Hansard Association of Canada
31st Annual Conference

August  17 to  21, 2004
Halifax, Nova Scotia

Closed-Captioning

MR. ROBERT KINSMAN (Chairman): Good morning, everyone. Order, please. This morning we are talking about closed-captioning and I am going to be a good chairman and be very unobtrusive. I will briefly introduce the people who are speaking. We are starting with B.C., Rob Sutherland, talking about their closed-captioning program, they were in the forefront. Then Deborah Caruso from Ontario is going to talk about how that jurisdiction kind of took their application from B.C. and adapted it to their own needs. Ron Tremaine from the Senate will discuss how they use the program. Rob.

MR. ROB SUTHERLAND (British Columbia): I'm going to stand because I have a little demonstration to show to you.
   I wanted to start by giving you a bit of background and saying that B.C. began experimenting using closed-captioning as an editing tool back in 1999, and that's when Greg Whincup acquired something called the hubcap device and began experimenting with how to strip the closed-captioning from the TV signal and use that as a preliminary transcript. Then it sort of went on hold for a little while and in 2001-02, that project was handed off to Jim Cowling, who is our Production Coordinator. Jim was able to create a set of fairly robust macros that integrated the hubcap system right into our editing process. When he did that it really made it a tool that we could utilize.
   At that time, Alison Braid-Skolski was Production Manager and I think the proposal went to Alison that we should test this out on some of our open Cabinet work we were doing in the Summer and Fall of 2002. That's when we sort of put the macro into practice to see what kind of results we would get from it.
   Our primary motivation in doing this was really to address some occupational health and safety issues. We were finding quite a number of our editors were experiencing repetitive strain injuries and we felt we had to do something, kind of on a proactive basis, to see if we could reduce some of the manual inputting in the transcription of the initial product.
   One thing that I do want to say is that Alison's production management team at that time did a really outstanding job introducing this product to our editorial staff. There's always a little bit of apprehension when a tool like this is introduced because people begin to think, what is going to be the long-term impact on my role in the organization if the transcript is going to be generated automatically.
   Some of you may have seen a short video that was done that is kind of a humorous slant on what we were doing but really demonstrated that this was an effort to address these health and safety issues. There was also a lot of consultation with staff, we tried it out, we tested it with staff, we solicited a lot of feedback from staff to see what they thought about the tool. I think, overall, the implementation of this system was really first class.
   There was some initial skepticism, as I mentioned, and some of the early feedback we got from editors was kind of lukewarm but with each passing session - we've been using it now since Fall 2002 - even the most skeptical editors have come on-board and it's nice to be able to come back at this point and say that it's become one of the really indispensable tools of our editing process.
   What I want to touch on today is three things: I want to give you an overview of our editing macro, and that's what the demonstration will be; then go through a bit of some of the feedback that editors gave us; and finally, just a couple of comments on the impact this has had on our production workflow. Let's see if I can get this to run.

[A video was shown.]

MR. ROB SUTHERLAND: That's just a little slice of some Question Period from B.C. and the purpose of that is just to show you our closed-captioning on screen - I imagine most of you are familiar with closed-captioning. Our closed-captioning is done by an off-site contractor so this is the contractor to the captioning group located in Calgary and they work with contract people all over western Canada, as I understand it.
   So what happens is they take our signal off the satellite and input the closed-captioning and they send that signal back over a dial-up modem of some sort, it comes into our TV studio and then it's added as a line of information to the broadcast signal so it's a fairly simple process. You do see there is a little bit of a delay of maybe two or three seconds by the time the closed-captioning gets on screen.
   The next part of this is to show you what we call the hubcap device and it's hard to describe, it's kind of a visual thing, so let's take a look at it. What you have here is the workstation where the hubcap device is located - I'll just point it out here, it's that little box right there where the arrow is. It's about the size of a cigar box and it's plugged into a video cassette recorder that you can't see very well. The video cassette recorder is taking the TV signal, passing it through the hubcap decoder and then it's going to fire the text onto this screen, up in here. So that's the closed-captioning text being loaded into the hubcap interface.
   Now these are the hands of Jim Cowling and they will show you what Jim does. In the morning, or just before a broadcast starts, we're going to input a file name - this is the output file selection - HSE and there's going to be a date code after that so that's House, and I can't remember the date we have there, March 26th, so that then is going to save the file under that name. Here is a look at kind of a file directory, there is the file and Jim will open that up, and there it is.
   So what you see here is how the information from the closed-captioning is saved in a notepad file, this is an ASCII-text file and what you'll see is that every input of information or text has a corresponding time marker and all of that will scroll into that file. So this becomes a continuous file of all of the text for that sitting and we've just highlighted here where Oral Questions begin.
   This part is going to take us into the actual use of the macro at an editorial workstation. This is a button on our Microsoft Word button bar - this is part of what Jim created to integrate this into our system. The menu gives you two options here, CC create, which is going to be the button you click on to to create the file. And the last one, we don't have this part of it, this is not part of the demonstration but once the editor is finished editing that file, they'll go back and click, CC to edit 2, and that will save the document in a second edit directory. So here is what happens when we create a file using closed-caption edit.
   Right now the editor is being prompted to enter the file name into this dialogue box and when they click out of this, first they'll get a second dialogue box, so Z090, this is the typical file name that we would use for one of our five minute slices of audio. So, we'll click, "OK", there, and now the editor it prompted to enter a time indicator and this corresponds to the beginning of that slice of audio so 9:05 is not normally when we have Question Period in B.C. but this demonstration was done in the morning and we were using a video tape of a previous day. Now the editor is going to click, "ok", to this and we'll see the beginning of the macro. We'll stop there.

[9:15 a.m.]

First of all what it has done is it creates a file, Z090, and saves that file to our first edit directory. The next thing it does is it starts downloading all of the text between the time frame - in this case it would be 9:05 to 9:10 - and then it grabs about 15 seconds on either side of that to give us an overlap. What it's doing now is it's reaching into that ASCII-text file and pulling that five minutes and 30 seconds of text, and pasting it line by line into this Microsoft Word document. At this point a number of work macros are applied to start formatting the text. I wish we had a tighter view of this but I hope you can see.
   What's happening at this point is that all of the - it's happening right at the very bottom of the screen - time markers are being stripped out, that's one of the first processes.
    So all the time markers are being stripped out leaving us with just the closed-captioning text. There we've got some formatting so now all of the capitalization has been taken out and it has been reduced to all lower case. Some formatting is being applied to identifiable items like speakers' names. These have been tagged earlier and now it's going to reformat some of these names.
   Now it's applying a number of other macros to capitalize and reformat speakers, for example, and it's adding line spaces, so it's really giving a first pass at giving us a pretty good quality transcript, formatted as we would like it, in our style.
   Here the editor has an opportunity now to tidy up the file and there are a couple of little changes that Antoinette is going to make here. We wouldn't keep a term like "interjections" in our transcript like that so she's going to take that out - this is just standard editing. She will insert another little macro, auto-correct, to insert an interjection-style line.
   Obviously it's not a final text, there's a lot of editing that we need to apply. There are macros that can change those capital cases, automatically capitalize the first letter or lower case the first letter of a word. I think we're just about wrapped up on this part. The last little bit is just to show you a glimpse of the macro, itself, the script that Jim created.
   Just to give you an idea of what this is, this is a part the script of the macro and the SR is a search and replace. So these are a number of search and replace functions that have been created so, for example, if you get a lower case lieutenant governor, search and replace, find that and replace it with capitalized Lieutenant Governor. So there are literally thousands of these search-and-replace features that are run by the macro. In addition to that, these are initial caps, so this is a whole dictionary of terms where the initial letter has to be capitalized. Again, there are thousands of those that have to be entered.
   This part of the macro is something that Jim constantly updates. If a member, for example, has been a member of Cabinet, our style would be Hon. G. Hogg, as his identifier in the transcript. If he is dropped from Cabinet or resigns from Cabinet we would need to change that so he would come up just as G. Hogg. Jim can go in here and find any references to Hogg and change the search and replace or the initial capital function. So this is something where there is ongoing maintenance or refinement of what the macros are doing.
   I will just tell you one other thing about what you saw. I had Jim slow that macro down by adding a couple of pauses to the process so, in fact, when the editor enters that time indicator in that interface and clicks the button to say, go, it would race through that in about five, six, seven seconds, so it 's just, boom, it's right there formatted in a way they go into editing.
   So that's kind of the magic of the closed-caption edit macro. We're very pleased about it, it's something we're very proud of, especially considering that it was all developed in-house - a real tribute to Jim's work and the sorts of things that people in our technical operations unit can accomplish. I do want to mention my thanks to John Thorpe from our Hansard TV who came down and shot this little video for us last week.
   So that kind of describes what we do and I just want to give you a sense of some of the feedback we got from editors on this process. As I mentioned earlier, there was some initial skepticism but I think the fact that we presented it as being an optional tool that editors could use that was really meant to address these sort of health issues, and that it was not intended to either eliminate our editing, or replace the function of editors. We also were not going to follow up on this with tighter expectations on productivity so we haven't said, because you have this our expectation is that you will generate your transcripts in five minutes, six minutes, or seven minutes less. They still have the same period of time to edit and so I think what editors are finding is that by using this they are able to get all that text generated right away and they spend more time editing the text to their satisfaction, rather than spending the first five to 20 minutes, or whatever it takes, to input the raw data.
   So we haven't made any wholesale changes to our production process, we haven't made any major changes to our productivity requirements and we have not required this application on the part of editors, it remains an optional tool. I think early in the game there were some complaints about what it does. Editors first observed that there are certain routine parts of business and the main ones are introductions of members - I think that's probably the worst - but also some members' statements, and heavily procedural parts of debate where they find that this tool isn't very satisfactory, that there are so many omissions, or there's so much research that needs to be done, so many names that need to be corrected, that they're better off to just start from scratch and type everything in from a blank page. So if that is their choice, they can do that, that's no problem.
   A second complaint was that closed-captioners completely misunderstand what a member has said. I'll just bring up another little document I have, I hope you can read that. These are some typical errors that were noted by one of our editors kind of early in the process but I think it does give you a sense of the types of mistakes that come across in the closed-captioning. This is not to criticize the work of the closed-captioners, it's absolutely outstanding quality that we get, considering how fast they're inputting this information, but the first one is a missed negative and you would really want to make sure that you're on top of that sort of thing because it really does misrepresent what was being said.
   "To build a pass," "a bill to pass", there's a really simply mishearing. For "confrontation in the House", that might make sense in a lot of contexts but it's "for contemplation in the House". This one by the "Minister of Justice project", "administrative justice project", I think you can see the sort of pattern here, that these are things that are easily misheard by the closed-captioner. They put in what is, to them, the most plausible set of terms but it's really significantly different from what was said. I think when editors see this, they can lose faith in a tool like this but I think you have to remind them that any sort of transcription can lead to these sorts of results. So you sort of reinforce the notion of we heard these types of mishearing in the past, we're getting them now still but there is this benefit that all the text has been generated for you. So it still means that an editor has to edit, an editor has to know context and understand what it is the members are talking about.
   The third concern that editors raised was that working with the closed-captioning edit is a different sort of cognitive process, that many of them process the information by listening and typing and there's something about the tactile activity of entering the information that allows you to process it and think about what's being said and render the text, edit in your head and all that sort of stuff. What they were finding is that their task as an editor was not so much a real editorial function but more a proofreading function. Some people feel that that is a different set of skills, that with proofreading everything is there on the screen, you have to be very careful to listen and ensure that every word is there, words haven 't been added and that you listened very closely to make sure there haven't been mishearings.
   I think all of those concerns that were raised by editors are quite valid and the way we've responded to that is to recognize that those are valid concerns but to remind people this is just a tool, it's not something that is meant to replace an editor and these types of problems you are going to find in any type of transcript that's generated in a hurry like this.
   What we did to address that third concern about the different type of task, was to develop a number of workshops on proofreading. All of our editors have had an opportunity to take more intensive instruction on proofreading and again, this was developed in-house and a lot of it was done bringing in experienced staff and they talked about the tricks that they have to make sure that their proofreading is accurate and reliable. I think that worked out quite well.

[9:30 a.m.]

Some of those initial concerns remain but the staff surveys that we've done - most recently we've checked back in with staff again this last session - increasingly editors speak about the advantages of this tool. We are really pleased with the way it has come along. One thing they'll say - and I think this is the most obvious thing - is not having to enter all that information gives them more time to edit and they appreciate that. It also allows them to identify - because they have the full five minutes of text dumped into their document right away - if there are problems ahead, like a huge section that requires a lot of research or difficult procedural issues. Also, because this immediately generates that whole text, editors who have the tape before or after, can right away go into that first edit directory and they can examine the run-on between the two tapes so they're not waiting for someone to finish a tape to find out what happened before or just after the tape they have.
   The number one comment that we hear from editors is that they no longer find themselves physically exhausted at the end of the day. Some of our days start at 10 o'clock in the morning and we're still working until 11 o'clock at night. So the reports from editors are that that late, when you have those last couple of hours, they're not as tired as they used to be in the past. Sort of moving into what the impact on our workload has been, it really hasn't significantly changed the time lines of our production process, but that was never subjective. What it has done, I think, is increase some of the quality of the transcript we're getting from our editors because they're spending more time editing, rather than transcribing or typing.
   Anecdotally - because I don't have the sort of scientific data to back this up - as I was monitoring production in the last session, at night, as we were making that last push to finish off the day's production, I did see a lot of our takes coming in from really experienced editors, turning out takes in 38 minutes, 37 minutes. We give them 45 minutes and anytime that they come in under that you start looking at that and you really start to appreciate that that is really going to start knocking off a significant amount of time at the end of the day.
   The other advantage this has had for us from a kind of production point of view is that we're now - this is something we started recently - using a lot of our senior auxiliary editors to do a final read-through process late in the evening. One thing about this that has been a real advantage with this is that we know that when we pull this, people who may have started at 10 in the morning, and say, you have another hour, or hour and a half, or two hours of read-through to do, they're not totally wasted at that time and exhausted and they can simply say okay; they're ready to go, they're fresh and we get high quality read-through from that group of editors as well. So I think that has been one of the real advantages to this tool.
   That pretty much wraps up what I was going to say. Thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thanks, Rob. Deborah, are you all set?

MS. DEBORAH CARUSO (Ontario): Yes, I am. Thanks, Rob. I'm in the position of really not having to have done a formal presentation like Rob just gave us because our system is exactly the same, so I can just ride on Rob's coattails here. I could practically do my whole presentation by saying, ditto, but you're not going to get off that easily. I will reflect a little bit on what the experience has been in our jurisdiction and the ways we have customized it. I noticed a lot of people taking notes so there might be a lot of interest in this, I'm gathering. In case you're thinking, well, in our jurisdiction we don't have digital audio so this won't work for us, I will have a few suggestions to make on how you might be able to take advantage of a tool like this, without having digital audio in your jurisdiction. You do need to have televised debates or portions of your debates and there needs to be closed-captioning included with that but other than that, if you have that in your jurisdiction, you have something to work with so you can develop a tool like this.
   I actually heard about this for the first time - what B.C. was doing with hubcap - during last year's conference on one of our networking days, proof positive that we do put our networking days to very good use. Alison and I were having a chat and I was pretty excited about this. We had been exploring ways to do just this but had no idea about this hubcap program and we had kind of run into a few walls, so it was really exciting to hear about this.
   We got back to our respective jurisdictions and I guess we were pretty busy leading up to Christmas but once that Fall session died down, we really had an opportunity to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Tony, let me compliment you on your staff, they were very generous, very skillful. Alison, to start with, was wonderful in allowing us to have access to members of the production team. Jim Cowling was great, you have a wonderful person in Jim, he was so helpful in every way to us, so heaps of praise for them.
   Once we got into early this year, there wasn't a lot of live production going on so we had a lot of time to work on this tool. First of all they sent us information about hubcap. It is - as Rob demonstrated for you, I don't need to do that again, there's a piece of hardware - a little black box about the size of a cigar box and it comes with a software program, too. You can use that to build your own applications into it. Just as B.C. has, we've linked it to our document creation macro - I think our in-house guy, Dave Woodruff, tells me that it uses VBA, that's the programming code it uses. It's not expensive, hubcap is U.S. $495, so I guess that's about Can.$700 and I'm not even going to attempt to do the exchange rate in other currencies.
   B.C. was also very generous, Jim Cowling sent us the program that he already developed, so we weren't working from scratch. We were able to open that up and have a look at it and adapt it to our needs, delete some of the parts of the program that didn't work with our document creation macro, create our own, so we rode on B.C.'s coattails on that, too, it saved us a lot of time and effort, that was great. We did adapt it for our in-house document creation macros, and we were ready to go with it in a very short time. We started using it when our Spring session began last March.
   Rob pointed out that one of the things you need to manage for is how to introduce it to staff. We found that we had the same experience. Rob was actually a little more tactful than I'll be in explaining what staff reaction is initially when they first hear of that, it was not, gee, I wonder what this will do to my role long term in the organization? It was more, how many jobs is this going to cost and how quickly are you going to expect me to crank out my documents now?
   We reassured them that it is an optional tool, that they can use it if they want to. If they don't want to they can delete it from their document - when you create the document now, all of that text is automatically loaded into the document, cleaned up the way we like it - and type from scratch if they want. We did market it as a tool that would reduce some of the physical wear and tear, just of the sheer physical drudgery of keying all day. We did have people experiencing RSI, and everyone going home at the end of the day feeling like they had given about 125 per cent, feeling pretty burned out, all they were able to do when they went home was crash. We explained that that was the purpose of it and I was hoping that there would be some productivity gains as well, but that wasn't the primary purpose.
   Once again, riding on B.C.'s coattails, Alison was kind enough to send a copy of their video they produced in-house. It is hilarious, it's really funny, I guess it's like a K-tel commercial and it's very funny. It liberally uses movie clips, movie sounds, it's very funny. We played it for our staff and there were peals of laughter all over the room and I think it really did help bring the anxiety level down a little bit so people were more receptive. They were a little more open-minded to, let's see what this might be all about after all.
   As I said, we started using it March and the staff reaction was pretty positive almost right away. I knew that the older people on staff and the people who had been doing the job for years were experiencing that end of the day "I'm just exhausted syndrome", but even my newer staff members were experiencing it, which took me aback a little bit because one of the most positive comments was from someone - by Hansard standards - a youngish person, he was in his thirties and only started on Hansard at the beginning of this calender year. He reported that he had been going home at the end of the day exhausted and that wasn't happening any more. The reaction was positive in that regard almost immediately.
   As a positive side effect, we actually did see some productivity gains, they're modest but they're real. We were talking about timeliness, in one of the sessions the day before our networking day, that that is one of the most valuable things that Hansard may have to offer as a product. This has helped nudge our timeliness up even a little more; we're turning out documents that are edited to our standard - our draft documents that are edited to our standard - posting them to our Intranet, often within 30 to 35 minutes of something having been spoken in the House.
   There are times of day when it does take longer to prepare a draft document, as Rob mentioned, proceedings that are heavily laden with procedural events that have a lot of stuff that needs to be fact-checked, like when they rattle off lists of places and people, all of the stuff that can burn up time researching that kind of thing. It might take us 45 or 50 minutes to get those turns up but when it's Orders of the Day and it's just one member standing up going blah, blah, blah about whatever bill is on the agenda that day, you can clean that up to our standards and get it on the Intranet very quickly.
   We are able to stay almost current, in terms of signing for those five minute turns or takes, all the way through the day with one or two fewer people. We find that with a roster of about 7 people we're staying pretty much right on top of it all the way through the day, it's amazing. It has freed us up to put people on our committee transcripts, so we chip away at that, we don't build up as big a backlog as might otherwise have been the case so it frees us up to use other people in other ways. So there have been those modest productivity gains as a wonderful side effect.
   There were things to note about CAT and Rob pointed out a number of those. Staff feedback, and our own observation, is that the quality of that closed-captioning transcript that you get depends a lot on the skill of the operator at the input end. Some of them have been doing it for years and are really good and have been providing closed-captioning for the Legislature for years, so they've got the jargon and the terminology and they've built their dictionaries and it's pretty good. Other people are newer and it's not quite to that level and they are working in real time so they do drop things, there are words and phrases that get dropped; their dictionary, if they program a word in they might not have all the endings programmed in so the text that you get, the verb might have ended with an "ed" but you might just get the root verb without the "ed" or the "ing". Plurals and singulars, you really have to have an eagle proofreading eye to catch those things and they don't even make an attempt with a lot of the proper names, they just leave those blank and they keep going and they just can't keep up. Sometimes they drop words and phrases, whole passages will fall by the wayside, so you're filling in blanks in places.

[9:45 a.m.]

Overall, it's a pretty good quality, it certainly gives us a good place to start working with correcting, rather than inputting it all. The way we presented it to people was that it frees you up from typing - which is a fairly low-level skill - to concentrate on the things that you've spent years training in and learning, all of those cognitive skills, the research skills, working with copy, those kinds of things.
   It has been a challenge with some staff who have expressed the fact that they feel more comfortable proofreading something and feeling very confident that there are very few errors in it with something they have typed from scratch themselves, than they feel about proofreading something that somebody else has created and that they've corrected. You saw the chart of mishearings in CAT and that 's our experience in our jurisdiction, as well. Sometimes what you see is what you hear so there is more of an element that you really have to keep your ears pricked up pretty sharply and be aware of those potential mishearings. What you see is not necessarily what they said, so be aware of the potential for the mishearings.
   I don't have anything quantitative or scientific to back me up but I would say that our published error rate since we started using this - our experience is only one session's worth, the House reconvened about the middle of March and sat till the end of the June, so that's been our experience with it so far, three and a half months - hasn't gone up, I would say it remains about the same. We didn't get any better but we didn't get any worse. We're making our product available in a draft form more quickly and people are going home at the end of the day a little less tired, so there have been a lot of benefits.
   One thing that I'm going to keep my eye on when the House reconvenes the day after Thanksgiving - I was chatting with the director of our broadcast branch and they've just tendered their closed-captioning contract to a new outfit, a different outfit from the one that had been used previously so presumably there will be a number of CAT operators who will be new to captioning the Ontario Legislature, so there may be a bit of a learning curve there immediately after Thanksgiving; presumably they'll catch up pretty quickly. We will have to brief staff about that and tell them to be especially careful in the early weeks after Thanksgiving.
   I mentioned that you don't necessarily have to have digital audio in your jurisdiction to be able to take advantage of something like this. It will work with analog sound as well. One of the benefits of hubcap and digital audio is that everything is tied together, it's all time-stamped, it dumps exactly the right text in each individual work processing document based on what the time stamps are. You create your document macro and you put in the time of 15:40, it knows that your documents are five minutes worth of audio so it gives you the text from 15:40 to 15:45 and it pulls up the relevant audio too. But you can work without the digital audio, you can use analog audio. You're creating a text file each day, it's dumping it all into a master document. Your people could go into that master document, search for the relevant portion of text and copy and paste it into their document. So it's longer, it's not automated, that's what we were looking at before we heard about hubcap. We found that hubcap just added that extra element of automation which was really desirable, it got around some of that. I have to search and then copy and paste the relevant text for every document I create. You can even do it without hubcap, that was what we had been exploring earlier.
   Most video cards, especially with gaming systems, one little feature a lot of people don't even know about, it's buried in there with all the wonderful things that they can do with those gaming cards, closed-caption, CC capture. It's one little feature in there. You can turn it on, create your master text document, it starts dumping it into that document, and you can create a little macro in-house; because you have to refresh it every so often, you have to save for that text to be available in that text file that you've created, so you can create a little automated function in-house that just saves at an interval that seems appropriate for your production process, so every two minutes, every five minutes, whatever, you can save to that master text file, and it's available for your staff to go in and then search and copy and paste.
   So there's a number of options available to you, high-tech, somewhat less high-tech, and because B.C. had been so very generous with their time and their expertise, I would just like to say that if anyone is interested in knowing a little bit more about this and picking our brains and asking for help about it, please do contact me or Associate Editor Steve Smal, and we will do our best to give you the information and the help you need. That's about it for me.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thanks, Deborah. We'll be calling you. Does that include lunch as well when we come to visit you? Ron.

MR. RON TREMAINE (Senate): First of all, Rob and Deborah, are you both gavel to gavel or are you Question Period only?

MR. ROB SUTHERLAND: The only restriction we have is that our Committee of Supply is not closed-captioned or televised, nor committees, so that's a problem for us.

MS. CARUSO: In our case it's gavel to gavel with the House, but no committees, no captioning for committees. So we're still keying from scratch on committees.

MR. TREMAINE: First of all, I want to introduce you all to Dave MacKay, who you've all met, I'm sure. He is my Chief of Production and he knows the system inside out, but since this is his first conference, I opted to make this presentation. At any rate, if there are questions that I can't answer, I feel confident that Dave can give you those answers. Certainly the CRTC seems to be pushing this closed-captioning thing more and more, and there seems to be more of a demand for it as the boomer population ages. So this may visit your Legislature sooner than you think or would like to have it visit your Legislature.
   Our basic system, as most of you probably know, is that we rely on shorthand, stenotype reporters. Since 1994 we've been doing our transcript in real time, which is closed-captioning, and that works by the reporter sitting on the floor, transmitting the floor language back to our offices where the other reporters who are not writing on the floor are pulling it up in 10-minute segments and, as Deborah mentioned with her system, our digital sound is synched with those 10-minute intervals; our software is from a company in Florida called Eclipse. They're very avant garde in the field of reporting. The other big company in the field is Stenograph, you may have heard of them. So with the reporters at both ends, the proofreading thing just falls into place and has always been there with us. Reading on screen was a little bit different, but in 1994 we dealt with that and we've put that behind us.
   Things really started with the closed-captioning thing, actually with a hearing-impaired Senator who was given a drug for an illness that he had picked up while monitoring elections in Haiti. He had an adverse effect to it, and he lost his ability to walk and his hearing. At any rate, the big thing was his hearing - well, as far as we're concerned (Interruptions) Sorry, I'm editing this as I say it. (Laughter)
   At any rate, he tried all kinds of things, and he even tried our system and said, no, that will never work for me. The system was something in the industry called CART, computer assisted real-time translation, instead of transcription, translation being that you are the eyes and ears for this individual; if someone across the room were trying to get his attention or something, you would type that in, Senator so-and-so would like to speak to you, or if there's a joke on the floor, you might say, joke, because that does not necessarily come across in the words alone.
   He was looking at heightened infra-red sound systems, we tried everything within our tech department, and finally it came back around to us and to this CART system, and away we went. Of course being a Senator and being an involved Senator, a local Senator from Ottawa, very much involved in politics, it was great to see this guy starting to pick up where he had left off before his illness. It just changed his parliamentary life entirely. So that was very rewarding for the staff and a wonderful thing.
   Of course being a Senator, he has meetings that aren't within our real-time system, so now we provide the CART service, we've distinguished CART within the office by giving him the CART service in his office when he has meetings with ministers and private meetings of that kind. In the Chamber and in committees, he relies on our real-time system. So we just gave him a laptop, set it on his desk, and he follows what is being transcribed by the reporters or edited by the unwriting reporters back in the office.
   Around this same time, maybe the late 1990s, the Senate entered into a contract with CPAC, the Canadian Public Affairs Channel, to provide certain of our committee meetings - they agreed to give us, I believe, eight hours a week. There was no closed-captioning in the initial stages. We actually asked them if it were possible for us to provide closed-captioning, would it be useful to you, and of course they were very interested. We then went to Eclipse, which provides closed-captioning in a separate software, but we did not want to do that. Closed-captioning in the States for example, there are two departments. In the Senate in the States, there is the Hansard department, if you will, and the closed-captioning department, which, like Deborah's and Rob's systems, watch television, report only what is on the television, and then you have the subsequent comments in the text, like interjections, so forth, which they pick up later.
   Well, we wanted to stay with our system of basic real-time transcription. Our interjections are all in there. They're taken right from the floor. Consequently, what you see on television is not necessarily the person speaking. You may suddenly see, on the closed-captioning line, "interjection" or another Senator's name and his interjection. That's slightly different within our system.
   At any rate, Eclipse in Florida was able to change its software, tweak it for the Senate, and we've had a rather symbiotic relationship with Eclipse over the years. They were actually running two sets of software at one point, one to the court reporting industry and one to the Senate of Canada. They 've been very supportive of our developmental process. They were able to do this for us. So suddenly we had this one reporter shooting text from the floor back to his or her colleagues, off to the hearing-impaired Senator, and on to the CPAC monitor.

[10:00 a.m.]

Of course this all meant some consternation and concern and worry amongst reporters, because no longer were they writing for just their colleagues back in the office. They had to write for everyone and get it right the first time, because if you're watching it on television, of course any captionist' s concerns, any reporter's concern is that it be understood, that what they write is totally accurate. We did some training. There are courses offered on-line, down in the States, and now these, of course, are all in English, and as you know we are dealing in two languages, French and English.
   What other changes did this mean to the branch once we brought in the captioning? Suddenly the reporters had to spend more time getting prepared for the particular meeting, they had to have, for example, if there are witnesses in committee, the names of the witnesses in there, if there's new terminology, BSE or some such thing, they had to enter that, so that it would come up clearly on the screen. The other thing was that no longer were we sending just one French and one English to a meeting, we were now sending two French and two English because the interpretation had to be reported. Consequently, we switched our regime from two reporters doing the committee gavel to gavel to four reporters, half hour on, half hour off. This works well.
   Once the stuff is coming across, we had to have software to modify the process. This is all behind the scenes, and I'm referring to the software which I just described, the Eclipse software. We had to change it to accommodate CPAC. The interpretation thing has been an obstacle that the reporters have had to live with. As you know, interpretation by its nature follows behind, and therefore that adds to the delay. As you know, when that individual who is being interpreted switches languages, you then have half a sentence or a whole sentence, in some instances, lagging behind, but the person on the floor has now switched languages and he or she is not stopping to wait for the interpretation to catch up. So this overlap, if you will, is very difficult.
   If you get an in-and-out situation, it's practically impossible sometimes to get it down accurately, but it's interpretation, we can only do what we can do with the realities that are out there. That's accepted. The interpreters have not made any change. They cannot change their system. Their job is equally as intense as the job of the reporter on the floor. They can't anticipate what someone is going to say. There are instances where it's practically impossible to get down what is said, accurately, because they're just too fast. We have this one period in the routine of business called Senator's Statements, and whereas before we would let them go over to finish a statement, the Speaker has now started cutting them off at three minutes. So they stand up, read this at a horrendous speed, and even the interpretation can't get it down or get it said. We live with that. It's not a perfect world, and we can only do what we can do.
   We have these reporters on the floor, and they have this little thing in their lives called anonymity. It's coming up over here on a screen, it's coming up over there on a screen. Well, we took that away from them in the Chamber by putting in monitors in the public gallery for hearing-impaired viewers who may come along. Suddenly the reporters are writing on the floor, and the people in the gallery are able to see who they are and see their mistakes on the screen.
   All of these hurdles of stage fright, if you will, at various stages in our development have been overcome. I have a great staff, they're very professional. Everything we do is daily copy. All our committees are done the same day, as I indicated the other day. They just, after a point, roll up their sleeves and get on with the job. That stood me in good stead, and I can't say enough about them and the work we do and the timelines. Senator Gauthier - I've now given you his name - actually refers to them as 'his little angels'. Now, some of them aren 't so little (Laughter) It's very nice. He's very supportive of us. He's become very involved in the hearing impairment-field, if you will, with the Canadian Association of the Hearing Impaired, and is pushing the boat out farther and farther.
   One of the problems we have with providing these services is finding French stenotype reporters. There aren't a lot of them out there. The Senate has practically cornered the market in Canada. But he's gone ahead and he got a community college in Ottawa, called La Cité collégiale to put in place a program for stenotype reporters. It was to start this September, unfortunately they didn 't get the minimum enrolment they need to start up the course, so there will be some delay there; perhaps in January, maybe they'll start. I'm not sure what the latest is on the situation there. He's pushing our buttons all the time, and making more and more demands. So it's a little bit of a, I can't say love-hate, but it's that kind of relationship sort of thing. That just about describes everything I have to say about our system. Thank you very much.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Ron. I would like to thank all three of you for today's presentation. We have about seven minutes, if anyone has questions.

MR. TONY DAMBRAUSKAS (British Columbia): Thank you for the kind words about the management team in B.C. We do have some pretty spectacular managers who are willing to push the envelope and try different stuff, so thank you for those kind words. Let me just - if I can take a few minutes - share some of the administrative concerns that were not touched on, and not to be on a negative side but I think everybody should be aware. If I can use a small analogy of what's happening, the Speaker some months ago, under the auspices of the occupational health and safety umbrella, has decided that smoking will be banned in certain courtyards that are close to the air intake. That occurs when the House is sitting and only Monday through Thursday but all the staff is still there on Fridays and when the House is not sitting, and smoke still goes through the building.
   Where I'm going with that is if you use the umbrella of occupational health and safety to help the employees be aware, the employees say if you're so concerned about our health what about committees? Right now committees almost represent about 50 per cent of our business and so it is an issue that somewhere along the line, wouldn't it be nice to have committees also available to support our stance on being concerned about occupational health and safety.
   As I was listening to Ron I was thinking, wouldn't it be nice if we could send some of our committee audios to, for example, Ottawa and have them do the CC for us and then I thought, no, I don't even have to do that because Bonita and CRIM might have a solution for me down the road that I may be able to use that technology. A lot of this, what we've heard in the last couple of days, makes for exciting times.
   Closed-captioning is not cheap and for those of you who are not in the business and are looking for it, the typical rates for excellent closed-captioning, you're talking $160 to $180 an hour. When your House sits for a lot of hours, the bill can add up. Our annual cost is close to $100,000 a year for closed-captioning of just the House.
   Also, if you're involved in renegotiating your contracts, all of a sudden when you're involved with using closed-captioning as part of your production process, historically we were a little more lenient if we had late sittings, we'd say, at midnight, that's enough closed-captioning, shut it down. Now when you are in an emergency debate and it's 12:30 a.m., 1:00 a.m. all of a sudden people are saying where's the closed-captioning. Alison has just tightened up all of our contractual language that the closed-captioners don't leave the scene at midnight, so that's a little more important. Those are just a couple of comments I wanted to make, thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thanks, Tony. Anyone else? Steve.

MR. STEVE SMAL (Ontario): I'll address one thing actually that Tony brought up. One of the benefits with the closed-captioning for the House and the use of hubcap is that before this, whenever possible, reporters in the House would gather up printed statements, member' s statements, speeches by the members. They would scan these in using a scanning software and an OCR and produce documents. They weren't perfect documents because the OCR wasn't always perfect, but these could be inserted into a document that was being transcribed, if the member was more or less reading them, and you could do an editing process there and cut down on some of the RSI and the time that was needed to take for that.
   Now we've been able to stop doing that for the House - we still need the printed documents to check against - because the closed-captioning is available much sooner. Sometimes we couldn't use the scanned stuff because it came too late after the transcription had been done. But especially if we're in a backlog situation, even slightly backlogged for committees, we still use this a great deal, especially with witnesses or members who make statements. We make a big effort to collect all the exhibits that are introduced. Even if a presenter does not present a formal brief, we'll chase them and ask them for their speaking notes afterwards because they're usually printed. These we scan in and if you want something to address health and safety concerns in committee transcription, I'd be quite happy to talk to you about that because it's something we've been doing for a number of years now and it certainly helps reduce that to a certain extent and it helps us a bit, especially if there's a heavy committee schedule, in catching up with that.

MR. CHAIRMAN: We have about a minute and a half. Anyone else?

MS. ANNE MACGILLIVRAY (Ottawa): Anne MacGillivray, House of Commons, Canada, Editor. I'd like to thank everybody for looking after editors so well and trying to improve things for us. I do have a couple of questions about the closed-captioning.
   I wondered why you go outside to get it instead of using your in-House staff, like the Senate is doing? If you're getting it from outside, do you have plans to eventually switch it over to your own staff and get them to do the closed-captioning and send it out, instead of bringing it in?

[10:15 a.m.]

MS. CARUSO: Doing the real-time closed-captioning is a very specialized skill that takes years to learn, they don't use a standard keyboard. Ron alluded to this in his presentation. It's something that takes years to learn, it's almost dying out. The Senate has cornered the market practically on the CAT transcriptionists in Canada, anyway . . .

MR. TREMAINE: In French.

MS. CARUSO: Even in English, you haven't cornered the market but you've snagged a lot of them.

MR. TREMAINE: There's a ton of them out there, though.

MS. CARUSO: In our shop, broadcast and Hansard are two separate branches. The broadcast people bring the closed-captioning people in but that's why. If you had somebody in your shop sitting at a keyboard trying to keep up in real time, it's just not possible with the standard QWERTY keyboards. So that's really the answer to your question.

MR. ROB SUTHERLAND: I think possibly we would have some difficulty retaining them because our Legislature doesn't sit long enough to have a full-time investment in a person with that type of skill. I think after they work for us a while they would be looking for full-time employment or contracting to fill in that gap. I don't think it's something we would be looking at. I think what's more exciting for us is voice recognition, so that could fill that need for us.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Our time has run out for this portion, perhaps you can catch up on some exchange of information at lunch time. It is time to have a short break and we'll be back here at 10:30 a.m.

[10:17 a.m. The conference recessed.]