Captioning Local Community Television

Someone wrote asking me the following. I don’t have an answer for her without doing a lot of research. Maybe one of you knows a resource. Just post a comment and I’ll make sure she gets your notes.

I’m looking for information on captioning provided to local communtiy television station. This is a community of 12K, university town with good number of deaf/hoh students. Deaf/hoh in town numbers around 15-20. City attorney says they are not required to provide captioning for their city council meetings and such. We understand that there is a cost issue. Is there any technology out there that will alliviate the cost to caption the local tv station?

University students are involved for internships. I was hoping there is something out there that is not cost prohibitive that I can share with them. They use a video camera and manage their output thru a computer that sends live/taped sessions of municipal court/city council meetings/and other city related issues such as interviews with park adminstrators etc. Let me know if there are tools out there that I can present to them so they can caption some of the local events.