How do they get live closed-captioning, for example, the sports announcer from a football game? Is there some super-duper court stenographer working for the Wild World of Sports? 
- Jinx
Yep. Really fast typists.
Hmm… Is that really true? Maybe what we have here is a new trial Olympic sport? Synchrnized speed typing (with a difficulty level of 4)! 
- Jinx
There was an earlier thread about this, relating varied experiences: I said in it that I saw a lady on TV (they were showing a piece on this very topic) with a standard QWERTY keyboard, and others gave examples of a stenographers’ typewriter being used.
Interesting you should ask: I’ve been reading up on that lately.
Apparently, live closed captioning is done by a court reporter or similar professional trained to use a shorthand keyboard. See the Closed Captioning FAQ for details.
I’ve always speculated on the translation system used to convert from steno to English. Very informative, KoalaBear.
http://www.robson.org/gary/captioning/spelerz.html was particuarly interesting, and confirmed my suspicions forged after years of watching TV muted in the background. I, for one, will rest easier at night.
salute
In many cases TV announcers are actually working with a script of some kind-- and TV stations send the script to the closed captioner at the same time as it goes up on Teleprompter. The announcer can always change what he says, so if it doesn’t match, now you know why.
I shared this in the other thread – I had a neighbor who had been a court stenographer and later was hired by one of the networks to do closed captioning. She did one of the late night talk shows, and maybe some others.
Her captioning was done real-time (as the show was being broadcast) and she lived in constant fear of sudden Breaking News with difficult-to-spell names and places.
Yep. Plus many just caption over the phone, so when that disconnects, you sometimes see captions that say NO CARRIER…
You also get an eyeful of interesting captions (‘eye deal’ for ‘idea’) & sometimes profanities get through.
that should be ‘ideal’ not ‘idea’ of course, looks like I did a steno’s typo 
During the 2002 Senate debate here in Missouri, the moderator specifically mentioned that the captioning was being done by voice recognition software. It was making some amusing errors.