still uses sign language interpreters, along with "Mass for Shut-Ins" programs, which retain that form both for familiarity for older viewers (who may find captions distracting or hard to get on newer televisions) and for cost concerns as it is less expensive for a church organization to hire an interpreter to sign a service than hire a transcriber to caption it. The BBC continues to air some repeats with an onscreen sign-language interpreter in the early hours, presumably as a teaching aid for people wishing to learn British Sign Language, and also a magazine show aimed specifically at deaf people called See Hear. See Hear is noteworthy for having subtitles for the benefit of hearing viewers. Interpreters are usually known most to American audiences as appearing to the side of public officials in news conferences signing what is being said by the speaker at the microphone.
Closed captions are so called because they can be displayed or hidden as the viewer wishes. Captioners try to place captions so as not to cover an important part of the picture, such as the name of an interviewee on a news program, but that isn't always possible. Open captions also exist, but are seldom used (these aren't to be confused with subtitles used for foreign language media or hard-to-understand reality programming with bad mic work or The Unintelligible), at least not in more advanced countries like the US and in the Europe - Open Captioning is far more common in second world and third world countries like Malaysia. They can be created with a character generator or inserted right into the program itself rather than embedded in the video signal.
The reason for this is simple. Before the FCC mandated that virtually all television sets have closed captioning included, the only way to receive captioning was an expensive closed captioning set-top box (about the same cost as a television set). So to accommodate deaf people who might not be able to afford a captioning box, a number of programs were open captioned. Once closed captioning could be received by almost every TV set in the United States, open captioning was no longer necessary as almost any TV set now has a closed captioning decoder built-in. Open captioning's use has seriously faded to the point only "real-time closed captioning provided by this sponsor" announcements to demonstrate closed captioning technology are the only place the form is seen at all to most viewers. However, the concept of open captioning has become popular in online video advertising, a form where often most videos are muted and subtitling the dialogue in-video is often a requirement to communicate the message both in written and audible form.
Transcribers of closed captioning go through the same process of career training as court reporters and type on the same kind of machine modified for television use called a stenotype, a special keyboard designed for typing as fast as possible using key combinations. This is because court reporters are by training meant to transcribe words as fast as possible without any pause, which is very important for live television broadcasts. As both the law and people with hearing disabilities will always exist, court reporters are usually guaranteed a good job with great perks (such as the ability to usually be the first in the nation to watch a completed TV episode), though they have heavy financial and job security penalties intentionally written into their contracts to prevent any form of Spoiler leakage. Almost all pre-recorded programming except for long-cancelled archived programming is captioned on-site at the studio or a captioning organization's offices due to the risks of an episode being leaked, while live events such as news and sports can be captioned at home by telecommuting transcribers who watch the program live and caption on the fly.
Captions tend to be in all uppercase because early decoders couldn't display lowercase letters with true descenders (i.e., the tails of lower-case letters like g, j, p, q and y which go below the letters). Before TV sets had built-in decoding circuitry, a viewer needing the capability could buy an (expensive) external decoder, similar to the (not too expensive) external decoder used to allow an analog TV to receive digital over-the-air broadcasts. All TV sets made in the United States over 13 inches diagonally since July 1993 have had the decoders built in; eventually it became standard procedure to build the caption chip into the operating systems of nearly all televisions under 13". Closed captioning is now a feature expected in any television set or other device capable of receiving a television signal, such as computer tuner cards.
Television programs are virtually 100% captioned because the FCC has mandated virtually all television program producers to do so. Basically, the only exceptions are producers with revenues of less than U.S.$3 million a year or who make programs in languages not using the Latin alphabet, but even then when you're trying to get your program viewed by as many as possible, captioning is a must, making local cable access channels the de facto only organizations to not use them, save for 'international' feeds of channels originating outside the US airing on cable and satellite providers. Grammar and spelling errors aren't exactly rampant in closed captioning, but because closed captioning is required and is not usually a part of the production team's vision for a work they are usually done as cheaply and quickly as possible, leading to errors and issues.
There are three main kinds of closed captions: roll-up or scrolling, used for news programs and other live broadcasts, as well as for The Price Is Right; pop-on, pop-up, or block, used for fully scripted programs, and paint-on, used mainly for commercials and special effects. Roll-up captions are done live and can lead to some funny errors.note Every once in a while, the script used for captioning is an older version, or does not exist at all, causing the captioning to not totally match the spoken dialogue. Also, enhanced computer power has allowed for the development of speech-to-text software, and sometimes the computer-generated captions use the wrong word, especially for homophones; e.g., a military program using the word "ordnance" (weapons) might display the word "ordinance" (a local law). Today, for live broadcasts, it is not uncommon for the speech provided to the program to come from a human being who is repeating what was just said in a tone more easily recognized by the program. As seen above, it's very rare for a closed captioning transcriber to play the role of a Hidden Track Deadpan Snarker or MST'er unless a show asks him to be, so usually captions are modified directly from the shooting scripts with only minor formatting to show the transcriber as a True Neutral viewer of the program who couldn't care less about who is sleeping with whom.
The pop-on style of closed captioning can sometimes lead to a short-term variant of Spoiled by the Format, as it usually display a sentence before it's finished being said by the person who is speaking. Some programs, such as Survivor, are captioned in the roll-up live style specifically to prevent Spoiler leakage. In the particular case of South Park, the program is often finished only hours before first airing, making a traditional pop-on session immediately impossible (the pop-on session takes place after airing and that style will be seen in weekend encores of a new episode).
Also, when closed captions are displayed for works aired on TV which censor a word but not a whole sentence, they often display the censored word anyway. Sometimes they'll only censor part of the word; e.g., if the word "asshole" is used, it will be displayed as "ass[censored]" while the word itself is completely bleeped out. The reverse can even occur, such as in Crank Yankers, which sometimes censors even innocuous words when they are uncensored on the show.
The complexity of closed captioning of local news depends on the budget of the station; if they can afford it, "real-time" captions display and a transcriber at the station or watching by satellite can transcribe the newscast. Lower-tier stations will plug in the unedited raw script and roll that instead, which means viewers get to wonder what "NAT" (a scene with natural background noise) is, and wonder why the weather forecast is never captioned (mainly because meteorologists usually ad-lib rather than script out their forecast).
In the American/Canadian standard, there are also four closed captioning "channels" available, which allows for secondary captions in different languages (usually Spanish in the United States, or English on the Spanish networks such as Univision and Telemundo, and French in Canada); these are usually seen on the "CC3" caption channel.
Captioning was previously less regulated when it comes to Internet programming sources. However, the United States' new 21st Century Communications Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (which took effect in 2012) requires all online video content sourced directly from a television broadcast to be captioned. Hulu and iTunes usually have most of their programs captioned, and after a number of years where Netflix and the video players of many television networks often buried caption options, they now mostly are easy to make appear, though a few online players still bury the options deeply and customizing the text to a viewer's liking is a non-universal process.
Closed captions, while not standardized, have their own conventions:
- Narration is usually italicized. In Canadian closed captioning, brand names are as well.
- A change of speaker is usually indicated by either two or three greater-than (>) symbols, or by the new speaker's name (especially if the speaker can't be seen speaking). This is usually used on roll-up captions.
- On pop-on captions, hyphens (-) are often used to denote multiple speakers.
- Words that cannot be heard adequately in the brief moment they are said by the captionist are usually transcribed as "(indistinct)" or a similar variant, even on some fully-scripted shows where the captionist could have done double-checking in advance.
- Captions display not only dialog, but also how the dialog is spoken, as well as descriptions of music and other sound effects.
- Some 20th Century Fox movies have their opening logo (the stacked "20th Century Fox" with searchlights) captioned, in which the captioning reads "[LIVELY FANFARE]" "[FANFARE CONTINUES]" then with the last four notes, "[FANFARE ENDS]".
- Song lyrics are delimited by single eighth notes (♪). The last line is followed by a pair of eighth notes (♪♪). On iTunes and Amazon Instant Video, asterisks are used instead.
- Almost all captioning is white-on-black and uses sans-serif fonts. Occasionally, rare usage will appear with text in green, yellow, red, or cyan instead of white. This is mostly limited to music videos and "this program was captioned by" plugs, although the BBC has been experimenting with using different text colours to denote different speakers.
- However, any user with an HDTV (and/or some varieties of analog-to-digital TV converter boxes) is able to change color, font type and background to meet their own needs, so the viewer can watch a program with all dark red captions in Comic Sans with a white background and deep text shadowing. Unless you're a sadist, however, that isn't advised.
- Closed-captioned dialogue is often simplified on children's programs, such as Sesame Street, obviously to make it easier for deaf and hard-of-hearing kids to follow.
- The first eight seasons of Arthur were like this too; but the CC1 track contained the regular captions (which used to use all-capital letters for dialogue prior to 2000, when they were then redone in all-lowercase), while the CC2 track contained simplified captions (this would also describe certain things, like the vibraphone transition sound effects described as ([name of character] is imagining), ([name of character] stops imagining), etc. )
- Word puns are often pointed out to the viewer, since a deaf person, having never heard the sounds of the words, might not otherwise pick up on double meanings.
- The American closed caption signal can be recorded off-air onto videocassettes. Likewise, closed captioning can be included on pre-recorded tapes, or on DVDs as an alternative to regular DVD subtitling. HDMI, however, doesn't pass through captions, so in that case captions have to be set up via the viewer's form of set-top box to be viewable, while Blu-ray discs must be viewed with studio subtitles rather than captions.
- Twitter hashtags, which in on-screen graphics are rendered with the "#" (pound) symbol, are rendered fully as letters in captioning (for instance, "hashtag TV Tropes") since the pound symbol is in use for some delineation between characters and those with hearing issues might not understand as to what a hashtag is by the symbol alone since it can't be sounded out for them.
The more powerful Ceefax teletext system used by British subtitlers allows them an even more complete set of conventions, codified by Ofcom:
- Speech rotates among white-on-black, yellow-on-black, cyan-on-black and green-on-black. Main characters may get one devoted to them for the entire show while more minor ones get whatever is available.
- Non-human voices (e.g. those of robots or monsters) get white-on-blue.
- Sound effects are white-on-red in all-caps.
- Song lyrics are delimited by # signs, with an extra # at the end of the last line.
- Sarcasm is denoted with (!), unlike the American/Canadian style where it's just described as being sarcastic.
Unlike U.S. closed captioning, the analogue teletext signal in Britain could not be recorded on home video unless a (usually pricey) Teletext-capable VCR was used. All analogue TV ceased in Britain by the end of 2012. Digital text uses the same subtitling conventions, and can be recorded. What you can't do is watch a programme with subtitles and record it without, unless you're recording it from a different sourcenote .
The American caption system also had a Ceefax-like "text channel" built into the standard which was used to deliver news, sports scores and program schedules. To complicate matters there were two different and incompatible text standards that used the same channel. While it was embraced by four major networks (ABC and TBS used a standard based on the Ceefax system adopted for NTSC, while NBC and CBS used a incompatible competing system developed specifically for NTSC by the National Television System Committee), the presence of two wholly incompatible systems complicated deployment and confused the potential customers of the service, which pretty much doomed the service in North America, and now the text channel (along with the color buttons on the remotes) remains solely as an Artifact.
As already noted here, Closed Captioning is mainly used in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., some European countries, and, in to a lesser degree, Mexico and Japan.
A bit of trivia and a good tip: the benefits of closed captions (and subtitles) aren't limited to the aid of people with hearing problems. Sometimes, captions will give information even hearing viewers have trouble picking up. In some cases, captions will identify people (especially when their faces are away from the camera), give dialog that is not spoken clearly enough to be understood, help clarify song lyrics, or mention things not necessarily apparent (especially if the program was captioned from the script rather than the actual performance, which may have had parts of the script dropped).note Closed captioning is actually quite helpful to parents trying to watch television or a movie with noisy children in the roomnote . It's also helpful if sound is coming from another source or you need to yell to somebody in another room and you don't want to miss any of your show. According to an often-cited anecdote, the Ukrainian-born Mila Kunis may not have become acclimated to the United States and English without her daily viewings of The Price Is Right with captions on as a child.
WGBH's CC FAQ has more information on closed captioning. See also the Wikipedia article on the subject.
For the equivalent aid for people with sight problems, see Audio Description.
