The ardent support of web accessibility and captioning shares his honest opinion of what’s wrong with online captioning. The focus is on the quality not the lack thereof. It’s a great read in an outline format since it’s from a presentation he gave. Sure, I’d like online captioning to look and read better — but I’ll take what I can get as there’s so little of it online.
One thing that caught my eye from the outline:
Not only is only one show captioned, they have yet again found a new and shocking way to completely screw it up. (Continuous scrolling text in a frame to the right of the image, with upcoming text clearly visible and the current text scrolled upward into a reverse-type field. And! All capitals! 1979 called; it wants its captioning back.)
TV captions have always and continue to be — all uppercase. Why should online captioning be different? In the example Clark refers to — upper case is the least of the problems. The image background makes it very hard to read.
Regardless — I appreciate that he’s speaking loud and clear for online captioning.
1 comments
This article isn’t in upper case. Neither is any of the other continuous text you read every day of your life. Captions shouldn’t be either. Old-fart deaf people, usually with very poor English, like to insist otherwise, perhaps confusing television for their old TTYs.
I know the reason why closed captions started out in upper case and have published it repeatedly. It’s no longer valid.