Closed captioning serves as a powerful tool that extends its impact far beyond aiding the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Its significance transcends age, abilities, and background, making it an invaluable resource for both educators and learners. In the digital age, closed captioning has emerged as a transformative resource, with research revealing that students, English language learners, and children with learning disabilities who watch programs with closed captioning turned on improve their reading skills, increase their vocabulary, and enhance their focus and attention.
The scholarly article, Closed Captioning Matters: Examining the Value of Closed Captions for All Students (Smith 231) states that “Previous research shows that closed captioning can benefit many kinds of learners. In addition to students with hearing impairments, captions stand to benefit visual learners, non-native English learners, and students who happen to be in loud or otherwise distracting environments. In remedial reading classes, closed captioning improved students’ vocabulary, reading comprehension, word analysis skills, and motivation to learn (Goldman & Goldman, 1988). The performance of foreign language learners increased when captioning was provided (Winke, Gass, & Sydorenko, 2010). Following exams, these learners indicated that captions lead to increased attention, improved language processing, the reinforcement of previous knowledge, and deeper understanding of the language. For low-performing students in science classrooms, technology-enhanced videos with closed captioning contributed to post-treatment scores that were similar to higher-performing students (Marino, Coyne, & Dunn, 2010). The current findings support previous research and highlight the suitability of closed-captioned content for students with and without disabilities.”
Reading Rockets, a national public media literacy initiative provides resources and information on how young children learn and how educators can improve their students’ reading abilities. In the article, Captioning to Support Literacy, Alise Brann confirms that “Captions can provide struggling readers with additional print exposure, improving foundational reading skills.”
She states, “In a typical classroom, a teacher may find many students who are struggling readers, whether they are beginning readers, students with language-based learning disabilities, or English Language Learners (ELLs). One motivating, engaging, and inexpensive way to help build the foundational reading skills of students is through the use of closed-captioned and subtitled television shows and movies. These can help boost foundational reading skills, such as phonics, word recognition, and fluency, for a number of students.”
Research clearly demonstrates that “people learn better and comprehend more when words and pictures are presented together. The combination of aural and visual input gives viewers the opportunity to comprehend information through different channels and make connections between them” (The Effects of Captions on EFL Learners’ Comprehension of English-Language Television Programs).
From bolstering reading skills, to enhancing focus and language comprehension, the benefits of closed captioning are numerous. We at Aberdeen Broadcast Services are committed to providing quality closed captions for television (TV) and educational programming.
Here is the public service announcement (PSA) we released in 2016 on local broadcast stations, emphasizing how closed captioning can enhance children's literacy skills.
Been tasked with figuring out how to implement closed captions in your video library? The process can be overwhelming at first. While evaluating closed captioning vendors, it’s good to understand the benefits of captioning, who your audience is, what to consider when it comes to quality, and what to expect from a vendor.
There are several things that an organization should consider and evaluate before choosing a closed captioning vendor. Some of the most important factors include:
Benefits of Closed Captioning
Accessibility: First, and most importantly, closed captioning makes videos more accessible to people with hearing impairments. This can help to level the playing field and ensure that all viewers have the opportunity to enjoy the content.
Non-native English speakers: Closed captioning can be helpful for non-native English speakers. It can help them to understand the content of videos even if they are not fluent in English.
People in noisy environments: Closed captioning can be helpful for people who are in noisy environments. It allows them to watch videos without having to worry about missing any of the audio.
Engagement: Closed captioning can help to keep viewers engaged in videos. When viewers can read along with the audio, they are more likely to stay focused and understand the content.
Comprehension: Closed captioning can help viewers to better understand the content of videos. When viewers can see the words that are being spoken, they are better able to process the information and remember it.
SEO: Closed captions can help to improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of videos. This is because search engines can read the text of captions, which can help to improve the ranking of videos in search results.
Overall, closed captioning is a valuable tool that can benefit a wide range of audiences. It makes videos more accessible, engaging, and comprehensible for everyone.
Evaluating Vendors
By considering these factors, organizations can choose a closed captioning vendor that will meet their needs and provide a high-quality service:
Accuracy: The captions should be accurate and error-free. This is important for all viewers, but it is especially important for people with hearing impairments.
Timeliness: The captions should be delivered on time. This is important for live events, as well as for pre-recorded videos that are being released on a tight schedule.
Format: The captions should be delivered in a format that is compatible with the organization's equipment. This may include closed captions for live events, or subtitles for pre-recorded videos.
Cost: The cost of closed captioning services varies depending on a number of factors, including the length of the video, the number of viewers, and the turnaround time required.
What to Expect in the Process
Start early: Closed captioning can take time, so it is important to start the process early. This will help to ensure that the captions are accurate and delivered on time.
Test the captions: Once the captions are complete, it is important to test them to make sure that they are accurate and error-free. This can be done by having a few people watch the video with the captions turned on.
Provide feedback: If there are any errors in the captions, or if the captions are not formatted correctly, it is important to provide feedback to the closed captioning vendor. This will help to ensure that the captions are of the highest quality.
Use these tips when evaluating closed captioning vendors and you’ll ensure that their videos are accessible to everyone and that they provide a positive viewing experience for all viewers.
On October 11, 2022, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released the latest CVAA biennial report to Congress, evaluating the current industry compliance as it pertains to Sections 255, 716, and 718 of the Communications Act of 1934. The biennial report is required by the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA), which amended the Communications Act of 1934 to include updated requirements for ensuring the accessibility of "modern" telecommunications to people with disabilities.
FCC rules under Section 255 of the Communications Act require telecommunications equipment manufacturers and service providers to make their products and services accessible to people with disabilities. If such access is not readily achievable, manufacturers and service providers must make their devices and services compatible with third-party applications, peripheral devices, software, hardware, or consumer premises equipment commonly used by people with disabilities.
Accessibility Barriers
Despite major design improvements over the past two years, the report reveals that accessibility gaps still persist and that industry commenters are most concerned about equal access on video conferencing platforms. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of accessible video conferencing services for people with disabilities.
Zoom, BlueJeans, FaceTime, and Microsoft Teams have introduced a variety of accessibility feature enhancements, including screenreader support, customizable chat features, multi-pinning features, and “spotlighting” so that all participants know who is speaking. However, commentators have expressed concern over screen share and chat feature compatibility with screenreaders along with the platforms’ synchronous automatic captioning features.
Although many video conferencing platforms now offer meeting organizers synchronous automatic captioning to accommodate deaf and hard-of-hearing participants, the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Consumer Advocacy (DHH CAO) pointed out that automated captioning sometimes produces incomplete or delayed transcriptions and even if slight delays of live captions cannot be avoided, these captioning delays may cause “cognitive overload.” Comprehension can be further hindered if a person who is deaf or hard of hearing cannot see the faces of speaking participants, for “people with hearing loss rely more on nonverbal information than their peers, and if a person misses a visual cue, they may fall behind in the conversation.”
Automated vs. Human-generated Captions
At present, the automated captioning features on these conference platforms have an error rate of 5-10%. That’s 5-10 errors per 100 words spoken and when the average conversation rate of an English speaker is 150 words per minute, you’re looking at the possibility of over a dozen errors a minute.
Earlier this year, our team put Adobe’s artificial intelligence (AI) powered speech-to-text engine to the test. We tasked our most experienced Caption Editor with using Adobe’s auto-generated transcript to create & edit the captions to meet the quality standards of the FCC and the deaf and hard of hearing community on two types of video clips: a single-speaker program and one with multiple speakers.
Open captions and closed captions are both used to provide text-based representations of spoken dialogue or audio content in videos, but they differ in their visibility and accessibility options.
Here's the difference between closed and open captions:
Open Captions
Open captions, also known as "burned-in" or "hardcoded" captions, are permanently embedded in the video itself.
They are visible to all viewers and cannot be turned off or disabled.
Open captions are typically added during the video production process and become a permanent part of the visual content.
They are useful when the video is intended for a wide audience, including individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing, or when the video will be played in noisy environments where audio may not be easily heard (e.g. a museum).
Closed Captions
Closed captions are separate text tracks that can be turned on or off by the viewer.
They are not visible by default but can be enabled through the video player's settings or options.
Closed captions provide flexibility for viewers who may not need or want the captions.
They are commonly used in broadcast television, streaming platforms, and online videos to cater to diverse audiences and comply with accessibility regulations.
Closed captions can be generated in real-time using a live writer or automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology or added manually during post-production.
Feature
Open Caption
Closed Captions
Visibility
Permanently embedded in the video
Separate text track that can be turned on or off
Accessibility
Cannot be turned off
Can be turned on or off by the viewer
Applications
Wide audiences, noisy environments
Diverse audiences, compliance with accessibility regulations
Creation
Added during video production
Generated in real-time or embedded manually during post-production or uploaded as a sidecar file
Both open and closed captions serve the purpose of making videos accessible to individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing, those who are learning a new language, or those who prefer to read the text alongside the audio.
The choice between open or closed captions depends on the specific requirements and preferences of the content creators and the target audience.
In the July ‘21 release of Premiere Pro, Adobe introduced its artificial intelligence (AI) powered speech-to-text engine to help creators make their content more accessible to their audiences. Their extensive toolset allows their users to edit, stylize, and export captions in all supported formats straight out of the sequence timeline of a Premiere Pro project. A 3-step process of auto-transcribing, generating, and stylizing captions all within the platform already familiar to its users delivers a seamless experience from beginning to end. But how is the accuracy of the final product?
Today, AI captions, at their best, have an error rate of 5-10% - much improved over the 80% accuracy we saw just a few years ago. High accuracy is crucial for the deaf and hard-of-hearing audience as each error adds to the possibility of confusing the message. To protect all audiences that rely on captioning to understand programming on television, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set a detailed list of quality standards by which all captions must meet to be acceptable for broadcast back in 2015. Preceding those standards, the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) published its Captioning Key manual over 20 years ago and has since been a valuable reference for captioning of both entertainment and educational media targeted to audiences of all age groups. Simply having captions present on your content isn’t enough, it needs to be accurate and best replicate the experience for all audiences.
Adobe’s speech-to-text engine has been one of the most impressive that our team has seen to date, so we decided to take a deeper look at it and run some tests. We tasked our most experienced Caption Editor with using Adobe’s auto-generated transcript to create & edit the captions to meet the quality standards of the FCC and the deaf and hard of hearing community on two types of video clips: a single-speaker program and one with multiple speakers. Our editor used our Pop-on Plus+ caption product for these examples, which are our middle-tier quality captions that fulfill all quality standard requirements but are not always 100% free of errors.
Did using Adobe’s speech-to-text save time, or did it create more work in the editing process than needed? Here’s how it went…
In-depth comparison documents that evaluate the captions cell-by-cell are available for download here:
In this example, we used the perfect scenario for AI: clear audio, a single speaker at an optimal words-per-minute (WPM) speaking rate, and no sound effects or music.
The captions contained the following issues that would need to be corrected by Caption Editor:
No speaker ID.
Strange leading spaces before the second caption line - Caption Editor can delete easily in their software.
A total of 10 cells out of 95 were formatted the way our Caption Editor did it and would have required no further attention at all.
Several first words were not capitalized.
Some sentences had end-sentence punctuation in the middle of a sentence.
Many words were wrong.
Most cells formatted poorly, resulting in cells with 2-3 words, or cells that were difficult to read.
Many of these cells can be optimized and lines combined for ease of reading.
Several cells with a duration of less than 1 second.
Here’s the clip with Adobe’s speech-to-text captions overlayed on the top half of the video, and ours on the bottom half.
Multiple Speaker Clip
For the next clip, we went with a more realistic example of television programming where there are multiple speakers, an area where AI is known to struggle and has difficulties identifying the speakers. This clip also features someone with a pronounced accent, commentators speaking over one another, and proper names of athletes – all of which our editors take the time to research and understand.
The same errors detailed in the single-speaker example are present throughout, among the other difficulties we expected it to have. In fact, there were so many errors that our editor was unable to use the transcript from Adobe and started from the beginning using our own workflow.
Here’s a sample of the first 9 cells of captions with what Adobe transcribes in the first column, notes from our Caption Editor, and how it should look.
Adobe’s Automated SRT Caption File
Issue
Formatted by Aberdeen
something you are never seen in your life, correct?
No speaker ID.
(Pedro Martinez) It's something you have never seen in your life,
“Correct” is spoken by new speaker.
(Matt Vasgersian) Correct!
So it's.
Missing text.
So it's--so it's MVP of the year!
So we're all watching something different. OK
(Pedro) We're all watching something different.
He gets the MVP.
Okay, he gets the MVP.
I'd be better off.
Completely misunderstood music lyrics.
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
Oh, you, you guys.
(Matt) You guys.
Let me up here to dove into the opening night against the Hall of Fame.
Merged multiple sentences together.
Just left me up here to die.
You left me up here to die against the hall of famer.
Take a look at the clip. Again, with Adobe's speech-to-text on the top and Aberdeen on the bottom.
In-depth comparison documents that evaluate the captions cell-by-cell are available for download here:
Overall, the quality of the auto-generated captions exceeded expectations, and we found them to be in the top tier of speech-recognition engines available. The timing and punctuation were particularly impressive. However, when doing a true comparison to the captioning work that we would consider acceptable, AI does not meet Aberdeen’s broadcast quality standard.
Aberdeen's post-production Caption Editors are detail-oriented and grammar savvy and always strive to portray every element of the program with 100% accuracy so that the viewer misses nothing. For our most experienced Caption Editor, it took a 5:1 ratio in time for them to edit and correct the single-speaker clip; meaning, for every minute of video, it took 5 minutes to clean up the transcript and captions. Assuming your team is educated in the proper timing of caption cells, line breaks, and grammar, a 30-minute program may take over 2.5 hours to bring up to standards with a usable transcript. In the second example, the transcript was unusable and would have taken more time to clean up than it did to transcribe from scratch. Double that timeline now.
Consider all of the above when using this service. Do you have the time and resources to train your staff to know how to edit auto-generated captions and get them up to the appropriate standards? How challenging may your content be for the AI? Whenever and however you make the choice, make sure you deliver the best possible experience to your entire audience.
Closed captioning is an essential aspect of modern media consumption, bridging the gap of accessibility and inclusivity for diverse audiences. Yet, despite its widespread use, misconceptions about closed captioning persist. In this article, we delve into the most prevalent myths surrounding this invaluable feature, shedding light on the truth behind closed captioning's capabilities, impact, and indispensable role in enhancing the way we interact with video content.
Let’s debunk these common misunderstandings about closed captioning and gain a fresh perspective on the far-reaching importance of closed captioning in today's digital landscape.
Closed captioning is only for the deaf and hard of hearing
While closed captions are crucial for people with hearing impairments, they benefit a much broader audience. They are also helpful for people learning a new language, those in noisy environments, individuals with attention or cognitive challenges, and viewers who prefer to watch videos silently.
Closed captioning is automatic and 100% accurate
While there are automatic captioning tools, they are not always accurate, especially with complex content, background noise, or accents. Human involvement is often necessary to ensure high-quality and accurate captions.
Captions are always displayed at the same place on the screen
Some formats, like SCC, support positioning and allow captions to appear in different locations. However, most platforms use standard positioning at the bottom of the screen.
Captions can be added to videos as a separate file later
While it's possible to add closed captions after video production, it's more efficient and cost-effective to incorporate captioning during the production process. Integrating captions during editing ensures a seamless viewing experience.
Captions are only available for movies and TV shows
Closed captioning is essential for television and films, but it's also used in various other video content, including online videos, educational videos, social media clips, webinars, and live streams.
Captioning is a one-size-fits-all solution
Different platforms and devices may have varying requirements for closed caption formats and display styles. To ensure accessibility and optimal viewing experience, captions may need adjustments based on the target platform.
All countries have the same closed captioning standards
Captioning standards and regulations vary between countries, and it's essential to comply with the specific accessibility laws and guidelines of the target audience's location.
Closed captioning is expensive and time-consuming
While manual captioning can be time-consuming, there are cost-effective solutions available, including automatic captioning and professional captioning services. Moreover, the benefits of accessibility and broader audience reach often outweigh the investment.
In summary, closed captioning is a vital tool for enhancing accessibility and user experience in videos. Understanding the realities of closed captioning helps ensure that content creators and distributors make informed decisions to improve inclusivity and reach a broader audience.
In the history of our planet, littering is a relatively new problem. It was around the 1950s when manufacturers began producing a higher volume of litter-creating material, such as disposable products and packaging made with plastic. Much like the boom of manufacturers creating more disposable packaging, new video content is being pushed out to streaming platforms in incredible volumes every day.
Along with all this new video content, there are noticeable similarities between littering and a prevalent problem in our industry: inaccessible media – specifically poor captioning quality. Instead of it being food wrappers, water bottles, plastic bags, or cigarette butts, it’s misspellings, lack of punctuation, missing words, or the wrong reading rate (words-per-minute on the screen) that affects readability.
The motives behind littering and choosing poor-quality captioning are similar and it generally boils down to one of the following reasons: laziness or carelessness, lenient law enforcement, and/or presence of litter already in the area. Both are very selfish acts, allowing one person to take the easy route by just discarding their trash wherever they please, or in the case of captioning, choosing the quickest & cheapest option available to fulfill a request without any regard to the quality. When it comes to organizations enforcing the guidelines and standards, if their efforts are relaxed, it will encourage a lot of people to not follow them. And the presence of other content creators getting away with inaccessible media will, no doubt, encourage others to take the same route.
In The Big Hack’s survey of over 3,000 disabled viewers, four in five disabled people experience accessibility issues with video-on-demand services. “66% of users feel either frustrated, let down, excluded or upset by inaccessible entertainment.” In fact, “20% of disabled people have canceled a streaming service subscription because of accessibility issues.” It’s clear: inaccessible media is polluting video content libraries.
Viewers that do not utilize closed captions may not always think about how poor-quality captions affect the users that do, just like the consequences of littering on the community and animals that all share the Earth’s ecosystem are often overlooked. Education and awareness are important tools in reducing the problem. If we allow it to become commonplace, much like litter, bad captioning will wash away into the “ocean” of online video content and become permanent pollution our video “eco-system.”
So, what can we do about it before it’s too late? Much like with littering, we can start with community cleanups. Let the content creators know that you value captioning and would enjoy their content more if captions were present and accurately represent the program to all viewers. Find their websites and social media pages and contact them – make them aware. And if it’s on broadcast television, let the FCC know.
Clean communities have a better chance of attracting new business, residents, and tourists – the same will go for the online video community. Quality captioning is your choice and, for the sake of the video community, please evaluate the quality of work done by the captioning vendors that you’re considering and don’t always just go for the cheapest and quickest option. Help keep the video community clean.
Technological advancements have made preaching the Gospel through new mediums easier than ever – and the limitations in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic has forced embracing these new technologies a necessity. A majority of the fastest-growing churches in the U.S. had already begun live-streaming their services as a way to grow and connect with their audience that may not be able to physically attend due to distance, age, or a disability. Now, it’s a scramble for everyone to get onboard with a solution.
But this new burden to adapt is not all that bad. So far, we are hearing a positive response from ministries that the newly implemented video streams of their services have not only provided an adequate solution for their congregation but has also gained exposure to more members of their community. This leads us to see a common trend among the churches that make Outreach’s 100 Fastest-Growing Churches in America list every year: online services.
The New Normal
Like nearly every institution in American life, places of worship have been hit hard by the novel coronavirus and subsequent social distancing measures – no longer able to physically gather as one; to collectively nod their heads when a verse speaks to them or sway together during songs of worship.
State-to-state the laws vary, but here in California places of worship have been asked to “discontinue indoor singing and chanting activities and limit indoor attendance to 25% of building capacity or a maximum of 100 attendees, whichever is lower.” And it’s also encouraged to “consider practicing these activities through alternative methods (such as internet streaming).”
So amidst the uncertainty of how and when the regulations will change, religious leaders have turned to online platforms to practice their faith with community members. Since March of this year, BoxCast, the complete live video streaming solution popular among churches, experienced an 85% increase in active accounts and a 500% increase in viewing minutes compared to the same period last year. Even the modestly-sized church streaming platform streamingchurch.net saw an immediate increase in their subscriber base of 20% and their total viewership triple to 60,000 weekly viewers.
Rick Warren from Saddleback Church reports that in the last 23 weeks – since the church moved to online-only services – they have more than doubled their 45,000-weekly attendance. This is their greatest growth in the shortest amount of time in their 40-year history.
The silver lining here is that being forced to find an online solution has allowed the message to be more accessible than ever. And once the setup is in place to live-stream your services, keeping it as an option for your audience unable to attend in person even after all restrictions are lifted will be an invaluable resource for continued growth.
Hearing Loss and the Benefits of Captioning
As audiences grow, it is important to point out that approximately 20% of American adults (48 million!) aged 18 and over report some trouble hearing. Some of the audience may be sitting in silence; literally.
Captions are words displayed on a television, computer, mobile device, etc., providing the speech or sound portion of a program or video via text. Captions allow viewers to follow the dialogue and the action of a program simultaneously. Captions can also provide information about who is speaking or about sound effects that might be important to understanding the message.
Captions help comprehension and clarification of the dialogue – it’s not just with those with hearing loss. Reading along with captions can help other members of the congregation with concentration and engagement.
After surveying a small sample of churches using captioning, we’ve seen similar responses where they’ve started by adding captioning to one service a week to gauge the response. Most find encouraging numbers with engagement on that service and move to add captions to the remaining services and even start captioning their archived videos of past sermons.
So as your audience grows, consider being further accessible with captioning and ensure you’re reaching that additional 20%.
**Update: July 29, 2020** Changes have been made to the integration methods on WebEX, YouTube, and The Church Online platforms since we hosted this webinar. Please download the materials to get the most current charts.**
From April 9th, 2020
Virtual gatherings have become the new normal during the stay-at-home orders in place as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. It's as important as ever for organizations to keep their audience engaged, informed, and connected. With that in mind, it’s also essential that these events are accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing – which is approximately 20% of American adults.
We've been receiving countless phone calls looking for answers on how captioning works, what's possible, and how quickly businesses can get set up and ready to go.
In this 30-minute webinar, Matt Cook (President) and Becky Isaacs (Executive VP & Live Captioning Manager) from Aberdeen Broadcast Services discuss the options available for implementing accessible meetings with captioning – from the most simplified approach, to seamlessly integrating with your video player or conferencing platform.
Whether you use Zoom, Adobe Connect, or Microsoft Teams for your virtual meetings or YouTube, Facebook Live, or even The Church Online platform to stream your remote events, Aberdeen can find the solution for your audience to stay engaged and accessible with closed captioning.
There’s a growing trend on social media and sites like Reddit and Quora to showcase captioning errors from television and numerous online platforms. As accessibility laws tighten and the quality standards for captioning on broadcasts become more rigorous, how do these bloggers have so much fuel for their posts on captioning errors? It is a simple question with many complicated answers.
Live television programming is captioned in real-time either by machines or humans working with a stenotype machine (like those used in courtrooms) and thus tends to lag slightly behind and, inevitably, will include some paraphrasing and errors. While the Federal Communication Commission requires American television stations' post-production captions to meet certain standards, the Internet is still vastly unregulated. Video-sharing websites like YouTube have struggled to provide accessible captions. Despite YouTube's recent efforts to improve accessibility, their captions continue to disappoint viewers, especially those of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community.
In a 2014 The Atlantic article called "The Sorry State of Closed Captioning," Tammy H. Nam explains why machines cannot create the same experience humans can. She posits, "Machine translation is responsible for much of today’s closed-captioning and subtitling of broadcast and online streaming video. It can’t register sarcasm, context, or word emphasis." By using machines instead of human writers and editors, sites like YouTube are not providing the same viewing experience to the deaf and hard of hearing as they are to their other patrons. Humans can understand which homophone to use based on context. There is an enormous difference between the words soar and sore, air and heir, suite and sweet. Humans can also determine when noise is important to the plot of a story and thereby include it in the captions so that a non-hearing viewer won't miss critical details. In the same Atlantic article, deaf actress Marlee Matlin says, "I rely on closed captioning to tell me the entire story…I constantly spot mistakes in the closed captions. Words are missing or something just doesn’t make sense." Accessible closed captions should follow along exactly with the spoken dialogue and important sounds so that viewers are immersed in the story. Having to decipher poor captions takes the viewer out of the flow of the story and creates a frustrating experience.
YouTube created its own auto caption software for its creators to use in 2010. The software is known for its incomprehensible captions. Deaf YouTuber and activist Rikki Poynter made a video in 2015 highlighting the various ways in which YouTube's automatic captions are inaccessible. She wrote a 2018 blog post explaining her experience with the software, "Most of the words were incorrect. There was no grammar. (For the record, I’m no expert when it comes to grammar, but the lack of punctuation and capitalization sure was something.) Everything was essentially one long run-on sentence. Captions would stack up on each other and move at a slow pace." For years, Rikki and other deaf and hard-of-hearing YouTube users had to watch videos with barely any of the audio accurately conveyed. Although her blog post highlights the ways in which YouTube's automatic captions have improved since 2015, she writes, "With all of that said, do I think that we should choose to use only automatic captions? No, I don’t suggest that. I will always suggest manually written or edited captions because they will be the most accurate. Automatic captions are not 100% accessible and that is what captions should be." The keyword is accessible. When captions do not accurately reflect spoken words in videos, television shows, and movies, the stories and information are inaccessible to the deaf and hard of hearing. Missing words, incorrect words, poor timing, captions covering subtitles, or other important graphics all take the viewer out of the experience or leave out critical information to fully understand and engage with the content. Until web resources like YouTube take their deaf and hard-of-hearing viewer's complaints seriously, they will continue to alienate them.
So, what can we do about poor web-closed captioning? Fortunately, the Internet is also an amazing tool that allows consumers and users to have a voice in the way they experience web content. Deaf and hard-of-hearing activists like Marlee Matlin, Rikki Poynter, and Sam Wildman have been using their online platforms to improve web-closed captions. Follow in their footsteps and use the voice that the web gives you. Make a YouTube video like Rikki Poynter or write a blog post like Sam Wildman's post, "An Open Letter to Netflix Re: Subtitles."
The Internet is a powerful platform in which large companies like Google can hear directly from their consumers. If you would like to see the quality of closed captions on the web improve, use your voice. Otherwise, you'll continue to see memes like this one...
