Welcome to the world of closed-captioned television.

This is the daily routine for a select few, about 300 highly skilled captioners nationwide. Their numbers soon will require a tenfold increase.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandates that all programs be captioned by Jan. 1 with network affiliates providing the service for all local news broadcasts in the top 25 markets. Thus, according to estimates, at least 3,000 stenographers will be needed to provide captions for almost all new TV programs --- and the talent pool is woefully shallow.

Iowa Democrat Sen. Tom Harkin has introduced a bill to provide grants to educational institutions to help fill the void. The bill passed the Senate last month --- fellow Iowan Charles Grassley, R, voted for it --- and awaits action in the House.

Many say Harkin's funding request is essential because so few stenocaptioners are trained to type at the high speeds required to keep up with live programming. Most captioners work on taped shows, where the time constraints are not so severe.

Many are being drawn to the field because of a desire to help people who have physical disabilities and difficulty hearing the dialogue on TV.

"You're doing something that does have a social good to it," said Jack Gates, president of the National Captioning Institute, who noted that some children who don't speak English at home sometimes learn the language from captioned television. "There's a certain artistic element and a sense of mission to it."

Jessica Bewsee switched over to captioning after about 18 months as a court reporter. "I just feel like I'm really helping people when I do this," she said "It's definitely a small field. I wish it were larger."

Entry-level salaries for TV stenographers range from are about $50,000 a year, while veterans can make as much as $80,000. Many are drawn from the legal world of court reporting, and about 90 percent are women. Freelance stenocaptioners make $75 to $100 per program hour.

The dollars can quickly add up, especially for network affiliates outside the top 25 markets who will require as many as three hours of local news real-time captioning daily.

"For Des Moines, Iowa, that's a substantial chunk of change," said Jack Spellman, who manages real-time operations at WGBH, a public television station in Boston. Spellman's unit is responsible for captioning "CBS News," "Late Night with David Letterman" and "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer," among other shows.

Stenocaptioners watch live programs, listening with earphones and typing on a stenographer's keypad, which is different from a computer keyboard. The pad is connected to a software program that deciphers the keystrokes. After the computer interprets the words, telephone lines shoot the text back to TV stations with a lapse time of two to five seconds.

Stenocaptioners maintain a customized dictionary in their electronic equipment, designed to recognize certain phonetic entries. Shifting news events require captioners to periodically update their steno lexicon.

"With all the Arabic, it's a lot more demanding," Bewsee said.

Gates of NCI said that despite best efforts, "There are glitches that happen."

He said that clients sometimes complain, "Why don't you hire captioners who can spell?" But usually it is not a spelling problem.

The software program either fails to understand stenocaptioners' entries, he said, or the word is not in their customized dictionary.

A national coalition of deaf and hard-of-hearing organizations has asked the Federal Communications Commission to improve the quality closed-captioned television. In addition to the problem of typographical errors, the critics say, shows advertised as being closed-captioned sometimes fail to provide that service.

By Timothy R. Homan, Medill News