★★★★★ 0/5

“A bobcat said in parliament today”: The world of TV captions

What's it like watching TV when you are deaf or hearing impaired, and how do networks stack up?

21
Leave a comment

While most of us take watching Television for granted for some it can be quite the challenge.

Viewers who are Deaf / Hearing Impaired find mixed results with captions of television shows, which can vary wildly between networks, multichannels, catch-up, Pay TV and Streaming.

And there are variations in the quality of the captions provided.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority requires Free to Air Networks, including ABC and SBS, to supply captions from 6am to midnight on all programs. All news and current affairs programs must have captions 24 / 7. Captions must be easy to read, easy to understand and accurate -this includes the colour, font, length and positioning of the captions.

But multi-channels are only required to have captions if the show was previously broadcast with captions on the primary channel or another multi-channel. Subscription TV also has separate targets they must meet.

TV Tonight asked two viewers, Dave & Ken, to relate their viewing experience with captions:

So that we better understand your experience, how would you describe your degree of deafness / hearing impairment?

Dave: It is moderate. I can hear a direct conversation without hearing aids but if the person is a little way away from me or there is background noise I have a lot of trouble.

Ken: Severe. Use hearing aids but can’t comprehend / hear TV at what is deemed by others to be ‘normal’ level.

In your own words describe a typical viewing experience. 

Dave: If not using the sub titles I have trouble working out what is said. Not that the speech is not loud enough just that it is not clear enough to work out what is being said.

Ken: Dramas/movies – Will not / cannot watch if they are not captioned simply because I cannot follow the dialogue. Latest case in point – started to watch Network movie on SBS. No captions. Gave up. Daughter found it on Stan so watched it there, uninterrupted.
Interviews / news-caf – When news etc. is captioned “live” the text frequently:
(a) lags behind the dialogue by several sentences,
(b) falls so far behind that paragraphs or a whole item are skipped in order to catch up,
(c) important words are misplaced with (often hilarious) alternatives e.g. “…people in the middle of the road evacuating” captioned as “…people in the middle of the road ejaculating”.
“The Queen and the Duke travelling in this cabbage”
“…and two boys, John who is 11 and phrase whore who’s 10”
“…and, ah, Bob Katter said in parliament today…” captioned as “and a bobcat said in parliament today”.

Are there any shows / channels you consider worst offenders?

Dave: McGyver on Channel 10 had no subtitles at all. Sat through quite a few episodes of this trying to work out what was going on by the pictures alone mostly. The ABC subtitles are often amusing especially when watching shows which are broadcast live. Channel 10 often place their subtitles over the faces of the actors which is annoying.

Ken: Nine, Seven and 10 are equally bad. Oddly ABC News FTA has old, solid black blocks behind their captions whereas ABC News Streaming has translucent background, allowing us to see ‘did that golfer sink that putt or not?’, and to see what’s on screen that the FTA channel is blocking.

Which are demonstrating best practice and why?

Ken: Really only the streaming services have a best practice of captioning everything. WIN has neat, accurate captioning on their News, which I understand is done in advance by Ericsson, however, they fail to have any captioning on live crosses. ABC News channel generally captions everything but oddly stops for an hour or so in primetime.

What about Pay TV / Streaming / Catch-up?

Dave: Pay TV I don’t have. Streaming is very good. Have had Netflix and Stan and all been really good. Captions are well placed and easy enough to read without covering the bits of the screen that you want to see. Catch up is bad, mostly no sub titles. We have had a free trial of Amazon Prime for the last two weeks and the subtitles on there are terrible. Some days the only option that you have for the language that they are in is Danish. Whilst quite amusing at times not having them in English is a problem.  If you try to watch the same show the next day they are available in English again.

Ken: Netflix, and Stan programs are all captioned. ABC News Stream captioned now and then as per above. All have excellent small neat font with translucent background.

What needs to change first as a priority?

Dave: Catch up really. I avoid watching it as I know that I am going to struggle to work out what its being said without captions.

Ken: Captioning of programs on ‘secondary’ channels, which only seems to be if the program / film has been aired previously on that network’s primary channel and therefore is captioned.

ACMA told TV Tonight the quality of captioning is an ongoing issue that has been raised with and considered by the ACMA on a number of occasions.  The most recent were by Seven over Highway Patrol,  My Kitchen Rules, Instant Hotel and an AFL match. It last asked for public submissions in 2016.

Information about how to complain to about captioning on TV can also be found on the ACMA website.

21 Responses

  1. Firstly I believe there should be no special treatment of primary vs multichannel any more. This is legacy thinking.

    This – accessibility – is a whole of chain equity problem and is correctly not a niche issue. Even those not hard of hearing would struggle on some audio edits and the contexts of waiting rooms etc mean the audio may not always be desirable.

    The font/positioning/transparency issue is a legacy standards/TV/set top box change that could be a user option.

    Almost any content that was ever on DVD, etc will have subtitles and there’s no reason not for using them (albeit technical formatting ones).

    There could be true innovation here too. Squash the screen up and put the subtitles in a ticker form. Use a Bluetooth/web synced second screen app with a rolling Transcript instead, etc. Any grants available sure we could prototype something?

  2. The broadcaster pays to have the closed captioning done (I believe), so why don’t they offer the fee to the production team making the show to begin with? That way, we wouldn’t have censored captions (as the US is always doing. If someone says f*** on a show that’s being broadcast, I don’t want your namby pamby replacement) and you would have the captions available immediately.

    I’ve been having to watch Mad As Hell on catch-up because the captions are done live. But they’ve got a script. They could deliver the show with the captions and make a few more dollars.

    Same goes for live news broadcasts. They work of autocue. Why don’t they provide their own captions?

  3. Agree with all of the above. Catch up tv is appalling, some stations don’t bother at all with captions.

    I am deaf, with hearing aids, but use captions because I can’t always lip read, also some accents are difficult to understand.

    Laggy captions on news broadcasts are useless, as they do not match the visual making it very difficult to understand what the story is about.

    I generally won’t watch a program unless there is captioning. It’s very frustrating when popular programs don’t have them, especially on their secondary stations.

    If I try and watch catch up via chromecast on my tv, that means captions often can’t be used as the technology is obviously not understood by the broadcaster and put into the too hard basket to fix. Iview and Netflix is excellent, others not so good. Foxtel is generally good, but lately seem to be lacking in consistency.

  4. I’ve noticed that some of the content on Prime has very loose subs e.g. “Better Than Us” a Russian fembot sci-fi show that’s quite good if you can hear the dialogue, but which has ridiculously abbreviated subs. Also, it’s hard to believe that The Late Late Show on 10 Peach has no subs as provided to them. James Corden has some good guests, but if you’re hearing-impaired just forget it! It’s crammed full of ad breaks too, so maybe the advertisers are missing out too.

  5. Amazon Prime does have English captions but bizarrely defaults to Danish. You need to change the captions from the website not the app for some strange reason.

  6. For U.S scripted shows (e.g MacGyver on 10 like Dave had mentioned) shouldn’t the network be supplied with subtitles by the studio when the episode is delivered? Same with any pre-recorded Australian shows, shouldn’t subtitles be prepared in advance by the studio or network? A lot of these problems could be solved if studios and networks just used a bit of common sense. The fact that multichannels don’t have to have subtitling for anything that isn’t shown on the primary channels is flat out pathetic. Thanks David for the great article and thanks Dave and Ken for sharing their experiences! Seems like the networks have a lot of work to do…

  7. >> But multi-channels are only required to have captions if the show was previously broadcast with captions on the primary channel or another multi-channel. <<

    And this desperately needs to be changed.

  8. Thank you David for taking the time to write this article.
    As part of my work I use the closed captions regularly. It’s always good to be reminded that while most of us take watching Television and online content for granted for many it can be frustrating and in too many cases, not even an option.
    As I’ve noted before, in the scheme of things, buying or creating a caption file is not very expensive and it’s just the Networks being mean by not providing them with much of their pre-recorded content on the secondary channels.
    Having said that and noting the Live captions can some times be below expectations, I feel people can be very quick to point out any errors but fail to recognise the sheer volume of content that is broadcast with excellent closed captions.
    Also, I just had a look at The ACMA’s website and along with the complaint process info they also have a short…

  9. I was watching an old Space 1999 episode on YouTube the other day and they mentioned the queller drive but it came up as the koala drive ,now that made me laugh ,still not bad considering its live subtitles.

  10. A few years ago, whilst in a doctors waiting room there was captions on a TV which was showing one of those national morning news show. The sound was still on low, but still audible to everyone without being distracting.

    However, there was multiple misspellings and frequently skipped words. I understand that it was live, but was appalled and the level of care the broadcaster took in this situation.

  11. Thanks to Dave and Ken for their insights. This was really interesting to see how much our deaf friends and family are being short changed.
    I remember watching Top Of the Pops in the early 90s on BBC1 and would sometimes put on the Teletext subtitles (page 888) if I wanted to know lyrics to songs. An amusing stand out was when The Prodigy played ‘No Good’. I was amused that the subtitlers went so far to type out “G-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-give me the bassline” on a techno track.

  12. Thanks David. You know I’m a regular whinger about the lack of CC on the secondary channels – it’s time for ACMA to act on this and I, and I hope others reading this article, will rattle a few cages.

  13. I’m not hearing impaired but use captions to add another dimension to the viewing and to learn grammar, spelling and unfamiliar items or names. I feel sorry sometimes for the hearing impaired when I see the poor quality of some captions on live programs. It seems there’s only so much the technology and human intervention can do for live shows. But I’ve also seen some captioning work that is exemplary and should be commended, such as clear interpretation of difficult to understand and somewhat incoherent content.

  15. I don’t have a hearing impairment either, but I use the captioning to decipher strong accents (sorry Scots) or speech impairments. On a recent episode of The Last Leg, a guest on the show was Rosie Jones, who has cerebral palsy. I needed the captioning to understand her as she is witty and I didn’t want to miss a single word. She was certainly worth “hearing”.

  16. I have no hearing issues, but tend to use subtitles on some programs when the voices are mumbling, thick accents, or the sound quality of voice is poor compared to the background music. Netflix, SBS OnDemand, and iView have been very good. Haven’t used them on FTA commercial or catch up channel, as my FTA viewing is infrequent. Stan the other night was terrible. Watching The Rook episode one, and there was at least one minute wait for subtitles to appear after turning them on. Then the subtitles were shortened compared to the real conversation and about two sentences of delay. Had to turn them off.

  17. What I can’t understand is why it is up to the broadcaster to do the captioning. Surely with all modern shows there are electronic written scripts that can be fed into the digital recording. So it shouldn’t matter who broadcasts it, the electronic script is there and available and it only becomes a matter of syncing it with the spoken words.

    I have difficulty with hearing the spoken word, especially with the trend for many shows to use low voices for their characters, so I often have the text on to pick up words I don’t always hear. But that gets annoying with the over amplification of non-spoken sounds, which has me running the volume up and down throughout the show.

    1. That would be possible for scripted TV, but it wouldn’t be very nice to read.

      You can hear and decipher speech far faster than you can read. So when someone is talking quickly and on a roll, the subtitling does not take a verbatim transcript and put it on screen, it shortens it whilst trying not to lose anything integral to the story and style of the show.

      Done well, for scripted drama in particular, they also try to make sure the subtitles cut on and off screen in a way that doesn’t jar with with the picture edit.

      They also have to add punctuation, and bring words into sentences that are often not said in a very correct grammatical way. They try to do this without losing the style of the production (take a look at the subtitles for The Wire!), but you eyes much prefer to read sentences, whilst your ears can cope with more ‘flexible’ grammar.

      So, yes – they highly…

Leave a Reply