Caption every screen.

The characters on our favorite television programs are just like us: they come home from work and stream their favorite TV shows and YouTube videos. But it’s hard for me to recall any programs that showed actors using captioned media. While the sounds emantating from their screens may be captioned for us, the sounds are not captioned for them.

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Positioning and styling captions when speakers overlap and interrupt each other

It can be challenging to caption scenes with multiple speakers. Bottom-center caption placement is far from ideal for readers when it fails to clarify which captions belong to which speaker. Adding to the difficulty: speakers often talk quickly, interrupt each other, and overlap their speech to show collaborative support. When captions are placed underneath or next to each speaker, readers can more quickly distinguish — at a glance — who is speaking.

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Published: Special issue on disability and technical communication

I guest edited a special issue of Communication Design Quarterly on “Reimagining Disability and Accessibility in Technical and Professional Communication” (volume 6, issue 4, December 2018). The issue includes an introduction and three articles on a range of cutting edge topics, including lip reading and interface design, subtitling and video accessibility across multiple languages, and cultivating virtuous course designers.

Browse the special issue: CDQ 6.4 (pdf).

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Chirp! Captioning BB-8 in The Force Awakens

The release of Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens on DVD and Blu-Ray last week gives us a welcome opportunity to take a much closer look at the closed captions.

The BB-8 droid provides an instructive case study. How do the closed captions convey the changing meanings and emotions of the droid’s electronic beeping sounds?

Read the full post on ReadingSounds.net.

Tracking sonic timelines in closed captioning

Every sustained sound in the closed caption track creates a sonic timeline that continues to persist until it is terminated through a change in visual context or a stop caption. Multiple timelines may co-exist, with sustained sounds/captions building on each other. Sound is simultaneous, and one way of creating simultaneity on the caption track is by layering up sustained sounds.

Read the full post on ReadingSounds.net

“The main factor that drives captioning quality is what clients are willing to pay for it.”

Recently, I received a thoughtful email from a professional closed captioner with over a decade of experience. Her message raises some important questions about the economics of closed captioning. She’s given me permission to post her message here, provided her contact info is removed and in the hopes that viewers will take a more active role in telling broadcasters and companies what kinds of captions they want.

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Drunk speech but sober captions: How manner captions do the heavy lifting

How writing homogenizes speech and how the non-speech manner caption attempts to re-embody speech.

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“That whole thing’s your name?” Captioning names in The Fifth Element

On the importance of verbatim captioning, especially when names are involved.

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Busy signal or engaged tone? Captions, language variety, and localized accessibility

How would you caption this phone sound? If it can be captioned in more than one way, how do you choose the way that is best? What if the option you prefer depends on the variety of English you speak?

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Logocentrism: The tendency to privilege speech over non-speech in closed captioning

Just because words are spoken doesn’t mean they need to be captioned.

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Captioning the faintest sounds when they’re part of a repetitive series

Does every repetitive sound need to be captioned? What visual cues are sufficient to indicate a repeating sound in the absence of a caption?

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Captioned irony: How captions manipulate narrative time and viewers’ knowledge

Inspired by the notion of dramatic irony, I begin to explore in this video what I call “captioned irony.”

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Captioning 101: When music lyrics trigger an explosion, you just might want to caption them.

When music lyrics are instrumental to a film’s plot, they need to be captioned. It’s as simple as that. If captioners are responsible for captioning all significant sounds, then any sound that’s instrumental to the plot needs to be captioned.

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Stylistic standards for closed captioning and data mining

When speaker IDs, musical lyrics, and sound descriptions have their own distinctive stylistic treatments, they can be extracted from closed caption files and studied as separate units of discourse. The only efficient and practical way to study hundreds or thousands of sound descriptions at one time is to use a program to separate speech from non-speech.

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If it weren’t for Speaker IDs, I’d have no idea what’s going on

An analysis of one scene from Moon (2009) starring Sam Rockwell. The scene’s captions make use of Speaker IDs to identify speakers who are off-screen. But in doing so, the Speaker IDs fill in a major piece of the narrative puzzle.

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Dialogue that wasn’t intended to be read

Speakers don’t need to spell things out for caption viewers when these viewers can read it for themselves at the bottom of the screen. Speakers only need to spell it out for those audio-only viewers who don’t have the added benefit of reading.

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Overcaptioning: Which sounds are significant?

Which sounds are significant? How does the captioner choose which sounds to caption? Are some captions unnecessary? Why isn’t it possible to caption every sound in the environment?

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Twilight: Captioning the “gaspiest” movie ever

Featured post from 2009: How should gasps, groans, sighs, grunts, scoffs, moans, pants and other assorted “breathy” sounds be captioned? When should they be captioned? What’s the difference between them? Why does it matter?

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Prematurely revealing the natives as cannibals in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Movie captions should never reveal information prematurely. In this example, the captions give away a key plot detail before the narrative is ready to do so.

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Caption watch: Hulu.com

Over the last ten days, the percentage of full episodes and movies with closed captions on Hulu 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.

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Exploring Twilight and music lyrics through closed captions

In this example from Twilight, captioned music lyrics draw meaning out of hiding as the backchannel breaks through into the viewer’s consciousness.

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If movie characters could read closed captions, they’d glimpse the future

Caption readers sometimes know what’s happening before the characters themselves. In this way, captions tell the future.

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Whispers and other sounds 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.

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Podcasting and embodiment

Mainstream discourse about podcasting rarely discusses the affordances of the body. It rarely makes explicit the minimum requirements for participating, at the level of embodiment, or the bodily differences among users and producers that threaten to exclude some people from profitably using web audio and video.

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