Even as accessibility advocates make the case that captioning is a centerpiece of universal design, captioning doesn’t have a very high public profile . Yes, people tweet and write about the value of captioning every day, but we don’t have many opportunities to engage with captioned media in the public sphere. Only a handful of cities in the U.S. require captioning on all public screens (bars, waiting rooms, etc.). Outside of these cities — Portland (Oregon), Ann Arbor, Rochester, Alburquerque, Seattle, San Francisco — we are likely to encounter public captioning only in airports and select bars and restaurants. At the movie theater, good luck finding an open captioned showing in your city.

When captions are enabled on the screens inside the fictional programs we watch, they don’t necessarily make these programs more accessible to us. But they do make captioning itself more visible. Captioning is normalized when it becomes something to be expected no matter where we encounter it. Producers also model more inclusive worlds (and help to counter the public’s resistance to open captioning) when they depict characters on TV who consume captioned programming.

I’ve written about this issue before. In a 2018 article on “Designing Captions,” I used the term “meta captioning” to refer to the “process of hard coding captions onto the screens displayed inside the screens we are watching.” Meta captioning puts captions on every screen, even the screens that characters aren’t paying attention to and viewers don’t have enough time to read. In other words, meta captions contribute to a scene’s inclusive ambience even though they are not always intended to be read like traditional speech captions.

I’m always a bit disappointed when I see people on TV interacting with uncaptioned media, despite the fact that our fictional worlds are assumed to be populated entirely — with few exceptions — by hearing people who don’t need captions (presumably). My first inclination is to re-caption these scenes by using a more robust captioning format or burning meta captions onto the digital screens in these fictional worlds.

Here’s an example from Horse Girl (Netflix 2020) starring Alison Brie as a “sweet misfit with a fondness for crafts, horses and supernatural crime shows [who] finds her increasingly lucid dreams trickling into her waking life.” It’s the supernatural crime show part that’s relevant here. In this scene, Brie is watching her favorite fictional program, Purgatory. We’re watching along with her, which means that the speech sounds on her television screen are intended to be read and understood by us (as opposed to appearing momentarily in the background of a scene as visual decoration). In the original version, Brie is not watching Purgatory with captions:

Source: Horse Girl (2020). Netflix. Original captions.

Let me offer a re-captioned intervention that uses a more versatile captioning format (WebVTT). In the video clip below, I experiment with screen positioning, font family, color, and type size. For color, I’m inspired by both the BBC’s subtitling guidelines for color (white, yellow, cyan, green) and Hulu’s default caption color, which is a warm yellow (approx. red 255, green 204, blue 0). I haven’t tested these captions on multiple browsers or devices, and, honestly, I’m still learning and experimenting with WebVTT’s functionality for styling and positioning captions. If possible, please view the clip in Google Chrome, which supports WebVTT’s color and font styling, unlike Firefox.

Source: Horse Girl (2020). Netflix. Re-captioned by the author using the WebVTT format.

Feel free to browse the WebVTT caption file I created for this clip. WebVTT supports simple style markup (identical to CSS styling). I created a different class for each caption style I needed for this clip. Classes included “TVCaptions-offscreen,” “TVCaptions-onscreen,” and “TVCaptions-onscreen-closeup.” Each class was defined in terms of text color, font size, and font family. Screen position for each caption is included with each timestamp.

I hope this experiment starts a conversation about the limits of single-style, bottom-center captioning. When we caption every screen — even (and especially) the screens encountered by the fictional character on our favorite programs — we help to normalize and center captioning as a regular design feature of the public sphere.

Screen placement is a core standard of caption quality. The FCC’s (2014) new rules for “closed captioning quality standards for TV programs” require that captions should be Accurate, Synchronous, Complete, and Properly Placed. Regarding placement: “Captions should not block other important visual content on the screen, overlap one another, or run off the edge of the video screen” (FCC).

Contagion (2011), which we rented from Amazon Prime Video recently, provides quite a few examples of captions covering on-screen text. Because the on-screen text is low on the screen, and the captions are set exclusively in the bottom-center (default location), the captions partially cover this text at times. Whether the captions cover words on the screen depends on the device being used to view the movie and the caption size set by the user. I prefer large captions when watching programs on a large-screen television. Large captions are more likely to cover any low-set text.

But the topic of placement goes beyond making sure that titles, names, chyrons, and other on-screen text are not obscured by the captions. Caption placement can help readers identify who is speaking when when multiple speakers are talking, interrupting, or overlapping their speech turns:

When people onscreen speak simultaneously, place the captions underneath the speakers. If this is not possible due to the length of the caption or interference with onscreen graphics, caption each speaker at different timecodes. Do not use other speaker identification techniques, such as hyphens. (The Captioning Key)

Bottom-center captions can interfere with readers’ attempts to associate lines of captioned dialogue with their respective speakers. In this scene from Contagion (original captions), Jude Law argues with a newspaper editor about the need to cover a developing story:

Source: Contagion (2011). Amazon Prime Video. Warner Bros. Original captions.

This interaction is not too difficult to follow but could be improved by leveraging the power of placement. Single captions that blend the speech of multiple speakers can be confusing, especially in the absence of any distinguishing info such as preceding hyphens. For example, the following bottom-center captions combine speech from two different speakers, yet there are no visual cues in the captions to indicate which line(s) belong to which speaker:

ALL OVER THE PLANET. <-- Speaker 1
WE DON’T WANT TO BE THE PAPER <-- Speaker 2
THAT CRIES WOLF.

I TAPED THIS MEETING. <-- Speaker 1
WE NEED MORE INFORMATION <-- Speaker 2
THAN THAT.

Let’s re-caption this scene using a caption format such as WebVTT that supports more precise screen positioning options (view the following clips with the Chrome browser).

Source: Contagion (2011). Amazon Prime Video. Warner Bros. Re-captioned by the author using the WebVTT format.

We could go further and style each speaker’s captions in a different color or visual style. Distinguishing speakers by color is common in the UK — see the BBC’s Subtitle Guidelines, which list a “limited range of colours [that] can be used to distinguish speakers from each other.” The limited color palette includes (in order of priority): white, yellow, cyan, and green. These colors must appear on a black background.

Source: Contagion (2011). Amazon Prime Video. Warner Bros. Re-captioned by the author using the WebVTT format.

Placement is meaningful. When captions are placed on the screen strategically, they convey information through their form. Well-placed captions can help readers identify and distinguish speakers at a glance. What placement and color provide to readers is a more efficient method of speaker identification. Placement can’t and shouldn’t replace traditional speaker identifiers, of course. But placement can supplement other techniques without adding any additional words (proper names) or punctuation (hyphens) to an already jam-packed caption file.

Check out the podcast with transcript.

Danforth, C., Ferris, H. & Bahl, E. 2019. KairosCast Interviews Sean Zdenek. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 23(2). http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/23.2/interviews/kcast/index.html

Image credit: “Support Design” by Kool Cats Photography over 14 Million Views is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

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).

A note on pdf accessibility: The issue’s contributors carefully prepared their Word documents to be accessible when converted to PDFs by including alt text for figures and semantic tagging for headings. Access to these features was lost when the Word files were formatted to the journal’s specifications. As a workaround, I integrated authors’ alt text into their figure captions. After the issue was published, I took some time with the published version of the issue to 1) run Adobe’s accessibility wizard, 2) manually tag all headings and tables, 3) fix reading order in places, and 4) test with a screen reader. I believe this version is much more screen reader friendly, but please let me know if any of the content in this pdf is inaccessible (zdenek@udel.edu).

Image credit: “Architecture on LSD” by snowpeak is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Read the full article: “Designing captions: Disruptive experiments with typography, color, icons, and effects.”

Read the full article at DigitalRhetoricCollaborative.org.

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.

Read the full post on ReadingSounds.net.

Read the full post on ReadingSounds.net.

Read the full post on ReadingSounds.net