Captioning sucks

I watch a lot of TV on mute these days - mostly when I’m trying not to wake the kids, sometimes when I just want some peace and quiet, and very rarely whilst enjoying a cold beverage at a public establishment. So I love the fact that new TVs all switch on closed captioning when they are muted, so I can follow along.

Except, of course, when the captioning seizes up, converts English into ASCII swearing (!@##$!#@$$!), scrolls too fast and nowhere near the person speaking, overlays the sports ticker or someone’s face, spells last names using phonics, or translates “you guys” as “you gays”. I can’t imagine what the hearing disabled have to put up with.

Fortunately, Joe Clark is doing something about it, and he’s here in livid colour. The brand new and admittedly garish CaptioningSucks.com is an attempt to get people talking about how bad TV captioning is, and to help develop a set of standards to make them better. It’s the offspring of Joe’s Open & Closed project, funded at least in part through micropatronage (see the hairless guy’s “indolence” badge way down there on my sidebar.)

Check out Joe’s Flickr site for some appalling examples of the myriad ways TV captioning can be made to suck. And then visit Open & Closed to see how it can be made better. @!#$!@#%%.

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 04-01-2008 | 11:04 PM
Posted in: Television