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Closed Captioning Provides Assistance for Several Audiences
While broadcasters are required by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to include closed captioning for much of their programming, some federal govern­ment video projects may also require cap­tioning under recently enacted legislation.

As discussed in several "Market Watch" columns (May, September, and October 2001), Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1998 is designed to help disabled federal workers use "electronic and information technology." According to Victor Block, government sales account executive for Vitac, that require­ment extends to video.

"Any video that is produced that is vital to the agency's mis­sion would be covered under Section 508," he explained. That means training videos need cap­tioning, though non-essential videos (such as a video montage built for someone's retirement party) would not.

Beyond the legal require­ments, however, various govern­ment video projects, including educational programs and video presentations in noisy environ­ments, could also benefit from this technology.

More Than Compliance
Closed captioning visually describes dialogue and other sounds through visual text. The technology emerged in 1990 when the Television Decoder Circuitry Act (TDCA) required all stations to begin provid­ing closed captioning in their broadcasts.

According to the FCC, the Telecommunication Act of 1996 mandated captioning for the entire broadcast industry, with full captioning compliance - 100 per­cent of all new, non-exempt video program­ming-by2006.

The law doesn't require captioning of home videos or video games, and there are many exceptions and potential exemptions. Beyond broadcast and Section 508 compli­ance, however, captioning can serve a num­ber of potential viewers.

"Ten percent of the population is hearing impaired," said Mike Lyons, vice president of offline operations at Caption Colorado, "so that's a huge chunk of people potentially that are not receiving your message."

Other audiences may benefit from it as well, such as viewers at sporting events or kiosks in high traffic areas, according to Sidney Hoffman, project manager for Computer Prompting & Captioning. "Any place video is being shown in a noisy envi­ronment, closed captions will allow the audi­ence to understand what is being spoken by reading instead of listening," he said.

Closed captioning also serves an educa­tional purpose, Hoffman added. "Captions can be used to learn English as a second lan­guage, [and they] can also be used to help children learn to read," he said.

Hoffman compared it to subtitles, but with two differences. "Viewers can turn the captions on or off, whereas subtitles are always visible," he said. "Also, closed captions typically appear as white characters on a black background in a single font, while sub­titles can appear in any font in any color."

Others may benefit from closed caption­ing as well, Lyons pointed out. "ESL stu­dents," for example, he said, "or the times you yourself have relied on captioning at the health club or at a noisy kiosk." Block added that some studies showed captioning helped with retention rates.

Because closed captioning can only be viewed through a special decoder, most televisions come with a caption decoders as a stan­dard feature, noted Vladymir Rogov, vice president of marketing at Z Microsystems. Hoffman added that all television sets that are 13 inches or larger have built-in closed cap­tion decoders, eliminating the need for a separate decoder.

Technically Speaking
There are two main types of captioning, explained Lyons. "Real-time [captioning] is the only workable method for captioning live events, including newscasts and sporting events," he said. "A real-time captioner (sometimes referred to as a steno-captioner) typically works from a remote location and listens to an audio feed of the event and sends back the caption data to an encoder at the transmission site. A stenograph machine used in conjunction with spe­cial CC software makes this possible. It's simi­lar to what you see with a court reporter."

The second is called off-line captioning, which is ideal for pre-recorded programs, "so time can be spent on style and accuracy issues," Lyons explained. "It will take any­where from 8 to 12 work hours to complete one hour of video. There should be no laten­cy issues and the error rate for off-line should be virtually zero."

Closed captioning operates like a toggle switch. Because the captioning decoder is built into the production system, viewers usually turn it on or off via the handheld television remote control. When the decoder is turned off, the captions disappear.

Rogov explained that a specially trained captioner operates a piece of hardware that functions like a court reporting system. "As the video is played, the captioner keys in the scene descriptions and the dialogue," he explained. "The specially formatted text is [then] inserted into the broadcast video on line 21 of the vertical blanking interval [VBI] and recorded for later broadcast or sent out in real time to the transmission facility."

Various captioning software, such as CPC's CaptionMax, for example, is used to position the captions on the video, either to the right, left, top, or bottom, explained Hoffman. "Time code is used to synchronize the captions with the dialogue, and a closed caption encoder is then used to encode the captions onto the video."

But closed captioning is not only useful for aiding the hearing impaired in watching pro­grams. CaptionMax can also be used to cap­tion streamed video over the Web and to cap­tion DVDs, Hoffman added. "Both webcasts and DVDs are captioned using virtually the same file, which is exported in the appropriate format," he said. "In a nutshell, once a video is captioned, a webcast of the video and a DVD version can be captioned with virtually no additional work [using CaptionMaker]."

According to Rogov, a lot of agencies and organizations want to monitor what is being aired on TV the task for which ZVideo, Z Microsystems' staple captioning device, was designed.

"ZVideo leverages the CC by stripping out the CC and indexing it in a database with the video. The working concept of Zvideo is that [it] enables a knowledge worker [such as an intelligence analyst or government official] to leverage video as another source of real-time information," he said. "This person is not stuck in front of the TV surfing for relevant information to their job." By using Zvideo to caption, workers can analyze domain-specif­ic information in a timely fashion.

Caption Colorado, offers two captioning products, Premiere Offline and Value Offline. Premiere Offline is geared toward the high­end television industry, providing highly customized captioning features, such as pop-on style captions, specialized screen placement, speaker identifications, italics, special characters, and sound effects. The product involves a five-step design and editing process, but "does much more than sim­ply display the text of a program," Lyons explained. "It helps the viewer follow a story line, become aware of mood and feeling, and allows them to fully enjoy the entire viewing experience."

Value Offline provides FCC-compliant captioning, Lyons said. "That's what we recommend for productions that are instructional or informational in nature," said Lyons. "Two or three line roll-up cap­tions are placed at the bottom of the screen, and the product is edited twice to ensure all content is free of spelling and grammatical errors."

About Z Microsystems Inc.
Z Microsystems leads the "field-ready" deployable computing category. Focused on the military and government arena, Z Microsystems' field-ready commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) computing solutions such as flat panel displays, computers, and storage systems are considered a superset to traditional MIL-STD equipment. Z Microsystems also develops ZViDEO, a sophisticated multimedia news system with the ability to capture, monitor, index, search, and retrieve video assets in real-time.

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