Now Offering Accurate and Affordable AI-powered Captioning & Transcription

“That person doesn’t even know how to spell.”  “They can’t type correctly.”  “How come in today’s age of technology can’t they get the captions right?”  If you don’t know how captioning works, you’ve probably thought or said this yourself.  The captioner’s ability to spell and type is not usually the reason a viewer sees garbled captions.  So you ask yourself, “Why?”

The following are reasons why captions appear garbled:

• The most common is the combination of the quality of the video signal and the quality of the decoder chip in the television itself.  If the quality of either is poor, it will display words with missing letters, separate letters incorrectly or a miss a word entirely.

• The technology of encoders and decoders working together to reveal the captions properly

• When watching a live program, the captioner may mistroke resulting in a typo

• When watching a live program you may see a word spelled phonetically.  This happens when the captioner doesn’t have that particular word in their dictionary.   The more experience the writer has, the more words in their dictionary and typically better captioning results.

So the next time you view captioning, pass on the word as to “Why captions look garbled?”

It is estimated that over 1 billion people in the world are learning to speak English! English is now the most widely spoken language in the world. With adults and children across the world needing accessible ways of learning English, what better way to assist this population than with captioning?

English is a second language for 30 million people living in the United States. Studies show that Limited English Proficient (LEP) students represent nearly 10% of public school enrollment. ESL Adult Education courses are rapidly growing—it is estimated that nearly 25% of Adult Education courses are ESL. 

Additionally, literacy still remains a problem in the United States. The National Center for Education Statistics showed that over 40 million adults in the United States have limited reading and writing skills.

Captioning becomes the perfect solution for increasing English language and literacy in this country. Television is a huge part of American culture. 99% of homes in the United States contain at least one television! Children on average spend nearly 30 hours a week watching television. Studies have shown that children who watch captioned programs can increase fluency, comprehension, and language development. With this in mind, captioning of television programs becomes a readily accessible way to improve English language and literacy amongst the population.