The Opening Ceremony is Today!

Are you as excited as we are?! After being postponed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both the Olympics (TODAY through August 8th) and Paralympics (August 24-September 5th) are about to happen in Tokyo. The opening ceremony, the medals, the flags, the TALENT, the camaraderie: We cannot wait!

We’ve Done the Prep

To say the amount of hours that go into both preparing for and captioning during the Olympics is daunting would be an understatement. The National Captioning Institute represents countless local news and sports affiliates across the country, each who have varying default schedules during the games, daily highlight specials, extra newscasts, and more. Our marketers and schedulers have been working all month making sure our clients’ live captioning needs are adequately prepared. Our captioners are tirelessly prepping names, sport vocabularies, cities and other verbiage that might arise during an Olympic-inspired show. And our whole company is enthusiastically awaiting the competition! After over a year of isolation, to watch the world come together again will be nothing less than thrilling.

How Do We Cover All Those Time Zones?

NCI’s Engineering, Scheduling, and Captioning departments are staffed 24/7. While we have offices in Virginia, California, and Kentucky, what is less known is that we have remote captioners and translators in both English and Spanish all over North and South America. We span time zones in both our geographic locations and our willingness to put in the overnight shifts to accommodate those across the globe. Being a mission-led nonprofit with a goal to bring accessibility to the deaf and hard of hearing means that we never close our doors. We are always here and ready to help.

And that’s our Olympic Dream

That no one is excluded from enjoying the Tokyo games. To provide accessible captions to every person who is deaf or hard of hearing and others who, for whatever reason, wherever situated and irrespective of their economic conditions, are limited in their ability to participate fully in the world of auditory or visual communications. Just like our mission states.