Closed Captioning of TV and Internet Broadcasts of Legislative Proceedings

Changes or additions? Contact Pam Greenberg, NCSL, 303-364-7700 ext. 1413 or pam.greenberg at ncsl.org.

Nevada Legislature Develops Web Captioning System for the Hearing Impaired
While technology can provide some elegant solutions, cost is still a major factor

Excerpt from NALIT Newsletter, Winter 2004

By Andy Harvey
Nevada Legislature
aharvey@lcb.state.nv.us

Arguably, the single biggest reason the Internet has grown so rapidly in the past decade is that it makes vast amounts of information accessible to people regardless of time or location. The challenge for the future is to make that information available to the broadest range of people, including those with various physical limitations. Because it can make vital information available to its citizens, government should be a leader in this field. The concept is obvious and important, but its execution can be complex and costly.

The Nevada legislative website has followed the Bobby guidelines for several years now, and is Bobby Priority 1 compliant. This standard, however, seems to favor the visually impaired, in part because the Internet is text oriented. As with most legislatures, a priority for the Nevada legislative website is the audio/video broadcasting of committee hearings and floor meetings. This can raise issues for the hearing impaired. This past year, we were contacted by the Nevada Deaf and Hard of Hearing Advocacy Resource Center asking if we would work with them to find ways to make our Internet broadcasts more accessible. This request led to the development of our new system.

Our system is based on court reporters utilizing stenograph machines. The spoken words in a meeting are typed into a stenograph. The text is then sent over the Internet to an outside company that converts the stenograph text into electronic, Internet-ready text, and sends it back to us via the Internet. We are able to post that text next to the Internet broadcast on one web page as follows:

The font style and size can be selected and the font color and background color can be set by the user. This allows each user to select the settings that are most comfortable for them. Having the video and text side by side on one web page makes it easier for the reader to see (via the video) who is speaking. It also allows them to see any graphics that may be a part of the meeting that the camera can zoom in on.

This arrangement represents an ideal version for the captioning of meetings via the Internet, but there are significant issues that it raises. The primary issue is cost. A court stenographer can charge $100 - $150 dollars per hour. The outside company that converts the stenograph text to make it Internet ready can charge $75.00 - $100 per hour. At these rates, it quickly became clear to us that a goal of captioning all meetings in their entirety would be cost prohibitive. But, at least in our state, it may not be necessary. At this time, the Nevada Legislature will provide a “signer” at any committee meeting at the request of a hearing impaired person. The cost is about $50 per hour. We have only a few requests per year. Our first regular usage of the electronic captioning will probably work in a similar manner. We will only caption meetings that are requested. While this will greatly reduce the cost, cost will still be a significant factor. We hope to devise a plan that will see the legislature pay some of the cost, and we are open to finding a corporate or foundation sponsor that can pay some of the cost. We would be willing to put a sponsor’s logo or mention on our website.

Another issue that has come up is timing the electronic text to the electronic video. The outside company that converts the electronic text can set it to be in sync with the video it sees on the Internet broadcast. That works fine. But the issue that can create a delay is the buffering of the broadcast on an individual’s machine. Buffering can be affected by Internet data speed and the processing speed of the user’s computer. While this can cause a sync issue of 10 or 15 seconds, the system still seems to work well enough.

We have also had discussions on whether we should allow users to save the electronic text that is sent to their screen. Having a transcript of a meeting that is instant and accurate to the level of a court reporter at first seems ideal. In Nevada, however, this will not be allowed. By statute, the official record of any legislative meeting is the minutes. The purpose of the minutes in Nevada is primarily to record the intent of a committee. An exact transcript of a meeting does not address intent. So viewers will be allowed to see the text over the Internet, but not save it.

Finally, the way the text is provided over the Internet and on our website is by use of JavaScript and a cookie. It becomes important that privacy policies indicate this.

One frequent question we are asked is if we have tested voice translation software so that a court reporter is not needed. We have. The issue with voice recognition is that it “learns” one person’s voice to become more accurate. Obviously, in the legislative environment, there are many speakers in many meetings, so voice recognition software is not nearly accurate enough. We considered training one person who could repeat everything spoken in a meeting, but even then, the level of accuracy was not high enough.

Given all the issues this project has brought forward, we still think it is a highly useful system and testing with our hearing-impaired users shows they agree. We believe it is a system that can be refined and made useful here and one that can be copied and used in other states as well.