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We've always had a strange fascination with closed captioning. Is there a person sitting in a dark room typing the information in real-time? Have the words been "closed captioned" before the airing of the program? Are monkeys responsible for the words that magically appear on the screen? After a bit of searching, we learned that closed captioning is pretty straightforward. Our search on "closed captioning" directed us to Robson.org, a site brought to you by the Robson family. The site has a little bit of everything, including an excellent FAQ section that clearly explains closed captioning. We were a little skeptical, but
deemed the site's commentary reliable when we noticed that it was written by a gainfully employed stenocaptioner. Closed captioning for a live broadcast is very similar to court reporting -- stenocaptioners use a special keyboard to write what they hear as they hear it. Stenocaptioners are often capable of writing at speeds of up to 250 words a minute -- much faster than even the fastest typists. The typed words then go into a computer system, where they are translated into text and commands. Captioning software then converts the text into the captions which are then sent to a caption encoder. The results are what you see on the television screen, typos and all.
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