Joe Clark: Accessibility | Design | Writing

Why I Hate Online Captioning
(Because it sucks compared to real captioning!)

Notes from a presentation delivered 2007.10.04 at An Event Apart San Francisco.

A few odds ’n’ ends I mentioned:

And a serious correction about captioning at NBC.com: I really should have double-checked NBC.com while in American domainspace before I got up onstage and said they were the only ones doing anything in online captioning. They are, but it sucks too. Not only is only one show captioned, they have yet again found a new and shocking way to completely screw it up. (Continuous scrolling text in a frame to the right of the image, with upcoming text clearly visible and the current text scrolled upward into a reverse-type field. And! All capitals! 1979 called; it wants its captioning back.)

Notes


Audience reactions

I have the results of the comment cards from my performance at An Event Apart. I haven’t read them, because I was specifically warned in advance that I scored low. “If only you gave us news we could use,” I was essentially told.

Everybody knew up front what my topic was and it was approved from start to finish in the planning process. Audiencemembers know what kind of trouble they’re in for if they ever have to deal with captioned video. What exact other news could you use?

Posted: 2007.10.08 ¶ Updated: 2007.12.04, 2009.09.10

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