I have an odd habit of watching television with the captions on, though I’m not hearing impaired in any way.
I’ve noticed that the captioning is often terrible. Mispelled words, garbled sentences, entire words or letter simply left out or replaced with gibberish.
Is there some kind of alternate service available to people who are actually deaf and might be aware of such things, or are they forced to put up with an often terrible substitute?
Sounds like your cable isn’t tuning the channel properly so your captions are scrambled. I have a captioning that lets you adjust to get better tuning but tvs don’t let you do that.
What kind of programs are you watching? Live tv shows such as news programs will often have the words garbled. I used to think that there was a person like a court reporter typing away madly as everyone spoke on the show and it showed up as the closed captioning. After watching for a while I realized they must use some sort of voice recognition software at least some of the time. Watch for some hilarious grammatical mistakes that a human wouldn’t normally type, like when someone says “meteor” but it comes out captioned as “meaty ore”. A computer doesn’t know any better.
Most pre-recorded shows will have near perfect captioning with only a little of the dialog changed to keep with fast spoken dialog. It’s interesting to note that you can’t read quite as fast as you can hear.
At work in the breakroom most of the tv’s are turned down with captioning turned on as it gets loud enough with all the conversations going on in there.
Hmm my captioning sometimes sucks too. The garbled words don’t bother me near as much as the captioning that doesn’t show up fast enough to keep up with the spoken dialogue. I always wished there were something I could do about that. I didn’t realize some units (cable services?) could adjust that.
Horseflesh, I read as fast as I can hear so that isn’t a problem for me.
I do the same as the OP, and notice the same lack of quality. Often, letters will be replaced with other characters, long empty boxes will be present instead of something useful, or the weird one: some letters will be in different colors for no discernable reason (usually, it’s a letter that shouldn’t have been there in the first place).
Are you using an antenna, Johnny Bravo, or do you have cable?
I remember trying to get closed captions while using a pair of rabbit ear antennae on my TV, and the results were never good. Cable tends to provide a much better signal, and hence more consistently legible captioning.
I have cable.
I’d say that 70-90% of the captions are fine. But if I were deaf, I think I’d be rather pissed by that 10-30% of lost dialogue.
Actually, live broadcasts are either captioned from a pre-produced script or are created on the spot by a human. Since people talk faster than a person could ever type, the speech is entered in stenographic shorthand. This is what leads to errors like the one you mention, which are phonetically similar to the intended word. Read about it at the National Captioning Institute.
An exception I’ve noticed to this is children’s programs like Sesame Street. It seems that only 40%, at most, of the dialog is captioned, and even then it’s simplified from what is actually said. I imagine this is done so that the target audience can follow along.
I’ve actually seen the stenographers backspace on occasion.
Here in the Bay Area, I’ve seen the captions occasionally make a mistake, and then correct themselves. Like so:
“…A SHIPPMENT OF FUEL RODS FROM SOUTH CAROLINA…KOREA WILL ARRIVE IN OAKLAND TODAY”
And as for “color” captions…I’ve seen this happen on MTV occasionally (Like Alanis’ “Thank U,” which looked like: o/- …thank you india… o/- And I checked, it showed up like this on other TVs, too.) And in one notable occasion, I had a copy of Disney’s “Pete’s Dragon” playing with captions, and the song “Money, money, money” had all the lyrics referring to paper money in green, and all the lyrics referring to gold or coinage in yellow. Nice touch. 
Oddly enough, that latter tape was from the library, and over ten years old…but a copy from the video store, a recent re-release, didn’t include the colored lyrics.
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that captioning goes through many types of channels. Most DVD’s and HBO programs show in a credit who is responsible for the captioning. Other sources give captioning credits as well.
The idea of a voice recognition software handling some wouldn’t surprise me, nor would a court reporter or stenographer. In some cases like local news or “live” coverage from the 24-hour news channels, it’s hard to tell which method might be at play, you just know it’s coming in at roughly the same time as the audio. And yes, I have seen the backspacing and/or bracketed corrections in “real time” that suggest a person and not software. There is some software that’s pretty clever so I wouldn’t rule that out 100%.
The DVD’s we’ve watched that were in a foreign language have gotten us hooked on the “for the hearing impaired” setting and we’ll use that now even on English language shows. You’d be amazed at what some of them refer to in terms of background dialog, sound effects, music cues, and so on. It’s almost like you’re missing a good portion of what’s in the script (or the sound chart) if you don’t use the captions.
From the various sources I’ve seen thus far, I’d suspect that major feature captioning may be assigned to a post-production team who use the final script as a guide to what to show, possibly with direct input from the director or producer.
I’d love to see some authoritative commentary on this technology, so if any of you run across a book or article or website dealing with it, please post about it.
appletreats, sorry, I just now spotted your link to the National Captioning Institute. I’ll check it out.
There should be a link to the company that did the captions in the captions themselves. There are a few companies.
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I’d say that 70-90% of the captions are fine. But if I were deaf, I think I’d be rather pissed by that 10-30% of lost dialogue."
What gets to me is that only about 10% of all the programs are captioned. I don’t want to pay for the other 90% but according to a letter I got from the cable company, I have to.
Try watching a live baseball game with the captioning turned on. Watch the captioner trying to figure out spellings on some of the names. Then throw in a mediocre color commentator, especially one who’s always correcting himself, and I can imagine the captioner going crazy.
Just last night on ESPN…“Blackhead Coach” instead of “Black Head Coach.”
“He must have terrible skin,” I says.
I haven’t seen any formal studies regarding the percentage of programs that are currently captioned, but my own personal experience indicates to me that it is far greater than 10%. Most of network programming is captioned, and virtually all of prime-time programming on the major networks is captioned.
Cable stations vary with the percentage of captioning. For instance, The History Channel captions the vast majority of their programs, as does Comedy Central. However, The History International Channel is more inconsistent in their captioning, as is the Food Channel. “Good Eats”, my favorite Food Channel program, has always been captioned, but only recently has the Food Channel been including captions for “Iron Chef”.
TVLand is one of the poorer channels for captioning. When trying to watch the sitcom “Soap”, for instance, there were no captions, which surprised me since that program had captions when it aired on Comedy Central. Ditto for the Science Channel…I’ve yet to see a captioned program on that one.
Consider my ignorance stomped on with both feet. That’s what I get for relying on personal experience and WAGs than researching the subject myself.
My younger sister is deaf and I watched a lot of television cc’d when I was growing up to accomodate her (this was in the '80s). Closed captioning was probably under a lot less quality control back then.
I notice sometimes on CNN & other stations with a lot of live broadcasting that the cc will be just random symbols or very little legible text. If I switch channels the cc shows up fine, so I assume the problem is on the broadcaster’s end or maybe my cable provider on that particular receiver.
Another things that puzzles me is that many commericals for products or services aren’t cc’d. You’d think with the little cost involved to get it captioned that it would be worth their money to effectively reach another 28 million possible consumers. Or maybe I’m just watching the wrong channels.