Deaf News: BBC Archive criticised for lack of captioned content

The BBC’s Twitter account for sharing archive content has come under fire online, after posting videos without subtitles for deaf and hard of hearing viewers.

Roger Beeson, a Child of Deaf Adults (CODA) from Coulsdon, in South London, has been calling on the service to provide captions on 100 percent of its content through the hashtags #ActionOnCaptions and #WhereAreTheCaptions.

In a message posted to Twitter last Wednesday, the former British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter said: “Followers will know I’ve been pressing BBC Archive to subtitle ALL of their content. They seem to have taken umbrage and stopped subtitling altogether.”

Alim Jayda, a hard of hearing actor, added: “I wonder whether we can report them to Ofcom – as a licence payer I’m appalled. If YouTubers/bloggers on tiny budgets can pull captions together, the BBC can!”

Responding to a complaint made by Beeson, the BBC Complaints department replied: “The quality of the audio on the archive material means that subtitling is most accurately undertaken by people at present, and not through automated processes.”

“We will continue to deliver as many subtitled clips as we can for your enjoyment.”

Sharing the email on Twitter, Beeson said the broadcast had “missed my point” in that “automatic captions are pretty good these days”, with adding that the extra editing required to correct them is “usually minimal”.

Here’s the pathetic response I’ve got from BBC Complaints (not from @BBCArchive ) . They’ve missed my point, which is that even using automatic subtitles are pretty good these days, and that the additional effort of editing is usually minimal pic.twitter.com/M8acww6Xy9

— Roger Beeson (@RogerBeeson) April 29, 2021

In a statement to this website, a BBC spokesperson said: “We take accessibility seriously at the BBC and 100% of the programme content we broadcast has been subtitled since 2008.

“We have increased the number of subtitled clips we share via our BBC Archive social media channels and will continue to work hard to make even more historical clips accessible to all.”

The Limping Chicken understands that the BBC currently adds captions manually, with poor quality audio and the subject matter of the clips themselves making it a lengthy process.

The BBC have increased the number of archive clips with added subtitles over the last two years and are working on solutions to increase the number of captioned content available.

Photo: BBC Archive.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is a mildly deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He wears bilateral hearing aids and can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.