Captioning Sucks

Up until a couple of years ago, I mis­takenly believed that cap­tion­ing was just a souped up ver­sion of sub­titling. I was very wrong.

I learnt a lot about cap­tion­ing work­ing with a hear­ing impaired col­league to arrange cap­tion­ing of a work video, a few years ago.

One of the main issues is there is no stand­ard or even code of prac­tise for cap­tion­ing in Aus­tralia. Back then there was reg­u­la­tions (now legis­la­tion) on the amount of tele­vi­sion that must be cap­tioned, but noth­ing on the qual­ity of captioning.

In 2004 the <a href=“http://www.deafnessforum.org.au>Deafness Forum of Australia star­ted cam­paign­ing for improved qual­ity of cap­tion­ing and pro­duced a Cap­tion­ing Qual­ity Code of Prac­tice. While this appeared to gain some trac­tion ini­tially within the industry. 3 years later little seems to of changed, a quick visit to the free to air TV peak group, fails to find any men­tion of cap­tion­ing (except a tech­nical doc­u­ment on how to caption).

Joe Clark and oth­ers in the Open and Closed Pro­ject have star­ted Cap­tion­ing Sucks to try and get people to under­stand the prob­lems with cap­tion­ing and make some changes. Hope­fully this will extend out­side of North America.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under accessibilty . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.