Words are important

Thanks to my migraines, and loudness being a big trigger for them, the time I spend watching TV involves turning off the volume and turning on closed captions. Sometimes shows have no captions, which means I cannot watch them. Sometimes the captions are there and are perfect. Sadly, a majority of the time the captions are not accurate at all.

I can understand that if the show is being captioned live, such as a news broadcast, that it is impossible to transcribe everything perfectly. But when it is a recorded show that could be captioned ahead of time, and it is obviously not or is done poorly I find it hard to tolerate.

I cannot understand why a captioner would type the words "witches" instead of "which is" when witches would not fit into the subject at all.

I cannot understand why captioners bother to type half a sentence only to leave out important words that would be necessary for understanding. "The person would non-corn based products" is one caption I saw today. I have no idea what it meant since the rest of the speech did not clue me in.

I also cannot understand when captions seem to become completely out of control. The captions suddenly spout gibberish, turn bizarre colors, or change position on the screen for no reason and block the view of the picture. I always joke that the captioner must be drunk or on drugs to have messed up so badly.

And I also do not understand why captions sometimes block important words on the screen that are not captioned, such as text translated into English or a person's name. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the captions to begin with?

I can imagine that the deaf community feels ambivalent about the current quality of closed captioning. They don't like it but are afraid to complain too much for fear the captioning of visual media will be reduced or eliminated.

If I were blessed to be able to provide a wonderful service for a minority community I would be ashamed to put out such shoddy work. The little I have heard from said captioners is full of excuses. Face it: transcribers exist in many other businesses and are held accountable to be as accurate as possible. In this day and age there is no decent excuse for the overall poor quality of captioning.