![closed caption meaning closed caption meaning](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/closedcaptionsoverview-120415205128-phpapp01/95/closed-captions-overview-12-728.jpg)
What we do not have yet, and what I intend to offer in this essay, is a way of thinking about captions that goes beyond quality (narrowly defined in terms of visual design) to consider captioning as a rhetorical and interpretative practice that warrants further analysis and criticism from scholars in the humanities and social sciences. In other words, caption quality has been evaluated in terms of visual design for the most part-i.e., how legibility and readability interact with screen placement, timing, and caption style (e.g., scroll-up style vs. Current practice, at least on television, is too often burdened by a legacy of styling captions in all capital letters with centered alignment, among other lingering and pressing problems. Despite the age of captioning technology, we still do not have a comprehensive approach to caption quality that goes beyond basic issues of typography, placement, and timing. We have had plenty to talk about for a long time. are by law plentiful today (FCC, 2010 Robson, 2004, pp.
#Closed caption meaning tv#
The history of captioning on TV goes back to the early 1970s (see Earley, 1978), and TV captions in the U.S. But closed-captioning technology predates the Web by about twenty years. To date, online discussions about web captioning have centered on questions of quantity: How do we increase the number of captioned videos on the Web? How do we encourage our representatives in Congress to support one of the pending pieces of accessibility legislation? How do we increase awareness among content providers like Netflix of the importance of offering captions on their streaming web videos? Despite the passage of new legislation requiring Internet captioning on some types of content, questions of quantity will continue to dominate the discussions of online captioning because TV content accounts for only a fraction of the video content available online.īefore we can talk about quality, so the thinking goes, we need to have something to talk about. A new law, The 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010, will require "captioned television programs to be captioned when delivered over the Internet" (AAPD, 2010). When the same episode is rebroadcast on the Web (via NBC's official retransmitter, ), it is, at this time, uncaptioned.īut that will soon be changing. The episode of SNL featured in the epigraph to this essay (Baldwin, 2010) is required by law to be closed captioned when broadcast on TV.
![closed caption meaning closed caption meaning](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/zdenek-3playmedia-webinar-slides-12may2016-160511154948/95/the-future-of-closed-captioning-in-higher-education-7-638.jpg)
Very few of these TV shows and movies, when retransmitted on the Web, have closed captions.
#Closed caption meaning for free#
What remains are thousands of hours of television shows and movies that broadcasters and retransmitters are increasingly making available online, usually for free (ad-supported). Leave aside, for the moment, the millions of so-called "disposable" videos (Reid, 2008) that users are creating on-the-fly with their mobile phones and web cams, and then uploading to YouTube, Facebook, and other social networking sites (Bilton, 2010). More viewers are catching their favorite TV shows, like Saturday Night Live, on Monday mornings with laptops and mobile devices. Video has exploded in popularity on the Web in recent years. Rosaline Crawford, National Association of the Deaf (cited in Stelter, 2010) We do not want to be left behind as television moves to the Internet.