On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 3:37 PM, Jim Ellwanger <[email protected]> wrote:
> PGage wrote:
[snip]
> People who are watching the captions but can also still hear the
> dialogue/sound effects are obviously in an excellent position to make
> complaints about bad closed captioning.

Sure, but it's not a requirement. People who can spell and understand
rules of grammar have as great an advantage (and/or a burden).

The real benefit for those who hear and read is in discovering when
late post-production changes have occurred, and the captioning varies
greatly from what's being aired. Usually, it's trivial, but not
always. Last year's "In Plain Sight" had completely distinct texts for
the voice-overs at the start and end of many episodes. I remember an
episode of "Buffy" where dialogue was deleted from a scene, but CC
readers knew what the characters would have been saying. And somehow,
CC manages to be very good at revealing dialogue that's mixed way low,
say, because the character speaking is in another room or part of a
subsidiary conversation.

 The best place to complain about
> it is to the network/station that's putting it on the air.  The
> second-best place to complain about it is to the company that produced it,
> if you can figure it out.  (Why the network first?  Because they're the
> ones setting the standards, and the ones paying for it; it is definitely
> within their power to improve their captioning.)  The third-best place to
> complain about it is to the FCC.  The fourth-best place to complain about
> it is to your Congressional representatives.

I've tried the first two of these on multiple occasions. I did once
hear back from WGBH about a "Masterpiece" show, but they passed the
blame onto unnamed others. (Open aside to CaptionMax: That's "passed,"
not "past." Do please teach your captioners the difference.)

jd

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