Inside Captioning: Excerpt

This is one of the case studies from Chapter 13 of Inside Captioning, which should give you a feeling for the content and writing style of the book. To see a list of the other case studies (and the rest of the contents of the book), take a look at the online table of contents.

Church Captioning

an excerpt from Inside Captioning

Closed captioning is known as a way for deaf people to watch television, but can it be used in a church or synagogue as well? Absolutely!

Closed captioning is a way to expand a ministry not only to deaf people, but to many hard-of-hearing people (especially the elderly) and to people just learning English as a second language.

It is a common misconception that closed captioning is only for deaf people. In fact, you will often hear it referred to as "closed captioning for the hearing-impaired." In reality, it is a much more general aid to understanding oral communications.

Even in the best of churches, the acoustics in the sanctuary aren't perfect, because there are a lot more criteria to the design of the sanctuary than just sound. It isn't only the deaf and seriously hearing-impaired people that sometimes have trouble understanding what is being said. Elderly people often develop loss of hearing within just one register, meaning that they may be able to hear and clearly understand a woman's speech, but not the deeper voice of a man.

Captioning provides, on a normal television monitor or projection TV, the text of the sermon so that people can watch both the face of the person speaking and the words being spoken. This close-up of the minister helps truly deaf people with their "speech reading," which involves reading lips, expressions, gestures, and body language.

People learning English as a second language are helped as well, because when they first hear an unfamiliar word, they can look at the screen to see how it is spelled, and possibly recognize it from their reading. It is easier for them to follow written English, where they don't have to worry about accents and pronunciation. They are likely to recognize in print names of people and places from the Bible, which they may never have heard spoken.

Offering captioning in a church better serves the existing congregation and spreads the Word to those that aren't being reached today. The age group that most wants and needs to hear the sermons is the elderly. These are people who may be embarrassed that they don't hear as well as they used to, and this may lead them to either sit in the pew, not comprehending the sermon, or simply not to attend services at all.

When word gets around about captioning, it attracts new members to the church. Elderly parishioners bring their friends. Deaf people spread the word through their community. People learning English are better able to understand the service because of these captions, and they, too, spread the word to their compatriots.

A Real-Life Example

The Second Baptist Church of Houston, Texas, is a large church, with over 20,000 members on its rolls, making it the largest church in Houston and one of the nation's largest. Each service seats up to 5,000 people at once. In 1996, the church decided that realtime captioning would be a valuable addition to their services. They put the word out that they needed a captioner, and found one right in their own congregation.

Mark Kislingbury had been a court reporter for about 13 years. He is certified in Texas and Iowa, and holds an impressive array of credentials from NCRA, including the RPR, RMR, and CRR. His speed can be attested to by his placement in court reporter speed contests. He won first place in the Texas speed contest in 1995 and 1996, and took fifth in the national contest those same two years.

When asked whether he felt all of those credentials were necessary for a captioner, Mark responded, "Credentials are not necessary. However, if one is not skilled enough to pass the CRR, one should probably not be providing closed captioning or realtime - at least not for pay."

Mark began adding Christian/Bible terminology to his steno dictionary almost from the beginning of his court reporting career, anticipating a future opportunity to combine his personal beliefs with his realtime skills. This vocabulary has helped him surprisingly often, as words like "Genesis," "testament," "apostle," "prophet" (as opposed to "profit"), "ecclesiastical," "thy," "thou shalt," "thine," "proverbs," "Moses," "Israel," "Damascus," "Assyria," "Babylon," "Jerusalem," "Eden," "Sodom and Gomorrah," "Messiah," "Pharisees," "devil," "demon," and "Lucifer" creep into political and legal speech.

As Mark began working more with deaf and hard-of-hearing people, he began volunteering his services for groups like the Center for Hearing and Speech and SHHH (Self-Help for Hard-of-Hearing People). This culminated in the call from his church to caption their services.

How It Works

The staff at Sec ond Baptist decided that realtime captioning would be too distracting if it was visible to the entire congregation, so it is currently shown on a 27-inch television monitor on one balcony. Mark captions everything during the service, the text being displayed as four-line roll-up captions at the bottom of the screen.

Unlike some other church captioners, Mark does not receive, in advance, a copy of the sermon, so he has to be prepared for whatever may come up. This is where his realtime skill comes in. A particularly important part of that skill is dealing with names he doesn't know. Without a list of the people being baptized, he needs to be able to take a guess at the spellings of names; and he must be able to generate those spellings, nearly instantaneously, from his stenotype machine.

Mark does get lyric sheets for hymns and songs that the choir and soloists will be singing, a crucial consideration, as it can be very difficult to understand the words to songs sometimes.

Captioners (and churches) can have divergent opinions regarding Bible readings. Some, like Mark Kislingbury, have translation dictionaries so comprehensive and well crafted that they can write Bible quotes verbatim in realtime; others simply write the book/chapter/verse citation and let each individual look it up. This approach is difficult, because no one can read from two sources at the same time.

A third approach is to load prepared script files containing the Bible text. Scripts like these are available with some captioning systems, such as the Behold! product from Cheetah Systems. The Bible scripts include over 1,100 files (one for each chapter of each book) and occupy about 4-1/2 megabytes of disk space on the captioner's computer.

The structure of these Bible scripts allows a captioner to quickly call up a specific chapter. For example, to display Leviticus 19:14 ("Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumblingblock before the blind"), the captioner would simply open the script file for Leviticus, Chapter 19, and skip down 14 verses.

When Mark captions, he works in the control room with the audio-video technicians. He wears headphones to reduce distraction and to receive better sound quality. This is a fairly standard practice in the larger churches; smaller churches tend to put the captioner down in front, close to the deaf and hard-of-hearing people that are actually using their captions.

Another practice that varies from church to church is recording the captions. A videotape recorder can be set up to capture exactly what is being displaye d in the sanctuary, so that deaf and hard-of-hearing people who were unable to attend the service, or who wish to watch it again, can have a tape with captions. With some editing and clean-up work, the caption file on the computer can also be turned into a transcript of the service, although this is rarely done.

Other Uses for a Captioning System in Church

Few churches are fortunate enough to have a Mark Kislingbury in their congregation. In the absence of a stenocaptioner, can a church still gain something of value from a captioning system? Certainly!

Many preachers prepare their sermons in advance on a word processor. The word processor files can be loaded into a captioning system before the service, and a captioner without realtime skills can feed out the text as the preacher speaks.

Obviously, such a procedure can't completely replace live realtime captions. I haven't met a minister yet who, during the sermon, actually follows a script word for word. The deaf and hard-of-hearing people would miss all of the extemporaneous speaking, if all they had was a script. But they still have something. If you can't afford steak and lobster, should you skip dinner? No, you should eat what you can afford, and hope for the steak and lobster soon.

One part of a church service that is verbatim is the hymns. These can be entered into the system in advance and fed out as captions - another useful service to the hearing people in the congregation.

When something is going on that isn't scripted, any good realtime captioning system will allow "electronic notetaking," which allows a typist to enter a summary of what is happening. It isn't verbatim, but it gives people an overview of what is going on.

Another useful capability of online captioning systems is automatic caption feed. When nothing is going on in the sanctuary, the captioning system can be set to feed out church announcements or other useful information at a predefined reading rate, adding even more value to the concept of a captioned TV monitor in the church lobby.

Most people who arrive late wait for an appropriate moment before entering the sanctuary so that they don't disrupt the service. Similarly, parents with crying children will often take them into the lobby. A captioned monitor in the lobby lets these people follow what is going on, even when the piercing cries of a baby fill their ears.

Oops!

Do bloopers happen in church like they do on television? Of course they do! My favorite blooper happened at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. I was there for the inaugural kickoff of closed captioning for their services. The captioner was going on the air in the church for the first time; and if this didn't make her nervous enough, she had a collection of "visiting dignitaries" watching everything she did.

The church has a number of large projection screens, one of which was displaying the captions. The service began. Everything looked great. The captioner had prepared carefully, and she had all the appropriate terminology in her translation dictionary. Everything came out great, that is, until one misfingering turned the pastor's "Let us sing together" into "Let us sin together."

Where is Mark Today?

As this book goes to press, Mark is captioning every service for the Second Baptist Church of Houston, and he is also doing captioning of television newscasts and major events, both in person and on the Internet. He captioned the "Dove Awards" (Christian music awards) live from Nashville, Tennessee, and also captioned the Houston Rockets using the giant screen at The Summit in Houston, Texas.

Mark has also captioned some very high-profile people on the Internet, including Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates doing a new product announcement, and Apple CEO Gil Amelio welcoming Steve Jobs back to the fold at Mac Expo 1997.

A real treat for Mark, who is currently approaching a Master rating in chess, was captioning the big chess rematch between world champion Garry Kasparov and IBM's "Deep Blue" computer, live on the Internet, in May of 1997.

Does Mark feel that he's ready to move on to something other than captioning in his church? In his words, "What could be more important than not only writing the spoken word, but the spoken Word, to those who cannot hear? I [am] translating the Word of the Lord to those who, without the technological 'magic' of captioning and the gift of accuracy that God has given me, would never be able to hear a sermon preached."

That pretty well sums it up.