Captioning is not straightforward and is easy to get wrong.Ĭaptioning always has a new low it can hit Captioning is sui generis because it involves fleeting displays of the written word that must be instantly understood even while picture and sound are simultaneously presented. It isn’t like requiring wheelchair ramps but allowing ramps at a 45° angle. This is not like requiring seatbelts but not brakes in automobiles. There really is no analogy with other industries. The Anything’s Better Than Nothing fallacy is taken to the absurd extreme of insisting viewers must accept whatever el-cheapo “captioning” that somebody higher up the food chain is willing to pay for. If you can’t agree with that notion, I don’t know why you’re part of this discussion.īecause FCC regulations explicitly permitted broadcasters and VDUs to stuff anything at all into the vertical blanking interval and call it “captioning,” broadcasters, producers, and distributors have gone right ahead and done exactly that.
There may be lousy TV shows, but there should never be such a thing as lousy TV captioning. The latter point is not to be taken lightly even the worst TV show, the show whose very existence bothers you, the show you wouldn’t watch if your life depended on it, the show that’s well beneath your dignity, has artistic merit. We can view this attitude an example of the Anything’s Better Than Nothing fallacy of captioning.Īnything is better than nothing, but we’re talking about two important issues here: The legal rights of viewers with disabilities and the artistic integrity of the original program. If they glance at a monitor and see words that vaguely correlate to the audio, they consider the job done. To them, captioning is a deceptively straightforward task: Write down what people say. It seems that most people with the power to make decisions either do not care to learn much about captioning or resent captioning outright. But requiring a certain amount of captioning without regard to how it’s done reeks of a regulation that doesn’t understand the thing it is regulating. The FCC’s minimum quantities of captioning make for nice soundbites and more or less ensure that captioning isn’t completely absent from most of the shows people watch. Quantity without quality had unintended consequences This will become an important point later.
Unlike other respondents, I have 30 years’ near-continuous experience watching captioning – in four countries, no less. I have given various public presentations on captioning issues, including captioning typography. I worked within accessibility-related standards bodies like the W3C and PDF/UA until it became obvious that was a fool’s errand. The Atlantic Monthly dubbed me “the king of closed captions,” albeit so long ago it is old news. I wrote the book Building Accessible Websites (New Riders, 2001).
I am a journalist and author whose interest in accessibility for people with disabilities dates back nearly 30 years. We can talk about the problem or we can solve the problem.
We imposed captioning quotas, by law and regulation, to redress such discrimination.īut history and our experience up to this very second prove the free market will provide captioning that sucks. But it also proves that the free market will provide so little captioning it amounts to illegal discrimination against deaf people. It isn’t fair to say the free market, left to its own devices, would provide no captioning whatsoever. This submission is permanently located at /fcc2010/. This response pertains to the FCC’s 2010 Public Notice (CG 05-231 ET 99-254) on closed-captioning rules. Response to FCC Public Notice on closed-captioning rules