Joe Clark argues that the only way we’re going to get good captioning of online videos is if government steps in and regulates. Agree or disagree, it’s an interesting essay about a problem that — frankly — I haven’t thought about before.
Via Clark’s essay, I came across captioningsucks.com. I’ve never thought about how much captions suck, but they really do. Why aren’t they done in a decent font? It doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult to accomplish.
I’d tentatively favor government-mandated standards for captioning. I’d certainly favor legislation requiring videos produced by large companies to include good-quality captioning; for more garage-band productions, I don’t think I’d favor a mandate, but I would favor the government funding some resources to make captioning easy to accomplish even for folks with limited budgets and skills.
I think it’s really important, as Clark does, that captioning be done in an open standard. If it’s done according to an open standard, then every movie player maker on the planet will be able to design to the spec and get in on the action. If it’s done to a closed standard, then the only players that will support it are those which are legally required to — and only to the extent that they are legally required to.
On the other hand, I think he’s barking up the wrong tree with arguing for open captioning. As I understand his proposal, each video will require twice the storage space. And if you want to host or redistribute the video, you’ll have to download and re-distribute both versions. Who’s going to go to the trouble? The law will be so consistently violated that it will be unenforceable. Far better to have a standard that combines captioning into the same file as the video (to be added on top of the video if the user desires it), the way audio is combined with the video today. (This has the added benefit that the user could adjust the size, color, brightness, etc. based on their own equipment and visual abilities.)
While I sympathize with his frustration at poor quality captioning, I don’t think any of his proposals will actually improve it. His argument, if I understand it, is if the captions aren’t “hidden” from the majority of users (the way they are with closed captions) then producers will be embarrassed to produce bad ones. But if the majority aren’t relying on the captions, they probably won’t care if they’re poor quality or not, even if they are right there on the screen in front of them. (And if most people don’t have to see them, because two videos are being distributed, then the producers won’t be embarrassed.)
Finally, I wonder if the main obstacle to captioning is its difficulty. I certainly don’t know how to caption a video; I could probably figure it out, but that would require effort. Do good, open-source, widely-distributed tools exist, with an easy to use user interface that makes it difficult for the user to create bad captions and easy to create good ones? If not, perhaps writing some is in order.
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¶3 of Bjartmarr’s comment is incorrect. Embarrassment is not the issue.
And open captioning is merely technically much more straightforward than closed captioning. I suppose some people would have bandwidth issues, yes, but Google wouldn’t.
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that a site complaining about how captioning sucks because of poor fonts is written in Comic Sans?
Well, if embarrassment at everybody seeing their crappy captioning isn’t the stick that will prod producers to caption properly, I’m having a hard time figuring out what is.
Yes, open captioning is more straightforward, in that it’s built into the video. But Clark says it’s difficult because players don’t support unicode, because players screw up positioning and don’t support color, because producers don’t bother to position the captions, and because “fonts are a mess”. And he gives RealPlayer as an example of a player that breaks captioning.
Most of these problems could be fixed by an open-source, cross-platform video player that works according to spec. (Don’t believe me? Look at what Firefox is doing to the Web.) The only problem that can’t be solved by the player (producers not positioning captions) could be solved by an easy-to-use caption creation tool, that requires producers to deliberately position the captions.
Perhaps distributing open captioned videos alongside uncaptioned ones is a half-decent interim solution until we get the proper tools written, in the same way that using HTML tables for layout were a half-decent interim solution while we waited for CSS to be invented. But it’s hardly an elegant solution, and I hate to see it being presented as the goal towards which we should strive.
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