Sources for: The wrong kind of captioning!

All the examples we gave are real, like 30-year-old football games captioned in real time:

Or a prerecorded program like Mythbusters, also mishandled using real-time captioning:

Scrollup captioning on DVDs

A U.S. example is The Dog Whisperer. A Canadian example is Hogtown: The Politics of Policing.

Existing standards that ban or discourage scrollup captioning for fictional programming

We are aware of no (pretended or claimed) captioning standard that authorizes the use of scrollup captioning for fictional narrative programming.

• The Canadian Association of Broadcasters captioning manual almost bans such practice (emphasis added):

  Offline pop-on captions… are the only type of captions well suited to dramas, sitcoms, movies, and music videos, and they are therefore recommended for these types of programming…. Offline roll-up captions are not well suited to dramas, sitcoms, movies, children’s programs, or music videos, and their use for these types of programming is discouraged.

• The Caption Center Manual of Style limits use of scrollup captions to “programs produced very close to airtime or produced live.” (A later clarification states “The rules we have are unwritten and usually involve a discussion between marketing and the client. We have tried to hold a line that says comedies and dramas should be pop-on; news material, documentaries, talk shows, etc. can be roll-up. The gray area in-between frequently comes down to turnaround time and cost.”)
• Captioning Key: Preferred Styles and Standards (Described and Captioned Media Program) states: “The CFV program requires pop-on captions.”
• The U.K. Ofcom “Guidance on Standards for [Captioning]” limits scrollup captions to real-time stenography:

  The use of scrolling word-by-word captions for live news can present particular difficulties, especially in the area of retention of information. It is not just a problem of speed, but that the text placed upon moving lines is working against the readers’ natural reading strategy…. During an unscripted live broadcast… the subtitles must be composed, entered, formatted and transmitted in a single pass through the program.

• The only book currently in print on subtitling (Subtitling by Jan Ivarsson and Mary Carroll, TransEdit, 1998) states that neither scrolling nor crawling

  systems can be recommended (except possibly where a live subtitling is being broadcast for the hard-of-hearing). The problem with moving text is that the eye concentrates on the text while waiting for the word or phrase to finish and is thus prevented from seeing what is happening in the picture. This does not matter very much if the picture is only showing the news presenter, but if the images are conveying important information, such fixation on the text is disastrous.