In today’s issue, we will look into the practice of closed captioning: how the addition of captions is making video content more accessible, and what to consider when creating inclusive rich media content.
This is The Accessibility Apprentice, a free newsletter about universal design, disabilities, and inclusive tech.
We have come a long way
In his detailed overview of captioning techniques in media, Ben Myers, an accessibility advocate, writes:
I'm profoundly deaf. I rely heavily on my hearing aid, and every time I can watch something with captions, I will without a second thought.
Anecdotally, it feels like captions have been having a moment the past few years, as awareness of them — and the expectation of their presence — grows.
Myers cheers for the progress that led to an overwhelming majority of young people watching TV and playing games with captions on. He highlights that social media content has recently become more accessible: from short videos with automatically generated captions to juicy, award-worthy descriptions:
Tentacles squelching wetly
— a caption from Stranger Things, season 4.
Indeed, we came a long a way since the passing of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990, that mandated every TV manufacturer in the US to enable close captioning support.
Closed captions and the sound of cinema
In his article in Forbes, Steven Aquino writes:
As my parents were both fully deaf, our living room television was flanked by a VCR-looking device called a decoder box that transmitted captions to the television so they could understand dialogue. The decoder boxes were made by Sanyo and marketed by the non-profit National Captioning Institute.
Closed captions — or captions that can be enabled and controlled separately from the media — are indispensable for people with hearing impairments. Unlike subtitles that only transcribe spoken words, captions make the experience of watching a video truly immersive by providing detailed descriptions of all sounds.
Sound in general and music in particular plays a critical role in conveying the scene’s mood and tone, in crafting the suspense, and evoking emotions. In their paper “The role of music communication in cinema”, Scott D. Lipscomb and David E. Tolchinsky write:
The relationship between the auditory and visual components in cinema is both active and dynamic, affording a multiplicity of possible relations that can evolve – sometimes dramatically – as the narrative unfolds.
Imagine watching Hitchcock’s Psycho with no sound. Would the visuals alone be enough for, say, the famous bathroom scene to be truly intense and terrifying?
Captioning as a cultural phenomenon
Captions fill in the gap left by the sound’s absence, but recently, they have outgrown their practical function.
Unlike open captions, closed captions can be disabled, tweaked, and adjusted according to the user’s preference and needs, which gives the user complete control over the captions’ appearance and behaviour.
This turns subtitles and captions, to quote Brian Mandler, into “modern-day karaoke”, especially on platforms like TikTok, where subtitled short videos let fans sing along to their favourite creators.
It also makes videos easier to screenshot and share without having to provide additional context.
Making cinema more inclusive
Localisation is a critical step in ensuring that a piece of media lands well in a foreign soil. Localisation spans beyond translating the media itself: title, posters, marketing materials, and sometimes even new edits are created to ensure a cultural and creative fit.
Captions ensure that viewers can understand and enjoy foreign media: people who do not know the language and native speakers alike. Film Industry Network highlights that subtitling…
…is a necessary art, and almost essential if you hope to have your film picked up by a festival, function as an advertisement, or even find itself posted on YouTube.
Not every studio, let alone every independent creator, is ready to dedicate significant resources to making their films and videos accessible. The Accessible Filmmaking Guide writes:
Over 50% of the revenue obtained by most current films comes from translated (dubbing, subtitling) and accessible versions (subtitling of language and sound, audio description [AD] of the image), yet only 0.01%-0.1% of the budget is spent on these additional versions.
We have achieved a lot of success making videos more inclusive and accessible for everyone, but we've got a long way to go.