Real-Time Captioners

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) predicts that employment for all court reporting occupations will grow more slowly than the average, around 2 percent, from 2023 through 2033. Job opportunities in the motion picture and video industries (+10.7 percent) and educational services-state and local (+5.2 percent) sectors—which are major employers of real-time caoptioners—will be better.

"Demand for simultaneous captioners will be influenced by federal regulations requiring an expanded use of captioning for television, the internet, and other technologies," according to the DOL. "New television programming will continue to need closed captioning. An increase in the number of older people, a group that may experience hearing loss, also will spur demand for simultaneous captioners who provide communication access real-time translation (CART) or who accompany clients to proceedings such as doctor appointments, town hall meetings, or religious services. In addition, movie theaters and sports stadiums will provide closed captioning for attendees who are deaf or hard of hearing."

Digital and high-definition TV (DTV and HDTV) also continue to make captioning more desirable and useful to more people, thereby increasing demand for captioners. DTV and HDTV enhancements allow viewers with poor vision to adjust text-size, styles, and fonts. They also allow for more non-English letters, as well as more information transmitted per minute.

Captioners should focus first on the area where they want to live and work. To caption area news or city council meetings in a local area or do conventions in a large hotel, captioners must first obtain some costly supplies. These include a laptop or notebook computer, a compatible steno writer, cables, modem, and captioning software. Captioners may also need a character generator to project onto a large convention screen.

Captioners should learn the basic real-time skills that will enable them to do any live translating or interpreting on the computer. With such skills, they will be eligible for a variety of positions, including working in a computer-integrated courtroom; taking real-time depositions for attorneys; providing accompanying litigation support, such as key word indexing; real-timing or captioning in the classroom; or doing broadcast captioning. The future looks great for those who qualify themselves to perform real-time translation.

Other opportunities for the real-time captioner include working with hospitals that specialize in cochlear implants. For late-deafened adults who learned English before sign language, if they learned to sign at all, captions provide a far greater comprehension level. Additionally, some local news stations across the country are working to expand and improve the quality of their local captioning capabilities, providing yet another source of potential employment for the real-time captioner.