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ACMA rules 10 not paying attention to captions

10 agrees to pre-prepared captions for fast paced quiz, after ACMA rules live captions were incomprehensible.

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Network 10 will provide pre-prepared captions for Have You Been Paying Attention? after ACMA ruled a programme in breach of the Television Captioning Standard.

10’s Live caption service provider failed to meet standards on accuracy, readability and comprehensibility for deaf and hearing impaired viewers, the Australian Communications and Media Authority found.

Episodes broadcast on Network TEN Brisbane and another on WIN TEN in June contained inaccurate captions, missing captions for some key information, and delays that ranged from one to 11 seconds (on average four to five seconds).

Typically Have You Been Paying Attention? is recorded on a Sunday with the content being edited from Sunday evening through to Monday afternoon. A final copy of the program was transmitted from the edit suite in TEN Melbourne to TEN’s main playout centre in Sydney from 6.00pm on Monday 11 June. It was then live captioned by TEN’s caption service provider.

But ACMA found a range of issues in the fast-paced quiz, including incorrect comprehension, delays, lack of names, placement & spelling errors, making it difficult for viewers to follow.

Amongst the live caption errors cited, ‘To Melbourne. The home of coffee’ was captioned as ‘Two Melbourne. The Tom of coffee’; I believe it’s a kangaroo in a carpark and it’s getting kicked out because of Sydney’s lockout laws’ became ‘I believe it west kangaroo in a car park it’s sick kicked out because of Sydney’s lockout laws’; a quiz game about Julie Bishop and Penny Wong hanging out ‘That’s a really weird hens’ night’ was captioned as ‘That’s a really weird sand sign and ‘Tough one, two girls, one cup’ was captioned as ‘Sufficient one, two girls, one cup.’

10 submitted that its caption service provider conducted a thorough review and found accuracy was 99.1%. But ACMA disagreed leading 10 to agree to pre-prepared captions in future.

TV Tonight readers have previously noted difficulty with the show’s live captions, including that errors are not corrected for repeat screenings.

ACMA considered 10’s proposed measures to prevent similar breaches, as well as their good compliance record, and decided against enforcement action.

13 Responses

  1. Captions are always a mess. I see them on the screens at the gym. I always thought the captioning was done live to air with a seven second delay via a voice recognition program which caused the mistakes.

  2. This happens with so many live caption broadcasts and it’s not just 10 that is the culprit either. Prime7 news constantly misses names and words as does Sunrise at times. Nine also is bad with live broadcasts but I think the lack of captions on multi channels is the worst especially Nine and 10 multichannels. Seven seems to have captions on most of its shows across the channels although there is still some that it doesn’t. It should be across the board that all channels between 6pm-midnight at least has captions. It’s frustrating. More needs to be done.

  3. This is unsurprising considering how little time they have to transcribe everything (with no time to research names/locations and other details).

    Furthermore, live captions are delayed, so the text scarcely matches the visual. It’s a wonder that they even bother doing them for anything that isn’t news.

    1. “wonder that they even bother doing them for anything that isn’t news.” Because “Commercial and national television services are required to caption the programs broadcast between 6 am and midnight each day on the main channels as well as all the news and current affairs broadcast on the main channels. Programs broadcast on a multi-channel are required to be captioned if the broadcaster has previously broadcast those programs with captions on another television service.” (ACMA Broadcasting Services Act 1992). They have plenty of time to provide captioning in advance. Regional networks can do it in advance for multiple simultaneous playouts of news to markets. WIN, NBN, Prime NSW, 7Queensland.

  4. Those errors in themselves are funny as! But I do genuinely feel for viewers who require accurate and reliable closed captions, so that is not a laughing matter.

  5. My wife noted that subtitles were no longer present for This Is Us after it switched to a Ten secondary channel. I remembered that subtitles (for some inexplicable reason) aren’t compulsory for them.
    With Ten moving so many of our favourites to Peach or Boss (Madam Secretary – Hawaii 5-0 – and probably Bull) I’m dreading trying to follow the plot without subtitles.
    Why on earth aren’t they made to include subtitles on secondary channels?

  6. To claim “99.1%” accuracy is ridiculous. It’s virtually impossible to follow what’s going on in this show since one does have to rely on closed captions for clarity. If WIN can manage to get all of their news programs captioned in the tight window before broadcast it’s unacceptable that prerecorded programs are captioned “live”. Those examples are tame compared to some I’ve seen.

  8. Those caption errors are the norm for live captioning. We don’t have hearing problems in our house, but usually have captions on all the time anywhere. Whenever something is live captioned, though, we have to turn them off because they are always terrible. For anything that’s prerecorded, I don’t think live captioning should ever be acceptable.

  9. Fox Sports captioners need to learn the words to our national anthem. More often than not they are incorrect. (yes, I have made an official complaint to Foxtel with screenshots)

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