The story so far
Captioning (for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers) is only one of the topics the Open & Closed Project is interested in, but it’s a marquee topic. We figure if you can get captioning right, you’ll probably have the skills to get everything else right.
Except nobody is getting captioning right. Captioning pretty much sucks. That’s why we started this Web site saying as much.
Government hearings
Last year, the Canadian broadcasting regulator, the CRTC, held hearings on accessibility of telecom and TV services. The TV side was an excuse to push through a “standard” for TV captioning from the same people who had failed at the task once before – broadcasters themselves, represented by their industry group, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB).
Industry flubs its “research”
The most important part of the CAB standard, which was cooked up behind closed doors, allowed the use of scrollup captioning on every single program. While scrollup works OK on some shows, you can’t understand a fictional or dramatic series or a comedy when it’s captioned in scrollup. The CAB’s own working groups didn’t fully endorse that proposal (the French side rejected it outright, as did Canada’s biggest deaf group, the Canadian Association of the Deaf).
The CRTC called up the CAB and asked it to conduct a “validation exercise” for its proposed standard – i.e., to submit a document proving the foregone conclusion that the standard was A-OK. The CAB held a couple of testing sessions in Toronto and Montreal, in which fake TV shows with fake captions were presented to volunteer subjects on computer monitors. (Just like lying on the sofa channel-surfing at home!)
Subjects rejected scrollup captioning. The summary of the report that was later published (PDF) misrepresented that fact. The Open & Closed Project accused the CRTC of suborning scientific fraud.
Results
In July 2009, CRTC released a ruling that squashed the CAB’s demand for scrollup captioning everywhere. In fact, prerecorded shows have to use true captioning (pop-on captioning). So that was a victory.
But the CRTC asked the CAB to start all over again with another working group on captioning standards. (CAB has to report back to CRTC on that topic by 21 October 2009.) And that has led to a new kind of nonscientific “research” – the report commissioned from Mediac that is the genesis of this campaign.