Assault on Bad Captioning Month

March 2009 is Assault on Bad Captioning Month at CAPTIONING SUCKS!

Now, shouldn’t every month involve assaults on bad captioning? We certainly think so. But, somewhat like canned orange juice, we’ve decided to concentrate the acid.

Stay tuned all this month for one surprising escapade after another as CAPTIONING SUCKS! puts the boot into scrollup captioning used on dramas and comedies and real-time captioning used on prerecorded programs. Watch us as we impede the quickening race to the bottom among captioners. And look out for a wildly controversial deregulation plan that will set broadcasters a-tizzy.

What’s new?

  1. What about that other piece of big news from March 2009? We’ll have more to say about it in April. There’s a method to our madness; trust us.

  2. (2009.03.31)    CAPTIONING SUCKS! launches Illegal Captions, a year-long series of complaints to regulators, and, if necessary, human-rights commissions, concerning captioning. When the FCC starts up its new complaints process in June, we’ll be there, too.

    Now, where are the actual complaints? They have to be filed before they can be published, so stay tuned.

  3. (2009.03.16)    We’ve had it up to here with the misuse of scrollup captioning on programming where it doesn’t work (like dramas and comedies, music programming, and subtitled shows). CAPTIONING SUCKS! begins a (possibly lengthy) campaign to stamp it out – and we’re kicking it off in a way you’d expect for 2009, with a Facebook group: Stop the Spread of Scrollup Captioning.

  4. (2009.03.02)    Start with about 150 more photographs of lousy captioning over at our Flickr set. You can look at them all at once if you wish, or check the topics covered in these new photos, including:

    • Speaker identification
    • Non-speech information
    • Multiple caption blocks
    • French captioners mangling English programming
    • Misuse of real-time captioning
    • Upper case vs. mixed case