The other day I was watching a newscast, I won't say what the call letters of the station I was watching were for Channel 9, but I was in a gym so the TV was on mute but the captions were on. I watch with captions all the time, as I've noted (how anyone understands what they're saying in "John Adams" without captions is a mystery to me).
Anyway, I'm watching the last two minutes of the ABC World News and it was a really interesting feature ... unfortunately, someone at the local affiliate was so eager to get the closed captions loaded into the system for the upcoming newscast that they killed the text for the story. And so I got two minutes of useless video.
This happens all the time. But whom do you complain to? And how many people have to complain before they'll take you seriously and knock it off? I think the stations assume only grandma uses captions, and in the realm of sales and demographics that make TV profitable, grandma doesn't exist.
Two years ago, I even wrote a piece for TV Barn predicting, "Why closed captioning will soon suck." And I quoted some dire predictions from a leading, if not the leading critic of captioning in North America, Joe Clark of the eponymous website in Toronto.
Well, Joe's got a new website up, it's called Captioning Sucks!, and it lays out the list of grievances that regular users of captions have. I'd like it to be a little more inclusive of the U.S. (and yeah, I recognize the irony of that suggestion), but otherwise it appears they're having the same problems in Canada that we're having here.
The problem, as the website puts it succinctly, is that deaf and hard-of-hearing people feel unseemly about getting all militant when it comes to their captions. But the way I see it, these knuckleheads get free licenses to print money. They still do, despite all you've read about their plunging stock prices, make money hand over fist. And captions cost very little to produce. There would be a very simple way to measure captioning performance. An auditor could set up a gizmo that monitored their CC's for a month, then reported back the failure rate. Failure rate over 20 percent equals license suspension. Works for me!
