Transcript of interview on
the TV, Eh? podcast

CAPTIONING SUCKS founder Joe Clark appeared on the TV, Eh? podcast with Diane Wild on 2008.04.27. You can download the MP3 of the podcast from iTunes. A transcript of the segment follows.

DIANE WILD: So our next guest is on the line. I’ve occasionally turned the closed captioning on for help with mumbled moments and for difficult-to-decipher accents. But it’s being at the gym trapped in front of a muted television that really proved to me how much substance you can lose through crappy closed captioning. Particularly for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, bad closed captioning is more than a minor annoyance, though. Our next guest, Joe Clark, recently launched the Web site CaptioningSucks.com, and he’s going to tell us about his efforts to improve the situation.

Hi, Joe. Thanks for being here. Thanks for waiting on the line patiently while we ignored you and talked about Rent-a-Goalie.

JOE CLARK: Well, it’s mon plaisir to follow – to come in after Denis McGrath. Being on the same show as Denis “Not ‘Denee’ ” McGrath has been a long-time goal of mine, right?

— Really!

— And it’s a goal I don’t even have to rent, right? So I’m doing all right.

— I am glad to have helped you achieve that goal.

— So my day’s already better. OK, by the way, those two examples you just gave are the prototypical blogger/caption-naïve hearing person examples of why they don’t like captioning or why captioning sucks, right? “I couldn’t understand what she was mumbling on Buffy,” right, or “I was stuck at the gym watching CNN,” right? If you Google those concepts, you’ll find hundreds – that’s not an exaggeration – hundreds of bloggers pointing that out, right?

And they always say well, gee, are these typists morons? Are they doing it with two fingers? Has it been outsourced to the Philippines? Well, actually, it has been outsourced to the Philippines in some cases. It’s good that there is some kind of understanding among hearing people that captioning sucks. It’s just that I wish people would do a little bit of research before they post those kind of things. But that’s why we’re on the show now, right?

— Obviously I connected it to people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing; it’s more than a minor annoyance. I mean, why do you think it’s bad that hearing people only find it a minor annoyance?

— No-no-no, my objection is that I hear the same complaints over and over again, and the bloggers tend to just post those complaints and they never actually try to dig up why they might be seeing bad captioning on CNN at the gym.

— Well, tell us what led you to create the site CAPTIONING SUCKS.

— It’s the latest, you know, foray in my quixotic effort to get a pittance of money together to start a research project to actually develop and write, and then test, a viable standard for things like captioning and three other fields of accessibility – one for blind people and also subtitling and dubbing. Because at present there are no independently-developed and -tested standards for things like captioning, which is one reason why captioning sucks – because there is no set and tested way of doing it.

So for the last four years now I’ve been trying to put a measly seven million bucks together to start a research project together called the Open & Closed Project, which is of course online at OpenandClosed.org, which would do nothing but research a set of standards for things like captioning, and then test them to make sure they work, and then publish the standards, which you could then download for free off the Web. And then actually certify the practitioners to prove that people could actually, you know, adhere to those standards.

When the whole thing is done, you wouldn’t just have, you know, captioning from the lowest bidder or captioning outsourced to a foreign country where they don’t even speak English, or just captioning according to whatever way a particular company feels like doing it. We would just have captioning. There would only be one kind of captioning in each particular medium, like television or first-run cinema or Blue-Ray disc. And it would all look and act the same, and it would be predictable, and you could know you could depend on it. You would know that you had qualified people doing the work, because there would be a real standard backing it up, and the people doing the work would have been tested to meet that standard.

And thus far, bupkes: Ain’t got no money on this. I have tons of support. I have literally hundreds of individuals supporting me – that’s not an exaggeration. I’ve got support letters from five continents [actually from four countries – Canada, U.S., U.K., Australia]. No one’s articulated an argument against this idea; I just don’t have the money. So I thought I’d try to break people out of their complacency about how bad things are in the highest-profile of those four fields of accessibility, which is captioning. I’d start this new site, CAPTIONING SUCKS, which is the most vulgar and garish site you will look at all week and is the only—

— But intentionally so.

— defensible use of Comic Sans on the Web. We are the only people defensibly using Comic Sans on the entire Web. And it took so much effort to make it that ugly. It’s what Dolly Parton says: It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.

— It’s really a thing of beauty.

— Look, my designer Noel Jackson and I worked on that thing for four months just getting that damn thing ugly enough, right? And of course it has to be accessible to people with disabilities and work in all sorts of browsers and have really good code and have all the things that sites need these days, like a Facebook group and an account on Twitter, all those things. Took forever to put that together.

And it’s a pretty easy thing to understand. I give seven reasons on the homepage why captioning sucks, one of which is “There aren’t any standards.” But it starts at easy things like “Not everything’s captioned,” and “You can’t complain even if you don’t like a certain bit of captioning,” “It’s hard to read captioning, because the fonts suck,” “Deaf people settle for less than 100%.” And so on – there are a couple of others beyond that. It’s an easy-to-use sort of…. It’s something you can point to and say “There, I wasn’t imagining it. It really is as bad as I thought it was.”

— How many people are we talking about who are really affected by the issue? I mean, obviously, for me, I don’t necessarily need captioning, but how many people actually rely on captioning?

— Well, see, this is one of the other problems. No one knows. Incredibly enough, no one has even an accurate idea about the true number of deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the country – in Canada, for example, since this is the TV, Eh? podcast. Statistics Canada did come out with a reasonably accurate estimate of people with disabilities in the country, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who ticked the box on the long census form saying “I have a hearing impairment” actually watches captioning.

And if you go back to the olden days – you don’t sound old enough to remember this, Diane – when you actually had to buy an external decoder and stick it on your television, they never sold more than 300,000 of those in over ten years. That’s sort of a bad sign – it indicates either that they were too expensive, which they were, or that not a lot of people really want captioning. But actually now decoders have been built into televisions since 1993, which is a very long time now, it’s just assumed that everyone has a caption decoder, so no one has bothered to actually study how many people are actually watching captioning and genuinely need it – as opposed to hearing people who might want or need it occasionally, or just like it and leave it on all the time. Because they’re everywhere now, no one has bothered to run any numbers. Bit of a paradox there, isn’t it?

— Yeah. So even if you get these standards, if you do all the research and you find the best standard and you test it, how can you ensure that broadcasters are going to follow the standard?

— We won’t. We’re not in the business of legislating these things. Just as there are, you know, voluntary standards for a lot of things, which certain companies don’t adhere to, if you want to be cheap and not adhere to the only researched and tested standard on captioning, you’re free to do that in a capitalist economy. Now, the—

— I guess my point is does that make it harder to raise money when it’s going to be a voluntary standard, and do we have any faith the broadcasters are going to—

— Well, yeah, but the fact that the standard is voluntary does not mean it’s unattractive. I mean, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters is cooking up, behind closed doors, another failed pseudostandard that will also be, in theory, voluntary, right? But what ultimately happens when standards are published is eventually some regulatory body requires them by hook or by crook. It might be just because someone like the CRTC decides to impose the industry standard on broadcasters, or it might come out through human-rights complaints. There’ve been three of those in Canada, and the broadcasters have lost them in every case, on the topic of captioning.

So I can’t be too worried immediately on how to impose a well-researched standard on other people. That seems to be sort of antithetical to what I’m doing. But based on experience, I have reason to think it will come about through market forces – people just demand it. Or standardized captioning will end up just being cheaper, which is my prediction. Or it’ll be required by regulators.

— And so what can people do? What do you want people to do and what can people do to get their voices heard on this?

— Well, it’s actually – perversely, since I started out complaining that, you know, all hearing people do is gripe about a couple of mistakes they see on the monitor at the gym—

[Wild laughs]

— You want people to complain more?

— Keep doing it! Yeah, keep doing that. For reasons that I document on CAPTIONING SUCKS, it’s almost impossible to file a complaint about captioning, right? Because you’re lying on the couch, it’s 10:00 at night, you’ve got the remote in one hand and the dog in the other – and something goes wrong. Are you going to get up and try to write that down? No. You’ve already missed it. It borders on impossible to do that. But it isn’t impossible to, you know, sit at work the next morning and, instead of doing actual work, post to your LiveJournal or something and say “Boy, I was watching Battlestar Galactica last night and did the captioning ever suck” and here’s what I saw. That actually becomes part of the literature about captioning, right?

It may be impossible to write a really detailed complaint about what specific thing went wrong, but the more and more people document on their own personal sites that “I tried to watch this thing and I couldn’t understand it,” the greater the evidence becomes that it actually is a problem – captioning does suck. Now, that’s something that ordinary people can do. The funny thing is I have some aces up my sleeve. I have large stacks of videotapes – remember those?

— I do.

— Of the identical program captioned two different ways, usually once in the U.S. and once in Canada. So even if people disagree that captioning sucks and they think the captioning on a show is just fine, I can have them over, I’ll make them a pot of tea, and we’ll just watch, for example, Prime Suspect 6 with U.S. and Canadian captioning and see which one really works better. That’s a controlled experiment: It’s the same show with two different kinds of captions. That kind of proves the contention that you can do better with captioning even without a standard, right?

— All right. We’re running out of time, but thank you so much for joining us. And it’s CaptioningSucks.com, where there’s lots more about the issue and what you can do. And if any big companies are out there listening, OpenandClosed.org is the one that’s raising money for this giant project. So thanks a lot, Joe.

— You’re welcome!