As long as the captions are easy to read and don’t interfere with the picture, I much prefer to have them on! The only time that it annoys me is when the person who writes the captions for Sex and the City misspells all right as alright.
Picky, picky, picky…
I use it as often as possible, especially when there’s singing and the like. I find it amusing to read the lyrics for some odd reason.
My grandmother, on the other hand, hates it and can never figure out how to turn it off when I forget.
Her: Hayes! Get in here and get that writing off the screen!
Another hearing CC user. I especially appreciate it during movies that have dialogue happening during an action scene that has a heavy music background or lots of sound effects.
I also frequently use captions when Baby tlw is sleeping. What’s interesting is using the CC on shows that are syndicated reruns, especially the ER and Law & Order reruns on TNT. Because TNT is selling a different amount of commercial time than the original NBC broadcasts of the shows, they’ve re-edited the shows and put in ad breaks where the shows originally had changes of scene. Because the CC is hardwired into the show, you’ll often see the next line of dialogue pop up in the caption as the screen fades to black that split-second before the commercial break. When the show returns from the break, it’s a crap shoot as to whether that first line of the scene will be repeated in the captions.
I always left the CC on when I lived with my parents. Helicopters buzz the house so often – usually low enough to rattle the windows and vibrate the floor – that if I didn’t use CC I’d miss at least five 60-second segments of dialogue every hour – every half hour if something’s going on.
I put the captions on any time there’s other noise going on in the room. Really loud noises both me, so I can’t just turn it up to hear over things sometimes, so on go the captions! That was one of my biggest beefs with my room mate, actually, she always turned my cations off.
My boyfriend and I love the closed captions! It’s a good idea for me because my hearing isn’t good, so putting the captions on means I don’t have to blast the TV, and I still know what they’re saying even when I can’t see their mouths moving.
For you Americans: if you watch Kids In The Hall with the CC on, you’ll see some naughtier things than they say. 
Just last night I watched “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” with the captions on. It suddenly made a lot more sense.
Yet another hearing CC user. I often cannot sleep all through the night, and instead of disturbing anyone, I would turn it on, while watching a movie, and turn it off during the day. Now I just leave it on, and it’s just become part of the screen now. People won’t watch with me until I turn it off, but it’s like second nature to me now. I have picked up on a lot of phrases that I wouldn’t have noticed, and sometimes, they will have the title of a song, and the artist singing it listed.
Depending on what channel I am watching, the spelling sometimes is horrible, and I get a good laugh out of some of the spellings they come up with. DVDs are usually pretty good about spelling, but VHS is another story.
I like the CC too.
I haven’t seen one of my favorite reasons yet: they identify the bit of music being played when the scene starts, etc.
Our television is ridiculously old, and doesn’t have the CC option. However, when we rent DVDs, we absolutely use it. Hubby doesn’t hear all that well, and in order for him to hear the movie fine, he has to blast me out of the room. But I like the CC, too. As others have pointed out, when there’s a lot of background nois (in the movie), sometimes the dialogue gets difficult to hear. Also, if we rent a movie where the characters have heavy accents and/or dialects, it can be difficult to understand without the CC.
Jorel, at least two others have mentioned this:
Well, I’m glad to see that I’m not the only “hearing” person who has trouble hearing the dialogue over the music and sound effects in movies. I was afraid maybe I had some sort of weird hearing loss that only affected my ability to hear voices.
And yes, I also get a kick sometimes at the mistakes made, especially when watching live events, although it can also get annoying.
One interesting thing I’ve noticed on my brand new wide screen TV is that it even provides captions for DVDs. For some reason, my old TV never did that (or maybe it’s just the new DVDs that I’ve been playing on my new TV). These TV-provided captions are completely separate from the subtitles that can be turned on from the DVD menu, and it’s interesting to see how they conflict with one another.
Barry
Seems a lot of people turn on the CC so they don’t wake their kids up, while at my mom’s house we turn the CC on while the kids are awake. With two toddlers, four dogs and three parrots in the house it’s hard to hear the TV.
I’m not hearing impaired but the hearing in my right ear has become slightly weaker recently. I use the subtitles on my DVDs sometimes for when I lie down to watch a movie on the couch since to do so I have to lie on my left side and use only my right ear.
I also use it for movies featuring characters with heavy dialects or accents or when the dialog is full of slang (usually from the UK) I’m unfamiliar with. They also come in handy whenever I watchmy copy of Snatch with other people. It easier to turn the “Pikey” subs on for Brad Pitt’s character than to explain everything to other people. Plus it can be fun to “see” how well written dialogue flows even if you can understand what’s being said. Slap Shot and Winter Kills are two examples I can think of right off.
I can remember wanting to stay up as a kid and watch the CC version of the ABC evening News on PBS when I was little about the same time I was learning to read. It helped me match up difficult larger words if I could see them at roughly the same time as they were said. Kind of like for ratatoskK’s son.
There’s nothing wrong with my ears (apart from the unattractive lumpy angular look), but I use captions on occasion - it’s interesting, it can help me follow the murkier dialogue, and occasionally something unexpected crops up in it. Gives a little bit of added perspective on what I’m watching.
My deaf impaired friends like them on, but that’s mainly cause they watch them at my house :-0
oops, sorry norinew…I guess I was reading too quickly