In the article, 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.)
This was also the case in Australia. When the Australian Caption Centre (ACC) began captioning TV programs in 1982, it set the speed for adult programs at 120 words per minute, or two words per second. This meant that when captions were created, much of the dialogue had to be rewritten and many words left out. This led to complaints from some viewers who could see that the captions differed significantly from the dialogue.
In the early 1990s, the ACC conducted a series of tests where it showed a number of Deaf and hearing impaired people clips of programs captioned at various speeds. The majority favoured the captions at 180 words per minute, or three words per second, and this became the ACC standard.
Since then, the captioning landscape has been transformed by the advent of live captioning (where captions are created as a program goes to air using stenographic techniques or speech recognition technology). As live captioners have a very limited ability to edit dialogue, the captions they create are inevitably close to verbatim.
Earlier this year, Media Access Australia produced a white paper, Caption Quality: International approaches to standards and measurement, which looked at caption standards around the world. It found that there is no real consensus about word speeds in these, so this is a debate that is set to continue.
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