Accessible Rhetoric

Five sounds that should have been captioned

Captioned thematics: How captions make interpretative patterns visible

The sloppiest captions ever

Having closed captions is always better than not having them at all. But sloppy captions -- that is, captions that are misspelled, ignore rules of capitalization, or are simply illegible in one way or another (low contrast, too small, all caps) -- show a lack of respect for viewers who use them. Sloppy captions imply that closed captions aren't really all that important. They're an afterthought, a necessary evil, an add-on, a nuisance, a bother. While having closed captions is infinitely better than not having captions at all, we shouldn’t settle for captions of inferior quality.

Stating the obvious: Subtitles need to be large with high contrast

Leveraging captions to serve up parody

Caption space is precious. Don’t waste it.

Undercaptioning: Beyond subtitles in Curb Your Enthusiasm

Captioning the backchannel

Overcaptioning: On significant vs. superfluous sounds

Twilight: Captioning the “gaspiest” movie ever

What comedy needs from captions

Captioning wordless movie trailers

Exploring Pirates of the Caribbean 2 through closed captions

Caption watch: Hulu.com

At a time when so few content providers on the Internet are offering closed captioned content, Hulu.com seems to be leading the way. Hulu not only offers integrated support in their video interface for closed captions but also allows users to limit search results to closed captioned content. Still, Hulu has a long, long way to go. The news isn’t good for accessibility on the Web. Over the last ten days, as Hulu has regularly added new full episodes and movies, and removed others that have contractually expired, the percentage of full episodes and movies with closed captions has actually gone down. Overall, that percentage of cc content is embarrassingly low, hovering at around 4.5% for full episodes and 6.5% for movies — and appears to be on the way down. [...]

Exploring Twilight through closed captions

If movie characters could read closed captions…

If movie characters could read closed captions along with us, they’d be more efficient at fighting crime and solving mysteries. The world would be safer — as long as we didn’t let the bad guys read the captions too. The time traveling rhetoric of closed captioning makes this possible. By time-traveling, I simply mean that we sometimes know what’s happening before the characters themselves, not to mention before every viewer who is watching without the added benefit of captions. Here's a clip from Season 1, Episode 10 of the Fox TV show Dollhouse. [...]

Captions tell the future

Closed caption users can, under the right conditions, stay a beat ahead of everyone else, laughing at a joke, for example, before the punchline is spoken, or nodding in agreement before the speaker has finished making a point. In this way, captions tell the future, even if it's only the tiniest glimpse. Consider a clip from Taken, a 2008 film starring Liam Neeson as a father trying to rescue his teenage daughter (Maggie Grace) from foreign kidnappers. The caption user recognizes a heartbeat before the non-caption user (or so I would argue) that because the bad guy's captioned sentence is unfinished ("We can nego-"), he will be shot before he can finish saying "negotiate." [...]

Some things you were never meant to hear

Consider the much-discussed whisper that occurs at the end of Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola’s critically acclaimed and prized 2003 film about two Americans who develop a friendship during lonely stays at a Tokyo hotel. In the final scene, Bob [Bill Murray] whispers something to Charlotte [Scarlett Johansson]. A handful of resourceful fans, not content to let the whisper remain a mystery, have used "special sound equipment [...] to make the conversation audible" (IMDB). Unfortunately, no attempt at sound editing has resolved the question of what was actually said. [...]

Video: Captioning the cheese

Every feature-length movie distributed over the Internet needs to be closed captioned. That goes without saying. But there's a special category of movie -- the low-budget cheesy feature -- that may be inaccessible to all viewers if the movie's production values are not sufficiently high. I offer up as an example the movie Spill, a 1996 action flick starring former NFL linebacker Brian Bosworth. [...]

Video: XXX Captioning

Closed captions, when done well, provide access to dialogue and other important sounds for those who need them, such as deaf and hard of hearing viewers. But captions have the potential to do much more -- and to do so for a wide range of viewers. I'm interested in documenting the ways, big and small, that captions can make visible those layers of meaning that may not be readily available on the uncaptioned surface of things. Here's a very simple example from an episode of Arrested Development, entitled "Motherboy XXX" [...]