The same skills that Dronosky, of Crown Point, and hundreds of court reporters use to record testimony in court could soon land them new jobs translating everything from television dramas and sitcoms to Bears football games for nearly a quarter of the nation's residents.

Thanks to the Telecommunication Act of 1996, all television shows broadcast in English must be closed captioned beginning in January, said Jay Vertickal, spokesman for the College of Court Reporting in Hobart.

The law literally creates hundreds of jobs almost overnight -- and there's currently not enough closed captioners to meet the demand.

The law, designed to help the 28 million deaf and hearing impaired people in the U.S., has created a demand for experienced court reporters who can be cross trained in the skill of writing closed captions for live televisions shows.

Indiana has more than 430,000 people who fall into the hearing-impaired category alone, said Chris Cosgrove of Colorado Captioning, a company that provides that service to both local and national television shows.

The elderly, people learning English as a second language, children learning to read and even those exercising at the gym also use closed captioning to improve their lives.

"I have been asked to hire 60 people by January," Cosgrove said. Cosgrove, a seven-year veteran of closed captioning for television, was at the Hobart school Friday to give a seminar to court reporters training to become closed captioners.

The agency also captions local news broadcast in major cities, including Chicago, Atlanta and Dallas and on a given night a closed captioner's "translations"can be read hundreds of thousands of people.

It is estimated that between 20 and 25 percent of the population of the country will use closed captioning at one time or another, Cosgrove said.

Now in its 21st year , the College of Court Reporting is the only certified school of court reporting in the state of Indiana, training as many as 200 students during any given session, Vertickal said.

The job can difficult at times, such as when the television news reports Dronosky translates include tragedies involving small children, but all in all she said she has no regrets.

"It is a great career," said Dronosky, a court reporter for 12 years and now an instructor at the school.

By Royal M. Hopper III
http://www.thetimesonline.com/articles/2005/12/03/news/top_news/eb25b88614d68d40862570cc00075f85.txt