About Captioning Sucks!

First, some links

• Looking for ad banners for your blog or Web site? We’ve got those!
• Curious about the design of the site, and why the homepage is cheap and vulgar-looking? Well, that was no accident.
• Want to browse some photos of captioning in the real world? If you didn’t believe captioning sucked before, you will now.

Need to contact us?

Just send mail to info at OpenandClosed dot org.

About this site

CAPTIONING SUCKS! is a microsite with two goals:

1. To get people talking about just how lousy captioning really is.
2. To alert people to the fact that there is a solution on the horizon – the Open & Closed Project.

To achieve the first goal, we wanted to snap people out of their denial – that things are really just fine because most TV shows and most home videos have captioning. (“Most” is not “all,” and the quality sucks.)

We especially wanted to snap broadcasters and regulators out of their denial – that they’re doing their level best to provide accessibility to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. (Actually, broadcasters are doing whatever is cheapest and are using loopholes to avoid captioning in the first place. Regulators do next to nothing to solve the problem, because even the regulators’ official biographies show that many officials used to work for broadcasters and vice versa. Regulators have an obvious and unresolved conflict of interest – they’re regulating their former or future bosses and coworkers.)

The second goal is more complex, as the Open & Closed Project has been in the works for four years with no funding whatsoever. Broadcasters have no interest – yet – in spending a puny $7 million to solve the captioning quality problem once and for all. Captioning Sucks is a way to build interest among the general public in the Project’s main task – to research, write, and test a set of standards for captioning (and a few other things). You can learn more about what we’re doing.