Elements of caption quality: determining the priority of qualitative closed caption elements

Abstract

In Canada, the Canadian Radio Television and Communications Commission requires that all English- and French-language broadcasters caption 100% of their programs, and that live-produced programming – such as news broadcasts, sports events, and award shows – arecaptioned with a 95% accuracy rate for English-language. However, measuring caption quality as a purely objective count of the number of errors in the text means that many qualitative factors of quality are not considered. This research explored what priority Deaf and hard of hearing viewers place on non-quantitative elements of caption quality, namely caption display speed, missing words, spelling and grammar errors, and speaker identification. Using a survey tool based off the principals of the NASA-TLX workload assessment tool, participants were asked to watch two television clips with their original live-produced captions and provide feedback on how the captions impacted their viewing pleasure. The main findings suggested that viewers place equal value on verbatim accuracy and caption display speed, and that a trade off between the two cannot easily be made. This research provides a starting point for measuring caption quality using subjective quality factors.