Watch: The kid who understands the importance of online captioning better than most adults do

Girl or boy… no matter…. the message gets across fine.

I have been captioning videos for 25 years, and I was very impressed with Presley’s work, especially with her tendency to keep phrases together in the same caption, rather than breaking them up between captions (as so often happens in newbie captioning) and thereby decreasing readability for the deaf.

Well done!

Brian Quass
Captions for the Web

PS Regarding Google auto captions, I would just add this: its inability to master human pronunciation is really only the most obvious of its faults. The auto captions that I’ve seen have also been choppy (sometimes one word per caption), poorly paced (some captions disappear in under one second) and there is no apparent punctuation, leaving it to the reader to decide when new sentences begin, which is often (unpredictably enough) in the middle of a line of text.

I would also add that Google’s goal of perfect transcription is not even theoretically possible, since three veteran closed-captioners can sometimes hear the same audio and come away with three different interpretations of what’s being said. This is not because of human shortcomings: this is because of the way that the brain processes a sound based on the specific context in which it is heard. Our interpretation of sounds is, in this sense, a relative process. Robotic perfection in this field would only be possible if there were a one-to-one relationship between specific sounds and specific meanings, and the fact is that there is not. (To learn more about the importance of context in interpreting speech sounds, you can search the Web for the phrase “the McGurk Effect.”)

If there’s anyone out there who still thinks that Google auto captions are acceptable for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, I invite them to visit my new website called “Otto Cap Shuns”, where I’ve started a collection of the most hilariously bad auto captions on the Internet Unfortunately, I am having no problem at all coming up with plenty of hysterical examples, because many (if not most) major organizations are using Google auto captions these days.

But that’s not the real problem. Auto captions can sometimes be a good STARTING POINT for the DIY captioning of online videos. The problem is that most of these organizations never use them in this way. In fact, most organizations never even read the auto captions that are appearing with their videos, let alone edit them to remove the many errors, both big and small.

And in some ways it’s the small errors that are the biggest problem:

When the software makes a big error, it’s usually obvious to the deaf viewer that something is wrong with the captions and so the viewer doesn’t take them seriously in that case. But small errors can result in captions that both look right and make sense while yet distorting the very meaning of the dialogue that they were meant to convey.

Example:

AUDIO:
“I would never do that”

AUTO CAPTION:
“I would have her do that”

So, it’s the big errors that are funny — but it’s the small errors that are the most pernicious thing about auto captions.

Of course I’m archiving only the big errors on my “Otto Cap Shuns” website, in part, because they’re just so funny to read: but the real reason that I’m creating this collection of bloopers is (quite frankly) to start shaming the many big organizations that are using unedited auto captions (like Greenpeace, the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, etc.) into doing a better job when it comes to making their online videos accessible to the deaf community.

I have a selfish motive, too, though: I am simultaneously writing to many of these same organizations, inviting them to take advantage of my own 25 years of captioning experience by letting me caption their online videos for a nominal fee. But I always end every such sales pitch with a comment along the following lines:

“Even if you decide not to take advantage of my offer, I would urge you to take a closer look at the auto captions that you are currently providing the deaf community online. I think you’ll agree with me that those captions are not providing a reasonable representation of the audio that they are meant to convey. If so, I hope you’ll at least take immediate action of some kind to remedy the situation.”

I hope it’s okay for me to end this post by providing the URL of my “Otto Cap Shuns” website that I’ve mentioned above, since, as I say, the purpose of that site is to draw attention to the fact that unedited auto captions just aren’t “cutting it” when it comes to providing the deaf community with accessibility to online videos.

So, at the risk of running afoul of some Linking Chicken forum rule with which I’m unfamiliar, here is the URL for my Otto Cap Shuns website….

http://www.ottocapshuns.com/