Name, channel you were watching, program you were watching, date and time of the problem. Description of the problem and indicate that you confirmed the problem is not your television. Give them 24 hours.
3) Contact the network on which you experienced the problem.
4) Contact the FCC
Apparently, emailing one party and copying the others -- such as the network, the cable company and the FCC -- works well and helps the people get responses. It doesn't always work. Sometimes consumers need to go to their elected officials. But it has worked well in several cases.
Marsha McBride is the executive Vice President of the Legal Department for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). She was at the conference to talk about broadcaster issues with closed captioning and how they're being resolved.
Marsha noted that NAB has been participating in the rule making process on behalf of the broadcasters of the United States. She said the one place where consumers and broadcasters totally agreed was the issue of notice about complaints and how they should be handled. NAB would like to be in a position where if they did get an e-mail, that broadcasters would know immediately whether it was their problem or the cable system, and that they would be able to respond to that quickly.
NAB believes there should be an easy way to know who to call or email at the broadcast station. All of those things would facilitate not only consumers getting better treatment and better captioning, but also give broadcasters a better understanding of what kinds of problems they could anticipate.
NAB also agrees that 30 days for a turn around is absolutely the maximum that there should be for a response. NAB has polled their broadcasters and found they would actually like to be able to fix problems immediately when it can be done. Marsha indicated the biggest frustration that broadcasters face is that there is a limited number of realtime captioners and voice recognition technology is not as good as they had anticipated it would be by now.
Most of the members of NAB are small individual stations or group owners in areas from Idaho to Kansas. The smaller broadcaster aren’t able to purchase captioning for 15 stations the way the bigger broadcasters can, so they can’t get as good a rate for captioning. In some cases, those broadcasters end up buying captioning from a service that perhaps isn't as good as the service could be.
NAB is working with the captioning community to try to figure out what to do until voice recognition technology finally catches up.
Marsha indicated NAB is concerned that a very high captioning standard would be a problem because new technologies don’t have a good
performance record yet. NAB would like to be able to continue to adopt some of the new technologies.
“I think not enough has changed at this point that I think that we would agree that all of the changes that have been recommended by TDI
should be adopted,” Marsha said. “I think we are willing to sit down and work with both the captioners and the community, the hearing-impaired, to see are there things that we can do? There will be things that we can't agree on. That's for sure. But if there are a series of things that we can agree on and we can take that as a solution, at least an interim solution for a three or four-year period, then I think maybe we could sit down and get some of the other problems fixed.”
Marsha also suggested she’d like to see more federal grants to develop voice recognition and other new technologies to support captioning.
©2007 by Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing
