Measuring caption quality is an emerging field, with many different systems being tried around the world. Ai-Media’s audit was scored using the NER (Number, Edition error and Recognition error) system developed by Pablo Romero-Fresco and Juan Martinez. This model recognises that different kinds of errors have different impacts and therefore the quality measure should take this into account.
Up to 1,500 blind people are expected to attend the conference, which is an initiative of the American Council of the Blind. The sessions will cover a wide range of topics, including audio description standards, advocacy to make the service more visible, audio description for the performing arts and museums, audio description in Spanish and how to become an audio describer.
As reported in York Region news, the channels are currently up for licence renewal, and CRTC has the power to revoke licenses if caption requirements are not met. At a hearing on 28 April, a representative from Channel Zero said that it had increased its captioning staff to six to provide captions for AOV Adult Movie Channel, AOV Action Clips, AOV Maleflixxx and two non-pornographic channels, and these were now all in full compliance.
Broadcasters are required to measure quality in sample of programs from three genres: news, entertainment and chat shows. The dimensions of quality to be measured are:
Currently, about 20 per cent of programs on Dutch television are foreign language (mainly English), and these are usually broadcast with Dutch subtitles, providing a level of access for Deaf and hearing impaired viewers. In addition to this, there has been closed captioning available since teletext was introduced in 1980. Legislation required the NPO to provide closed captioning on 95% of the Dutch-language programs shown on its three channels, Netherlands 1, 2 and 3, by 2011.
With levels of captioning increasing around the world, broadcasters and caption suppliers are always looking for ways to increase efficiency and reduce costs. In The future of pre-recorded subtitling, Hewson notes that the most time-consuming part of captioning is the creation of accurate text. In recent years, speech recognition technology has increasingly been used to caption live programs, however, there are still severe limitations on the process.
The survey looked at programs screened between 6am and midnight from 5 to 11 April 2014. During that period, the highest captioning percentage recorded on a commercial multichannel was 57 per cent on the Nine network’s Gem, while the lowest was 23 per cent on the Ten network’s One.
By contrast, captioning on the ABC’s three multichannel’s, ABC News 24, ABC2 and ABC3, stood at between 96 and 100 per cent.
Some of Seven’s most popular programs including Winners and Losers and A Place to Call Home remain uncaptioned online. My Kitchen Rules and Home and Away are currently the only Australian programs that have captions available on Plus7.
Unpublished
The Captioned ABC News, which began on 3 December 1973, was the first news program ever captioned. It was a repeat of the ABC’s 6 p.m. news which went to air at 11 p.m., with the captions prepared by a team of five captioners.
