HOW FAST SHOULD CAPTIONS BE? A recent article by Diana Sanchez, General Manager of Red Bee Media Spain, looks at one of the perennial areas of debate about captioning— the optimum speed for captions on television. In the article (link is external), Sanchez notes that studies have shown that some people have difficulty reading captions because they are too fast, yet they have consistently become faster over the last 30 years, and asks why this has happened. The answer, writes Sanchez, is that whenever caption providers or other bodies that draw up quality standards consult organisations which represent the Deaf and hearing impaired, the latter will generally push for captions which are closer to verbatim. “People who are Deaf or hard of hearing don’t want subtitlers or academics deciding what grammatical structure they’ll find easiest to understand, or replacing vocabulary with simpler synonyms they think will be easier to process conceptually. They want the subtitles to be as near verbatim as is reasonable because what they want is equal access.” (Note that the term for captions is ‘subtitles’ in Europe.) mediaaccess.org.au/latest_news/news/how-fast-should-captions-be
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 04:49:13 +0000
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