Today, news bulletins around the world are routinely captioned using a number of different techniques. Live elements of a program are captioned by ‘stenocaptioners’ who use a stenographic keyboard, or by captioners using speech recognition software. These techniques did not exist in 1973, so the first captioned bulletin, called The Captioned ABC Evening News, was a repeat of the bulletin that had gone to air at 6 pm. This gave a team of six captioners time to prepare the captions for broadcast.
Because the program had open captions (which all viewers could see) and was aimed at Deaf and hearing impaired viewers. The commercials which had been part of the original broadcast were replaced with content dealing with deafness issues.
Caption standards were also very different in those days. It was believed that captions should be tailored for the profoundly deaf, and that the language needed to be reduced and simplified when turned into captions. In the first captioned news broadcasts, the captions were written to no higher than a sixth grade reading level.
Some of this attitude still prevailed when captioning began in Australia in 1982. For the first few years, captions were reduced to a rate of two words per second, which meant that much of the dialogue had to be reduced. Since then, the trend worldwide has been to make captions closer to verbatim.
For more information on the first captioned news program is available on the Vitac website.
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