Stenography Equipment

Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 11:07 pm

stenography equipment

Legislation stemming from the Telecommunications Act of 1996 making closed captioning on television mandatory has greatly increased the demand for captioning services. Perhaps you are interested in becoming a captioner, either offline or realtime (live). It is easier to become an offline captioner than a realtime captioner, but there is more money, and possibly more job security, in realtime captioning.

Offline Captioner
The offline captioner captions pre-recorded video programming such as movies and television programming. Software for offline captioning is readily available and that offline captioning does involve some skill, such as learning time codes and synchronizing them with the captions, using computers, and having good English skills.

Some captioning services will transcribe a script before captioning, meaning that they listen to the video program and prepare a script to work with for captioning purposes. It is usually less expensive to caption if there is a prepared script already. The ease of getting into the business has helped to keep the cost of offline captioning down. In addition to independent captioning services, many post-production houses also offer offline captioning services.

Realtime Captioning
Becoming a realtime captioner, sometimes called a broadcast captioner, stenocaptioner, or real-time captioner, involves intensive training and practice. The realtime captioner may work independently as a contractor, or as an employee of a captioning service or television station. More court reporting schools and colleges, particularly community colleges, are offering broadcast captioning training to meet the increased demand.

This is a job that can be done remotely because it involves a link to the live broadcast feed, meaning telecommuting is possible. However, at-home broadcast captioner often have to buy their own computers, software, and captioning equipment. In addition, a realtime captioner must invest additional hours outside of the actual captioning, to preparing for a broadcast by making sure their equipment’s dictionaries are up to date with the terms that they will be captioning.