Answer: This is one of several letters I received about closed captioning, from people who love it and people who are frustrated by it.

Captioning is a system of providing on-screen captions of spoken material for people with hearing problems. Since 1993, TV sets with screens 13 inches or larger have had to be able to decode the captions for display.

There are different forms of captioning. Live programs, for example, may use ``live-display captioning,'' which is prepared from a script before a program airs, or ``real time captioning,'' which uses stenographers to record everything being said.

Real-time captioning is tricky. There's a delay between the spoken words and the caption, so fast-paced reports may move on to the next story or graphic before the captions appear. Errors appear if a stenographer does not understand exactly what is being said, which is often.

So far, not everything has to be captioned. All new programs covered by the Federal Communications Commission rules must be captioned as of Jan. 1, 2006, but some older programs need not be captioned for years after that.

Programs not required to have captions at all include commercials less than five minutes long, most programs shown between 2 and 6 a.m. and ``locally produced and distributed non-news programming with no repeat value.''

As for local news, National Captioning Institute spokesman told me that all newscasts in a market the size of Cleveland-Akron must have real-time captioning. But the FCC rules appear to be more vague. In any case, a sampling of local newscasts over the last couple of weeks found ones with real-time captioning, and others with captions from scripts. (In the latter case, a live report had a ``no script available'' caption.) I even saw one with no captioning at all.

As you can see, it's complicated. I haven't even talked about captioning for taped programs, which can have their own problems. And the FCC has begun seeking comments for a review of its rules.

By R.D. Heldenfels