Video captions, also known as same-language subtitles, benefit everyone who watches videos (children, adolescents, college students, and adults). More than 100 empirical studies document that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video. Captions are particularly beneficial for persons watching videos in their non-native language, for children and adults learning to read, and for persons who are D/deaf or hard of hearing. However, despite U.S. laws, which require captioning in most workplace and educational contexts, many video audiences and video creators are naive about the legal mandate to caption, much less the empirical benefit of captions.

Video Captions Benefit Everyone

Over the last half-century, the techniques and technologies used by courtroom stenographers have been transformed from mechanical tools to digital computers, from just-in-time print to real-time display, and from information commodity to information service. And as with the labor pools of other services related to information, both the sexual demographics and cultural gendering of courtroom stenography have changed, being now a specialized field dominated by females. None of these changes was obvious, deterministic, or uncontested. This article draws upon the published primary and secondary writings of courtroom-technology innovators, courtroom personnel managers, and professional court reporters to relate the story of the computerization of courtroom stenography.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/technology_and_culture/v047/47.1downey.pdf

Constructing "Computer-Compatible" Stenographers: The Transition to Real-time Transcription in Courtroom Reporting

/pdf/the-benefit-to-the-deaf-of-real-time-captions-in-a-vtal7w0klm.pdf

The benefit to the deaf of real -time captions in a mainstream classroom environment.

This is the fifth in a series of articles reviewing the scientific literature on computers and the physically hadicapped. Please see the Spring, 1983 issue of the SIGCAPH newsletter (No. 32) for a description of this series. This article is a bibliography of articles appearing in the literature between January, 1975 and December, 1980 concerning the speech impaired and the hearing impaired. Note that Part IV, Vol. 35 was erroneously titled Part V. It should be Part IV. The literature 1975-1090 is large enough to be listed in two parts, V-A and V-B. Articles are backordered and the publishing schedule will depend on their arrival.

An annotated bibliography on computers and the physically handicapped Part V-A: The speech impaired and hearing impaired, 1975-1980

This study focused on the occurrence of errors during real-time captioning of live news programs. An analysis was conducted of the types and frequencies of errors that took place during a span of 5 hours oflive captioned television. Thirty-minute segments from 10 different live news programs were randomly selected for analysis. Each error was recorded as it was detected and a list of errors, along with the corresponding spoken messages were compiled. A total of 235 caption errors were identified with an average of 23.5 errors on each station. The most common error categories were spelling errors (33%), word substitution errors (19%), and phonetic system errors (13%). Teachers should become actively involved in the process of preparing deaf students to mentally repair these errors when possible. In order to foster incidental learning, strategies are suggested for educators to use in the classroom to better prepare their deaf students to deal with the most common types of errors that they will face during real-time caption viewing.

/pdf/an-analysis-of-real-time-captioning-errors-implications-for-jo2m3bmbfz.pdf

Robert Shumway

Papers

Real-time captioning--promise for the future.