By Cadie Carroll
Carol Studenmund started her career in captioning services working with typists in the Oregon court reporting business.
Then technology opened the door to a new business — helping sports entities become compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and meet the needs of the hearing impaired.
“Technology is what made this possible,” she explained. “Inexpensive PCs made it very feasible to get into closed captioning without spending thousands of dollars.”
With that, Studenmund, along with co-worker Robin Nodland, decided to launch their own business, utilizing technology as its prime advantage. Thus, LNS Captioning was born.
One of the company’s longest-standing relationships traces back to its partnership with the Portland Trail Blazers for which it provides captioning for the team’s TV broadcasts.
A few years later came its first stadium work, a partnership with the National Basketball Association when in 2003 the league sought out LNS’s services to provide live captioning for its annual All-Star game. LNS has since continued to provide its services for the NBA’s all-star weekends, proving just how valuable its services are.
It has been this experience in the sports arena that has helped promote LNS as a trusted partner for all types of athletic entities in need of captioning services. That need is especially acute as a result of recent litigation requiring new stadiums to provide equal accommodation to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community.
In the case of Feldman v. Pro Football, Inc., for example, the Washington Redskins were ordered to make all information delivered aurally to patrons at the stadium accessible to patrons with hearing loss. Attorney John Waldo wrote about that case for Sports Litigation Alert article year ago.
“The court ruled that those patrons [of the hearing impaired community] are entitled to ‘full and equal enjoyment,’ not just of the game itself but of the entire spectrum of entertainment being presented,” Waldo wrote. “Whatever is believed to enhance the total experience for hearing patrons should be made available to deaf patrons.”
This meant that stadiums would need to go beyond captioning play calls and emergency announcements and include anything deemed to enhance the experience of a hearing individual such as song lyrics, advertisements and other announcements.
With that requirement, teams do have a choice in how they decide to provide individuals with captioning services, but many have found that one solution trumps the others.
Take for example the University of Oregon, which first sought out LNS’s services after deciding that hand-held devices we not sufficient to the needs of the hearing impaired community.
“Our first attempt was captioning with hand-held devices, but because of some problems with the internal antenna that did not work as well as we had expected,” said University of Oregon’s senior associate athletic director Mike Duncan. “And that brought us to the captioning situation on the boards.”
The University of Oregon, however, has not been the only one to run into problems with hand-held devices used to provide captioning. In fact, they are just one of many who have found problems with this method.
Studenmund explained how many hard-of-hearing individuals find it tedious to use a hand-held device when trying to watch a live sporting event and really gain the true experience that a hearing fan would enjoy.
“The purpose is defeated with hand-held devices,” she said. “There can be problems with the reception inside a stadium which will cause the devices to not work correctly.”
Reception isn’t the only problem, however. Studenmund said that feedback from the hearing-impaired community listed several drawbacks of using hand-held devices such as having to constantly look back and forth between watching the game and reading the device as well as it being difficult to juggle the device when cheering on their team or simply carrying food or drinks.
Some have even compared the experience of using a hand-held device to virtually staying at home to watch the game. Fans come to the stadium for the experience and many have found that the best way to provide that experience is captioning on a scoreboard or ribbons around the stadium.
Duncan said that since installing and implementing captioning services on their big video board at Autzen Stadium, they have received nothing but positive feedback.
“I had a call from a father whose daughter was able to go to a football game [at Autzen] and actually understand what was happening,” Duncan said. “She hadn’t had that opportunity before.”
In addition to benefitting the hearing-impaired community, feedback from LNS clients has shown that everyone can benefit from captioning services and that most hearing individuals actually appreciate the added convenience of being able to read about a recent play or penalty, et cetera, when the stadium becomes too noisy to hear calls as they are announced.
Studenmund noted that even beyond that, one of the greatest benefits to both hearing and hearing impaired individuals comes with urgent announcements and evacuation alerts in emergency situations.
“Tornadoes touched down in the New York City area, and MetLife Stadium [a client of LNS] had to evacuate to safer areas the entire football crowd,” Studenmund said. “Our captioner captioned the same emergency message over and over during the storm… the captions were just there for everyone to read. No one had to dial up information on their smart phone or look at their handheld device.”
It is clear from this example alone that scoreboard captioning is a prime choice when it comes to captioning options. Not only has the hearing impaired community deemed it their preferred method of receiving announcements while still feeling included in the game day atmosphere, but it is beneficial in numerous ways to all patrons attending an event.
LNS Captioning has truly revolutionized this business and continues to expand its client base across the nation. In addition to the NBA, Portland Trail Blazers, MetLife Stadium in New Jersey and Autzen Stadium at the University of Oregon, they now do work in Reser Stadium at Oregon State University and the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans.
