Captions?

I’ve been in video on and off since the early 1980’s. It was one of the skill sets I added while making a living as an applied anthropologist. It was not just another way of documenting behavior and events; it was a way of presenting them to a wider audience.

I had some great teachers, and they were eager to get their students to understand a very important lesson. The lesson is that in our rush to create fine video, we do not forget that the audio track is just as, if not more, important than the visual. The two go together to tell the story. The presentation is barren and incomplete without good audio.

So, fast-forward from the early days of my career as an anthropologist to my quasi-retired status running a small television station. What a thriller of fast montages from one stage to another! But telling stories in text, with images, and with audio always forms part of it.

But in the small world of public access television that I now inhabit, things regarding audio are getting complex. The Americans with Disabilities Act -ADA for short- is establishing new guidelines that go into effect in April 2027. The stations will be required to provide closed captioning or create simultaneous transcription of their live governmental meetings. Without getting too deep into the weeds with the requirement, we’ll be buying add-on equipment for our stations that will perform that service, write the transcription or captioning to the file, and then send the captioned file out via cablecast to the viewing public.

These value-added technologies will allow many more people in our communities to participate in local government. After all, you can’t really participate if you are disenfranchised because you can’t hear what’s being said.

Well, in a roundabout fashion, this leads me to online courses. In preparation for all the changes, I’ve been participating in online classes on the technology and on the ADA. The courses have been the best laid out I’ve ever run into. Rather than getting into the mud of running the equipment, the early sections deal in a very sensitive manner with the law, its importance, and how organizations like my own can come into compliance. Later we can talk about the care and feeding of the very expensive equipment needed to do it all.

Lacking the equipment at this point, we’ve made an effort at early compliance by subscribing to an online service that performs captioning and presents the meeting online to our community. Soon we’ll be updating our equipment for full compliance. The equipment for captioning also requires a subscription to the company providing it to pay for the hours captioned. A small station like mine might only use a hundred and fifty hours in a year. But larger organizations might need to pay much more.

Now comes the zinger. Yesterday afternoon I was in the station monitoring the feed on one of my public channels. I had programmed a classic horror movie from the 1950’s for that time slot, and I was monitoring the feed to make sure it was all working well. Then I noticed it. The company that had done the film/video to digital file transfer had also gone the extra step of captioning the movie.

It’s a vortex forming! Soon we’ll not only be captioning public meetings; we’ll need to caption all our content that we cablecast. Stupid me! I’ve been concentrating on the narrow issue without seeing the necessary wider need. I kind of felt dope slapped as the obvious hit me. Like any new value-added technology, the demand and need will grow, and the approach and technology are going to have to rapidly adapt.

And just when I thought I was going to retire!

What’s the best online course you’ve ever taken?

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