Sources for: Not enough captioning!

100% captioning – in theory

• In the United States, only some broadcasters are required to caption any programming, and there are numerous exemptions.
  • There are even exemptions a broadcaster can simply assert, even if that assertion is actually untrue.
  • The most important exemption in that category is the exemption for “new” networks; broadcasters pretend that HDTV versions of analogue stations are “new” (most notoriously, Universal HD).
  • We know of no broadcaster in the United States that is required to caption all of its programming. Even some broadcasters that claim to caption all programming, like some PBS and HBO channels, do not caption commercials, promos, or other interstitial programming or subtitled programming.
• In Canada, the new official policy calls for 100% captioning. But the policy is not retroactive.
• Only CBC Television and Newsworld have a 100%-captioning requirement in place, and that came about because of a human-rights complaint, not the new official policy.
• In the U.K., broadcasters do not have to exceed 80% captioning, and they have ten years to reach that level. (The BBC must abide by its own commitments, which often include 100% captioning.) There are a range of exempted programming types, and many channels with low viewership are exempted completely.
• In Australia, conventional television and pay TV have to caption only a portion of their programming.

No captioning for the weather

The Weather Network in Canada has consistently claimed that captioning isn’t necessary. Most recently, its claim (see a lengthy transcript) was that only occasional its newscasts needed captioning; weather reports were already full-screen and text-only, or, in other cases, weathercasters reiterated what was already shown onscreen anyway. In that latter case especially, live captions would be too far behind the audio and would cover up too much of the screen. (You could say that about all live captioning.)

The Weather Network’s contentions were unpersuasive. The station has to caption 90% of spoken-word programming in all forms. (As of 2008, it isn’t.)

DVD class-action lawsuit

Discussed elsewhere.

French captioning in Canada

For one example of the claim that captioning in French is “difficult,” see a CBC submission to the Canadian Human Rights Commission (PDF).

Movie captioning

• Most open-captioned films are produced by InSight Cinema, which, at time of writing, lists about 20 titles. Only certain specific screenings in a few cities are captioned.
• The MoPix system, available in about 350 cinema screens, lists about 30 titles at time of writing. All screenings are captioned. But MoPix-equipped screens might be showing a movie without captions.
• The DTS and Screentalk systems, used mostly in the U.K. and Ireland, have about 275 screens. The number of captioned films available at any given time is impossible to estimate from publicly-available sources. Only certain specific screenings are captioned.

These figures represent a mere fraction of the available cinemas and movies. There were 656 movie theatres (including drive-ins) in Canada in 2006. (The number of movie screens is not given. We will assume a very conservative one screen per theatre.) There were 38,415 movie screens in the U.S. in 2006. Hence the MoPix system accounts for about 0.8% of U.S. and Canadian movie screens. That’s ⅘ of one percent. Only some of those screens are actually showing captioned movies at any given time.

Online videos

To use just the YouTube example (actually the Google Video example, but Google owns YouTube), only 100 videos were closed-captioned at time of writing. Google Video has about 193 million videos, meaning that closed-captioned videos represent 0.00005% of the total.

An industry association, the Internet Captioning Forum, was announced in October 2007. It pledged to solve the problem of video captioning. The press release never clarifies whether open- or closed captioning is to be used, but the whole purpose of the Forum is to solve a set of problems that do not exist if open captioning is used.