Closed captioning
I'm a hearing person, but because English is my wife's second language, we've kept CC on constantly since she moved in. I've found it an asset even to me, because there are things you miss while listening, but I've also noticed the spread in quality. Sometimes (rarely) it's excellent. More often it's mediocre. And far too frequently it's execrable.
There is, of course, an obvious difference between captioning of pre-recorded scripted programs and those that are live (or even pseudo-live, like The Daily Show, which is recorded around 7 every night and transmitted at 11). But even the pre-recorded ones, depending on the network, can be abysmal. Live shows use a "scrolling" format, where letters come onto the screen one after another like you're watching a telex printout. The better pre-recorded shows have lines appear in their entirety as they're spoken (and the very best go out of their way to place them on the screen so they don't obscure any important action, and so as to indicate clearly which actor is speaking). While they make some mistakes with transcription (whether because they didn't get the script on time or they simply didn't care), they at least make a reasonable effort to convey the original program to the hearing-impaired.
Some stations, however, like FX and AMC, use the scrolling format even for live broadcasts, and when they do so it is usually abysmal. "I work a lot with clay" becomes "I will go out with clay". Similar egregious errors are so commonplace that in many cases one would have absolutely no idea what anyone was talking about. And a lot of the time they simply skip over big chunks of dialogue because they'd be too difficult to type.
Similarly, they frequently simply skip non-English dialogue, replacing it with [Speaking Spanish] or the like, apparently with the assumption that all hearing-impaired people are monolingual anglophones. (Amusingly, I once saw CBC Newsworld's captioning during an English-language interview with Jean Chrétien resort to: "......[Speaking Foreign Language]".]
Then there are the problems with live or semi-live television. Last night's Daily Show transcribed "I am Jon Stewart, our guest tonight is Bill O'Reilly" as "I AM I DON'T KNOW STEWART, WHAT TIME IS IT O'REILLY". And while CBC tries better than many other stations (looking at you, CNN), their captioners still have a tendency to elide names and places (especially foreign ones) with pronouns. A story about Mahmoud Ahmedinajad will replace every instance of his name in captioning with "he" or (very rarely) "the President".
If this annoys me, I can only imagine what it must be like for the hearing-impaired. Canadian regulatory agencies mostly seem concerned with making sure some form of captioning gets on the air, not with ensuring it's at all useful. What do other babblers (especially hearing-impaired babblers -- Boom Boom, please weigh in) think about this?
I assume that CC is computer-generated? Sometimes my dad has it running and I've been amused at some of the mistakes. Agree that it's not amusing when you need the service. Voice-to-print software is just not up to the task. Now, court reporters (a mostly extinct breed nowadays) could solve this problem.
I was a member of the board of the Canadian Hearing Society in Peterborough in the 1970s and one of the persons who crusaded for CC decoders to be installed in every TV sold in Canada. We were succesful, along with many others across Canada who worked for the same cause. I'm very hard of hearing, by the way. I own one of the first CC decoders ever made for commercial consumption - to be attached to a non-CC equipped TV.
And does it work well?
Perfectly well, although both my TVs have CC capability already. You have to look really hard to fiind a non-CC equipped TV nowadays - at least in Canada.
We've had discussions about CC before, and I thought there was an ear;lier thread devoted to this, but I can't find it.
I know a lot of people who have in the past done CCing to both taped and live programming. As far as I know that practice still exists.
Some of the screw ups cco references might be trying to combine CC and foreign language subtitling - that's the only reason I can think of for it. Like I mentioned, standard practice for a pre-recorded program involves having a transcript based on the program's script, which is then input on the editing suite. We also have to do Descriptive Video for the visually impaired, which involves someone recording description of the action by voice, which is then laid in on a seperate track on the video, much like CC.
Timebandit, I'm not sure which network you work for. CBC is one of the better ones, for sure -- their laziness only seems to kick in for live programming, and even then it's just the foreign name stuff I talked about, not skipping entire minutes of conversation like CNN does. TVO's also excellent. I'm speaking almost exclusively of English-language programming here, though. CC with subtitled programs is a whole other kettle of fish.
Movies tend to be the best, for obvious reasons. Sometimes (especially when a program is produced with relatively little lead time) you catch interesting things like lines that were ADRed out in the final product still being in the captions, because they have to roll to production with an early version of the script. Sometimes (with shows like The Wire, which uses a lot of obscure slang and heavy dialect) it's obvious that they didn't have the original script, but still tried their best. But sadly often, especially with American channels, it seems like they simply didn't give a shit.
Oh, and that thing about using scrolling mode with pre-recorded programs (even CBC falls victim to this, as with The Fifth Estate) is REALLY obnoxious. There's a roll delay and everything, like they just sat a stenographer down in front of a tape of the program and had him bang it out as fast as he could as if it were live.
A strange caption I saw on a Canadian news-entertainment program featured an Aboriginal actor who said, "I'm proud to be Ojibway." The captioning came out as "I'm proud to be a Jew-boy."
I don't work for a network. I'm an independent producer who pre-licenses projects to a variety of networks, and I'm responsible for captioning the finished product before I deliver it. Very little Canadian TV is done in-house anymore, so it's mostly the production companies who handle such things. Live television is a whole other matter, we don't do that.
If there is a last minute change and you've already started the CC process, it can be a real bitch to fix, so if you don't have the money or the lead time to do it, you will get a glitch where a line has been removed between transcription/creation of the CC track and layback. It's unusual, but it can happen.
I'm pleased to see CC on every show I watch - in the beginning of CC, you had to scroll through the programming to find a CC program - that is over, at least for me. I don't have any networks on my satellite feed that do not offer CC. CBC makes a lot of errors - especially on "Power and Politics" at 5pm, but usually they correct their error quickly, or try to. Sometimes they repeat the error several times until they get it right - I think CBC's P&P is the worse captioned program that I watch, sadly. None of the American networks are this bad.*
*I don't watch Fox News so I can't comment on the captioning of that show. However, The Simpsons on Fox TV has excellent captioning.
I'm watching P&P right now and the captioning is just awful.
"Jacques Parizeau" just became "Jack Parr" on P&P!!!!
CNN occasionally has a CC error, but are very quick to correct it - unlike our CBC which consistently repeats the error several times before they get it right.
I guess I don't stray far enough on my Cable listings: I just stumbled onto AMI last week, - the Accessible Media Inc. channel that provides not only closed captioning but also 'described video' (play-by-play narration) on all of its programming. Makes obvious sense for the visually impaired, though the couple of times I have since wandered back, its been playing Matlock reruns, so maybe not much of a pool of programming.
Apparently this is a "must-carry" service by CRTC and can be found on all basic digital TV packages. The things you learn ....
I watched AMI while I was stuck in Sept-Iles last week - was one of the more interesting channels at the motel which just had about 13 channel listings.
I'm too deaf to hear any narration on AMI, but their closed captioning was excellent.
CTV's Question Period this morning rendered Leona Aglukkaq in captions as "LEONA EYE GLUE CAT".
And I really miss Boom Boom.