The survey was part of NCAM's development of a prototype automated assessment system for live captioning (including the captioning of news programs). The first stage of this process was to determine the relative severity of different sorts of errors.
The placement of 2-D captions is a relatively straightforward matter – they will generally be positioned at the bottom of the screen to avoid covering important visual elements, but moved if necessary. In 3-D, the challenge is to place the captions appropriately into the 3-D space so as to not destroy the illusion of three dimensions.
In the US, most live or real-time captioning is done by stenocaptioners, who use a phonetic keyboard to create captions as a program is broadcast. (In Australia, live captioning is performed both by stenocaptioners, and by captioners using speech recognition software). The quality of live captions can be variable, and earlier this year, NCAM conducted an online survey which asked caption users to rate different types of caption errors, and the degree to which they make news programs hard to follow.
The Set Up was straightforward, relatively quick, presented no stumbling blocks and pre-empted the steps better than some other set ups we’ve experienced.
Once installed, we tested the caption font on a broadcast program. The captions were found via the STTL button and the font was acceptable; we’ve seen better but we’ve also seen worse.
