VISUAL AID Online video is an ever-growing content industry, but those with hearing difficulties are
not always catered for
capabilities of social media platforms generally: “If you’re talking about the big players like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, I’d say they’re still pretty dire. I’ve tried to caption a video on Facebook. It is a nightmare.” Online video has been called a universal language, but unless captioning is made fully and easily available to creators and audiences, that promise will remain unfulfilled.
captions and subtitling tech provider Digital Nirvana, Russell Wise. Their services include captioning, transcription and language localisation. “For the most part, it’s been ‘best effort’ in terms of quality, but there’s no real QA on that, for the most part. In the US, if the captioning is not there, you get a big fine; if it is there, you’re good to go. “But every country has its own regulations, and it’s starting to evolve again. We’re
seeing regulations in Canada that are very specific about the quality – and it’s audited. We’ve also seen that in India. In these cases, the onus is on the content provider to prove that the captioning is high quality and meeting government standards.” Digital Nirvana is just one company offering AI-enhanced
CLEAN CAPTIONS Though broadcasters might be meeting their captioning requirements legally, they don’t always excel in execution. Anyone who has looked at captioning of live events or news will remember instances of hilarious – or irritating –
I’VE TRIED TO CAPTION A VIDEO ON FACEBOOK. IT IS A NIGHTMARE
miscaptioning. The fact that this hasn’t improved hugely in recent years suggests to viewers that getting captioning right may not be the highest priority, even among major content providers. Some new legislation is mandating that captioning adheres to a minimum quality. An AI-created word salad, only loosely in sync with the picture, may not be passable any more. “Since about 2005, the US upped its game for captioning,” explains sales and marketing SVP at US
solutions for helping broadcasters assess the quality of their captioning in real time. The need for both speed and quality in captioning is an additional pressure for broadcasters, especially since captioning takes place at the very end of the workflow. It can be the last aspect that still needs to be added – and executed well – while the content is getting pushed out the door. One of the basic methods of captioning is doing a speech to transcript conversion – often with
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