I'm part of the stenographer/captioner community as a hobby and you'd be surprised at how many people think that all captions are automatically computer-generated. In reality the practical limitations of autogenerated captions are demonstrated by YouTube's caption system. It's good but even a mistake every other sentence (95%+ accuracy) can completely obfuscate the meaning behind the video.
Big time. There are various levels of caption quality and part of it is the tools used.
1. QWERTY transcriptionists working brief, 5-10 minute shifts typing as fast as they can and rotating.
2. Voice-mask reporters using Dragon with a voice mask (more commonly phonetic typos)
3. Stenographers using a steno machine, some of them were not trained to do realtime and lack the ability to edit as they go.
It's all up to the individual, unfortunately. Furthermore, the budget for live captions is sometimes smaller than it should be and so the service purchased is the cheapest, not the best.
I pay attention to captions now. I've watched TSN (Canada) and it seems that past 10 p.m. they put in someone who isn't fully trained or graduated from school and they most definitely shouldn't be providing captions as they are near unreadable.
Good captions are priceless for the access that they offer.
