The vendor is required to provide transcription services for county council sessions for the county’s government access channel.
- The county government access channel, close captions 99.9% of our programming.
- To close caption our programming, the county owns two Evertz 9084 caption encoders and has two toll free phone lines in our technical operations center.
- The county uses this equipment to close caption regularly scheduled live public hearings, county council sessions, county council committee meetings and other live events on an as needed basis.
- Provide documentation of captioning and transcription services for television with at least a 98% accuracy rate with your bid via prior year submissions included reports.
- Provide captioning for all public hearings, county council sessions, county council committee meetings and other events as requested by the county.
- County also close captions prerecorded series programming on a weekly basis (currently on Wednesdays and Fridays) using the encoders listed above and the toll-free lines.
- The federal communications commission (FCC) rules concerning closed captioning of video programming on television
- FCC rules for tv closed captioning ensure that viewers who are deaf and hard of hearing have full access to programming, address captioning quality and provide guidance to video programming distributors and programmers
- The rules apply to all television programming with captions, requiring that captions be:
• Accurate: captions must match the spoken words in the dialogue and fully convey background noises and other sounds possible.
• Synchronous: captions must coincide with their corresponding spoken words and sounds to the greatest extent possible and must be displayed on the screen at a speed that can be read by viewers.
• Complete: captions must fully run from the beginning to the end of the program possible.
• Properly placed: captions should not block other important visual content on the screen, overlap one
another or run off the edge of the video screen.
- The contractor may be asked to make recommendations for the county to purchase software for the successful transcription of the county council sessions and additional closed captioning equipment and new or updated software for the county that will be owned by the county.
- The contractor must provide a dedicated project manager who will be responsible for all aspects of the project to include, but not be limited to:
• Monitoring and performance of all tasks on the project;
• Supervision of all team members working on the project;
• Use of best practices for the industry;
• Creation of and compliance with project schedule;
• Provision and explanation of project status reports;
• Coordination of all required tasks and personnel for entire project;
• Coordination of any necessary equipment, hardware or software acquisition and installation;
• Responding to emergency requests; and
• Completion of all deliverables/milestones
- If requested, the contractor must provide the services listed below.
- These services must be available for normal workdays, evenings 7:30pm – 10pm and weekends within 24 hours after receipt of notice.
• Real time closed captioning for regular county council sessions, generally held on Tuesday, averaging five hours each, begin at approximately 9am EST
• During a two-three-week period in may, the county council will meet every day (Monday – Friday) for approximately 6 hours per session;
• Real time closed captioning for county council public hearings and committee sessions.
these sessions are held generally on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday averaging four hours.
• Transcripts may be requested for the committee sessions and public hearings.
• Real time closed captioning for prerecorded programs as they are digitized into the county automated playback system
• Real time closed captioning of programs produced in Spanish simultaneously in Spanish and english on Fridays and Wednesdays.
• Real time closed captioning of programs produced in english simultaneously in english and Spanish.
• Provide a smi or sami closed caption file of each live captioned event.
• The county reserves the right to request that the qualified vendor provide transcription services for
county council sessions for the county’s government access channel. the resulting
accurate corrected transcript in xml file must be able to be used with our video on demand provider.
• Offline closed captioning.
• Internet service captioning for video streaming, web casting, and video on demand
• Multi-language closed captioning and subtitling, including but not limited To Spanish, Amharic, Chinese and Korean.
• Captioning and transcription services starting the effective date of the resultant contract.
• Customer access to indexed county council sessions over the internet and on demand.
• Customers access to county council sessions based on a set of indexes by topics and agenda
item and keyword searches and
• Closed captioned teleconferencing.
• Provide specifications for any necessary equipment needed to provide captioning and transcription
services.
• Provide policies, procedures and best practices to insure optimum service.
• Provide the number of captioners who will be assigned to the contract that have the following
certifications: certified real-time reporter and certified broadcast captioners.
• Provide consistency in persons captioning, transcribing and editing county council sessions to provide a high level of captioning quality
• Provide engineering support for captioning and transcription services if requested.
• Arrange to acquire a copy of any necessary information for live events including but not limited to the county council’s agenda package to set-up captioning dictionaries prior to the start of each meeting or event.
• This information is available on our website.
• Arrange to acquire a copy of any necessary information for live events including but not limited to the
county council’s agenda package to set-up captioning dictionaries prior to the start of each meeting or event. this information is available on our website
• Provide loaner equipment support in the event of failure of county owned equipment.
• Provide a list of new technologies that could assist the county in providing closed captioning services to our viewers.
• The county reserves the right to use other means, such as speech recognition software or other software or hardware solutions, when it deems this necessary to close caption programming.
• Additional closed captioning services as requested by the county.
- Contract Period/Term: 1 year
- Optional Pre-Bid Conference Date: March 24, 2025