Job: Broadcast captioner, Sandy Springs
What I do: When news happens, you can find Heidi Thomas watching television in her basement. From her windowless studio, she is one of the people who make the media's message accessible to people with hearing disabilities. She creates the captions that appear along the bottoms of TV screens on sets that are properly equipped and have the captioning feature turned on.
Her fingers fly over the keys of a stenograph, a machine that looks like a tiny combination of a typewriter and a piano, as she accurately and nearly instantaneously transcribes what's being said. It's the same machine that court reporters use to keep verbatim transcripts of what's being said in a courtroom.
Thomas, 51, also takes on less-public work, doing Communication Access Real-time Translation for college students, convention participants or people at business meetings.
Heidi Thomas demonstrates how she uses a television and a stenograph to create closed captions for live broadcasts of news, sports and other events. Like most captioners, she works from home; her office is in her basement. She especially enjoys working with individual clients who need her to transcribe lectures in classes or at business meetings.
In those situations, she accompanies a person who has a hearing impairment and transcribes what the professor or presenter is saying, while her client watches the words appear on a laptop computer. She even can do the captioning from her studio, if the speaker is using a microphone and the client is connected with Thomas over a high-speed wireless Internet connection. The audio hookup goes through an Internet phone connection, and Thomas transcribes the lecture while listening from home. Sometimes, a client uses a cellphone with a speaker.
"It's pretty low-tech, as tech is these days," Thomas said.
Captioning for television is remarkably low-tech as well. The connections are usually dial-up, and the captioner writes as he or she listens. In fact, satellite hookups don't work. Because of the few-second delay in bouncing signals into space, the captioner gets too far behind the speaker.
Thomas says she enjoys her CART work most. "I enjoy listening to lectures about art history or calculus. . . . And they're paying me to go to school, to watch TV."
What got me interested in this: "This job didn't exist" when Thomas started as a court reporter in 1978. She went into that field because "I love words, and I love the machine," she said, referring to the stenograph.
Users are able to produce verbatim transcripts with it by typing what amounts to shorthand. What looks like random letters and spaces turns into full words and phrases with the help of training and a computerized dictionary.
Thomas began captioning in the mid-'80s, when a local television station began using captioning and hired court reporters.
Best part of my job: "Being able to work from home," Thomas said, adding that she enjoys the constant learning.
Most challenging part: "Doing the research to be prepared for each new assignment," she said. "There's so much you have to know." A captioner needs to be familiar with the vocabulary and the names of people who might be mentioned.
What people don't know about my job: "People don't have any idea that, when they watch live TV, there's a human being behind the machine writing down every word," she said. A captioner has to listen, then accurately record what's being said as it's being said.
After the terrorist attacks in 2001, she said, "every minute was captioned." Thomas worked nearly nonstop for national media, primarily NBC, at the time.
Thomas
What keeps me going: "The gratitude and thanks I get from deaf and hard-of-hearing customers when I work with them on-site," Thomas said.
Preparation needed for this job: You need training as a court reporter and in CART captioning from an approved school. It takes about three years to get a certificate. You also need flexibility to work any time important events happen, and you have to love words, she added.
Most captioners are independent contractors who work from home, like Thomas. She also co-owns a captioning business, EduCaption, which employs other captioners. Most of her television business now is from a local station and religious ministries.
Captioners buy their own equipment and software, but after the initial investment, there are few ongoing expenses other than telephone charges, Thomas said.
Thomas graduated from the Brown College of Court Reporting and Medical Transcription in Atlanta and later received her CART training. She has captioned news, sports and entertainment programs for the major broadcast networks, CNN, ESPN and Home Shopping Network.
- By Karl W. Ritzler, for ajcjobs. Got an interesting job that you love? E-mail your story to jobseditor@ajc.com.