Careers in Court Reporting

In 2006, Federal legislation passed a law that all new television programming must be captioned for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. In addition, the Americans with Disabilities Act gives deaf and hard-of-hearing students in colleges and universities the right to request access to real-time translation in their classes. Both of these factors are expected to increase demand for court reporters to provide real-time captioning and CART services. Although these services forgo transcripts and differ from traditional court reporting, which uses computer-aided transcription to turn spoken words into permanent text, they require the same skills that court reporters learn in their training.

(Citation: U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2006-07 Edition, Court Reporters)

Court Reporters
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor.

NCRA Guardians of the Record
Court Reporting Designated One of the Fastest Growing Professions by Federal Government, Although Number of Graduates is Trending Downward.
The National Court Reporters Association, a 23,000-member nonprofit organization, represents the judicial reporting and captioning professions. Members include official court reporters, deposition reporters, broadcast captioners, providers of realtime communication access services for deaf and hard-of-hearing people and others who capture and convert the spoken word into information bases and readable formats.

Media Access Group
Real-time captioning -- a career with a meaningful mission
Most stenocaptioners are graduates of court reporting schools. There are more than 150 court reporting training programs, both in classrooms and online, currently offered across the country.

Students at court reporting schools spend their first few months learning shorthand theory--how to operate a specialized steno keyboard that allows court reporters to write more than 200 words per minute. The keyboard has only 24 keys and a number bar. Shorthand theory is a method of hitting keys and combinations of keys to create words without typing each letter of every word.

More advanced classes focus on building speed and accuracy while enhancing the students' knowledge. Academic classes are offered in specialized fields, such as anatomy, medical terminology, legal terminology, punctuation and word usage. All of these classes help students build their own personalized dictionary--the computerized dictionary that "understands" the combination of keystrokes needed to write words.Moreover, many training programs have implemented educational tracks for those students who want to specialize in real-time captioning.

Before a stenocaptioner can go "on the air" to create live captions, the individual needs to go through a retraining process. This retraining is necessary because court reporters are traditionally allowed the opportunity to correct their transcripts before delivery, whereas when captioning in real-time during a live broadcast, the stenocaptioner has only one chance to get it right. The retraining process can take from six weeks to six months, depending on the student's experience and skill level.

NCI
News from the National Captioning Institute, Inc.