CBC Risk Management & Mitigation 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A captioner's software crashes 20 minutes into a 2-hour live broadcast. Which pre-established protocol minimizes audience caption blackout?
- Manually restarting the same software instance
- Activating a pre-loaded secondary caption workstation on a separate machine (Correct answer)
- Contacting technical support immediately
- Informing the broadcaster to use emergency text slides
Correct answer: Activating a pre-loaded secondary caption workstation on a separate machine
A warm-standby second workstation can take over in seconds, minimizing blackout, unlike other options that take minutes or longer.
Question 2: Which scenario represents a 'single point of failure' risk in a captioner's home studio setup?
- Using two different browser tabs for caption delivery
- Relying on one ISP with no cellular backup (Correct answer)
- Having two microphones connected simultaneously
- Using a laptop and a desktop both logged into the captioning platform
Correct answer: Relying on one ISP with no cellular backup
A single ISP with no redundancy means any ISP-side outage immediately halts caption delivery with no fallback.
Question 3: What does 'latency risk' specifically refer to in live broadcast captioning?
- Risk that captions will contain spelling errors
- Risk that captions will appear too long after the spoken words for viewers to follow (Correct answer)
- Risk that the broadcast signal will be delayed
- Risk of exceeding the client's word-count budget
Correct answer: Risk that captions will appear too long after the spoken words for viewers to follow
Excessive caption latency detaches text from speech, reducing comprehension value for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers.
Question 4: A captioner receives a last-minute assignment for a high-profile political debate with no prep materials. The BEST risk response is:
- Accept the job and improvise
- Decline and refer to a better-prepared colleague
- Accept but negotiate a higher latency tolerance
- Accept and request a 30-second delay buffer to allow for corrections (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Accept and request a 30-second delay buffer to allow for corrections
A delay buffer allows real-time review and correction, directly mitigating the accuracy risk caused by lack of preparation time.
Question 5: A captioner works across three simultaneous client accounts. The PRIMARY scheduling risk this creates is:
- Higher software licensing costs
- Double-booking or overlap conflicts causing a broadcast to go uncaptioned (Correct answer)
- Increased dictionary management complexity
- FCC penalties for the captioner personally
Correct answer: Double-booking or overlap conflicts causing a broadcast to go uncaptioned
Managing multiple client schedules without a conflict-checking system raises the probability of booking two live events at the same time.
Question 6: Which action BEST reduces the risk of caption quality complaints after a breaking-news broadcast?
- Using a larger font size in the caption display
- Conducting a real-time caption quality monitor and flagging errors for post-broadcast review (Correct answer)
- Increasing caption scroll speed to reduce latency
- Adding a disclaimer that captions may be inaccurate
Correct answer: Conducting a real-time caption quality monitor and flagging errors for post-broadcast review
Real-time monitoring combined with a structured post-broadcast review process identifies errors and provides documentation to address complaints.
Question 7: A captioner's stenography machine develops intermittent key-ghosting errors during a broadcast. The IMMEDIATE risk mitigation is:
- Slow down steno speed to reduce errors
- Switch to a backup keyboard or re-shadow with a second steno unit if available (Correct answer)
- Notify the client and continue
- Stop captioning and reboot the machine
Correct answer: Switch to a backup keyboard or re-shadow with a second steno unit if available
Switching to a backup input device maintains output continuity while the faulty machine is diagnosed and repaired.
CBC Risk Management & Mitigation 3
A captioner's software crashes 20 minutes into a 2-hour live broadcast.
Which pre-established protocol minimizes audience caption blackout?