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Online Video Captioning

Guest author, Jen Rohrig, looks at online video captioning on US TV networks.

Although I am hard of hearing myself, there was a time when I didn’t consider captions for online videos to be of great importance, since I rarely watched videos online. More recently, I’ve been watching some new online shows and would have been disappointed if captions hadn’t been available. In addition I’ve become more annoyed that interviews with favorite actors are being published online without captions — as are clips and previews from TV shows or movies.

Interviews can be especially troublesome because some actors either have strong accents or talk very fast — either of which can make it nearly impossible for me to understand them, even with the volume turned up on both the computer and my hearing aid.

Last year “Sanctuary”, an experimental online show, aired without captions. Because it was an experimental show to see if there were enough viewers to make it worth continuing online, the creators may not have had the money to add captions, but I wish it was something they had considered.

Listed below are the major USA TV show networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX), plus the SyFy Channel and Hulu.com, with my evaluation of the captioning available for their full episodes. It should be noted that I have no official credentials when it comes to evaluating the quality of captioning — just my personal observations. I didn’t carry out a full accessibility review of these sites, I only checked to see which sites have captioned videos and how effective I thought those captions were. For the purposes of the review, I only looked at full episodes.

ABC

Most shows were captioned, but there was no way to tell without playing the episode, waiting for the first ad to play in full, and clicking the settings tab at the top of the screen. Or finding and clicking the “CC” icon at the bottom of the screen under the time scrollbar. The settings tab was present even if there were no captions for the videos — making it hard to tell in advance whether captions were available.

Videos of new episodes seemed to be published without captions for the first few days. For example, the most recent episode of the show “Better off Ted,” aired on July 14 2009 and, at the time of review, had no captions, but the previous episodes did. There was no indication of when the captions would be added and the delay seemed to vary from show to show. At the time of this review, the most recent episode of “Castle” (aired on July 11 2009) was captioned. The most recent episode of “The Goode Family” (aired on July 10 2009) was not.

As for the captions themselves, they were in a box below the video screen instead of on the video itself, making it hard to watch both at the same time. The structure of the captions was disjointed and difficult to follow. Instead of having each line clear when a person finished talking, the captions simply scrolled upwards and a new line was added.

CBS

CBS did not have captioned videos except for the Elimination Station clips of the most recent season of “Amazing Race”, which I only found by searching “Closed Caption”. Perhaps they were captioned because there was a deaf contestant during that season? There were no full episodes available for “Amazing Race.” The captions themselves appeared automatically on the video screen. They were of good size — although yellow in color rather than the usual white.

NBC

Most shows were captioned, but there was no easy way to identify captioned shows without playing the episode, waiting for the first ad to play in full, and then pressing the “CC” button on the bottom of the screen. The “CC” button did at least change color from white to blue to indicate that captions had been turned on.

Like ABC, it appeared that new episodes were not captioned initially whilst older ones were. At the time of review, the most recent episode of “The Listener” (aired on July 9 2009) was not captioned but previous episodes were. The captions appeared on the screen as they should, were a good size and were not all in uppercase. As each person talked, the previous caption was removed from the screen.

FOX

Most shows were captioned, but there was no easy way to tell without playing the episode, waiting for the first ad to play in full, and then trying to press the “CC” button on the left side. There was no change in appearance to the button to indicate that the captions had been turned on.

Like ABC the captions were in a field below the video screen, making it hard to pay attention to both. The caption text was rather small with no options to increase the size and they moved so fast that it was hard to read everything!

SyFy (formerly SCIFI)

When SCIFI became Syfy on July 7 2009, they also put up a new web site. Unfortunately, even on the updated site, none of the online episodes were captioned.

Hulu

Hulu offers an alternative to the TV network web sites by providing a collection of online videos and clips from various networks — although the captioning of videos is dependant upon the captioning supplied by the networks. Most of the time, if the show is captioned by the network, the show will be captioned on Hulu. However there do seem to be some exceptions. At the time of this review, ABC’s “Castle” was captioned on the network web site but not on Hulu. SyFy channel’s most recent season of “Eureka” and the new show “Warehouse 13″ were captioned on Hulu but not on the network’s web site.

However, unlike the network web sites, every captioned show was clearly identified. It was even possible to search specifically for captioned shows. In addition, the captions themselves were displayed on the video screen, were of a clear size, remained long enough to be read and were cleared when the next person spoke.

Summary

In conclusion it would appear that, of the major network sites, NBC offers the best video captioning, but even they aren’t exactly great. There are definite improvements that need to be made on all networks that offer captioning. The text needs to be on the video screen, not in a box under it. Captioned videos should also be clearly identified. It shouldn’t be necessary to play each video and press a button to find out if a show is captioned.

I believe anything made by a television, movie studio or anyone else in the entertainment industry should be required to be captioned. This includes television show clips, movie trailers and other promotional videos as well as full episodes and movies that are published online. Some television networks do provide captions for full episodes of their shows — although not all of them — but there are still problems with the videos that are captioned. In nearly every case, it’s impossible to tell if a show is going to be captioned without playing each individual episode to check.

So far I don’t think I’ve seen a single network or other agency provide captions for clips, previews or interviews. If they don’t want to caption them, then they should at least provide some form of transcript!

I’m not convinced that videos on YouTube should include compulsory captions. Usually these are made by fans or other individuals who probably don’t have the knowledge or money to caption their home-made videos. Captioning online videos is neither cheap nor easy and I’m not convinced it’s appropriate to make captioning mandatory for personal, home-made videos. On the other hand, making the tools available and suggesting the addition of captions is a different story…

More information on online video captioning can be found at the following web sites:

Captioning Web

Information and updates about online video captioning.

(Warning: the Project readOn site launches with a loud audio track) Project readOn

Dedicated to making online media accessible to all. The project captions videos on the web, or add subtitles in other languages, on request.

Captioning Sucks!

Complaints about TV and movie captioning. Yes — the site looks bad. It’s intentional but despite how it looks, it’s still accessible. Honest!

Why I Hate Online Captioning

Joe Clark’s notes from a presentation he gave on October 4, 2007. Even though it is old and a few of the complaints are no longer an issue, it’s still a good read that demonstrates an understanding the problems. Joe is also the founder of Captioning Sucks!.

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