Interview with Adam Pottle

February 27, 2019February 28, 2019reelwords

Voice: On Writing with Deafness

part of the University of Regina’s Writers on Writing series

RW: Your book Voice: On Writing with Deafness is rich with insights—not only about writing but about how your deafness influenced your writing path. As a book editor and a caption editor, I found myself nodding in agreement and recognition frequently.

AP: Thank you, Vanessa. It was a different and, at times, difficult book to write, so I’m happy to read your positive reaction.

RW: I’ve been taking American Sign Language classes for 18 months now, and between school and Deaf social events, I’m learning a lot about Deaf culture—albeit as a hearing person. But even though I know about De’VIA and try to support Deaf talent and so on, I think your book was the first time I’d come across someone speaking about Deaf culture with a sense of nationhood and citizenship. To you, is this a regional thing (e.g., in our case, a relationship with Deaf Canadians) or is it an international state (different sign languages aside)?

AP: Deaf communities are polymorphic. They include so many different dialects and iterations, yet Deaf people around the world unite through the common goal of accessibility and linguistic beauty. While individual dialects and languages may differ, the need to use Sign doesn’t. I’m not sure if nation is the right word, because Deafness extends beyond borders. Nations are divided and divisible. Deafness is not regional or geographical. It’s not bound in one type of body or one specific area of the world. It’s sensual. It’s physical. It’s linguistic. It’s cultural. Deaf communities possess a unique and beautiful character, and Deaf people use their language and their imaginations to eliminate divisions and create connections.

RW: You mention having varying degrees of control, focus, and effort but also being imaginative and creative. You say you’re straddling the hearing and Deaf worlds. And you talk about constructing boundaries, a bivouac, around yourself when writing, in an attempt to ignore outside distractions. Do you think all writers struggle with personal dichotomies and opposing forces, or are they more pronounced for you as a Deaf writer?

AP: All writers of conscience struggle with different forces. Whatever struggles I have are no more pronounced than any other writer’s. The only thing that separates me from most other writers is the way my deafness has calibrated my imagination and the way I think.

RW: The power and interiority of voice feature prominently in your discussion. But so does the role of silence, both as a muse perhaps and as a sociological trigger for discomfort. I laughed when the section on silence listed all the noises that bombard us and ended with “Not to mention fucking people.” I have hyperacusis, and my audiologist chastised me not to isolate myself from noise, but I admit I’m paradoxically uncomfortable with total silence when I’m alone. I agree with you that it can be sacred, but what is it with us and silence? Are we just too afraid of hearing a still small voice? Why can you embrace it for imagination and growth through writing, but people like me, a non-writer, eschew it?

AP: Most of us are afraid of silence because we don’t want to hear that little voice. I’m more comfortable with it by virtue of my occupation and my physiological makeup. My interior voice and I have a strong relationship. I work at it. Most writers work hard at it, I think. I can embrace it because I know what the end product looks like—if I listen to my inner voice, I’m better able to connect with people and ask questions that trigger my imagination and allow me to write stories. That voice is always yammering, questioning, barking. The inner voice is always curious.

The majority of people—especially hearing people—hate silence. They can’t be alone with their thoughts because they’re worried where their thoughts may lead. God forbid they experience a little self-discovery, so they turn to their phones or their computers or their video games. They need to be distracted. And the really frightening thing is that distractions are probably the biggest industry going right now. We love being distracted. People in power love it when we’re distracted because distracted people are easier to govern and manipulate. I’m hyperaware of distractions. We’re in an election year here in Canada, so we’ll have to watch for distractions leading up to October so we don’t end up with Trump 2.0 at 24 Sussex Drive.

RW: You write unflinchingly about suicide, self-harm, euthanasia of the disabled, anxiety, and other things that loads of writers wouldn’t put out there. So congrats on that: it’s really important that we normalize these conversations and own them honestly, as opposed to worrying about squeaky-clean branding.

But I want to bring up another wave of contention (especially in online forums): ableism. You talk about the artistic trope of the self-hating disabled person, disability–inspiration porn posts, and the absence of front-and-centre disability in Canadian (every country’s?) literature, which your PhD thesis addressed. We probably all unintentionally step on some toes with our ableist attitudes sometimes, whether a product of our socialization or our hurried and unthinking society. Aside from seeing the Deaf or disabled or other minorities better and more frequently represented in fiction, the arts, and cultural content, what else do we need to do to educate ableism away? Would writing about it more be effective because we spend a longer time in the consumption of words than we do on a streamed show, for example? I feel like writing would be a powerful vehicle for changing these world views.

AP: We need to recognize that most of us have internalized ableism, and we need to listen to Deaf and disabled people rather than dismissing them. Even in issues as simple as installing ramps, able people think they know better. Able people need to listen to their inner voices and ask, “Do I really know what is best for these people, even though I have no idea what it’s like to live as a Deaf or disabled person?” Pardon me for being crude, but able people need to unfuck themselves, shut the fuck up, and fucking listen.

[Vanessa applauding]

AP: I like your question about what is most effective. Written forms such as books and articles and essays are crucial. With streaming services like Netflix and Crave, films and television shows have become bonbons. We gobble them up, then forget about them. More films and television shows are being produced now than ever before because the demand for content—that is, distractions!—has never been higher. But they’re also more evanescent than ever before. They are much more liable to fade. Back when television had three channels, everyone was watching the same thing, and those shows lived on—and still live on—in people’s memories forever.

At the same time, these mediums reach millions of people, and if you produce it well and show people something they’ve never seen before, they’ll remember it, they’ll absorb its message. Hannah Gadsby’s comedy show Nanette is a great example because she deconstructs the foundations of comedy while she’s making people laugh. She delivers hard truths in that show, things that we need to hear. I remember my jaw dropping open when I first saw her show, then going back immediately and rewatching the important parts and screaming, “Yes, Hannah! You’re fuckin’ right!” She made me question many of my own experiences. Most shows on Netflix don’t do that, but hers did. She’s brilliant.

So the question becomes: How can you market books the way the Netflix markets Stranger Things? That is, as crucial information disguised as a distraction?

It’s a difficult question, a difficult issue. Writing is only as powerful as the people who read and absorb it. It’s a tough time to be a writer because there are now so many of us, and so many distractions, and we’re all clamouring to be heard, and we all deserve to be heard, but nobody gets heard equally, and some aren’t heard at all. There’s only so much time for reading and thinking, and none of us have anywhere near enough time. I can only create to the best of my ability and trust my perspective and my instinct as things that might help me stand out.

RW: Obviously, I was super interested in your take on captions and subtitles! You talk about the barriers they create as well as the doors they open for entertainment, personal, and professional situations. Can I say something a bit heretical here? As much as I advocate for access to and excellence in captioning, I sort of feel like captioning—even more than the broader term accessibility—has become the new shingle that everyone is hanging out to indicate how salable their product or service is. It’s like the feel-good sticker we can easily apply because YouTube autocaptions <insert eyeroll>. If I see one more person recommend a list of companies that produce less-than-stellar captions (and I know because I paid to test it out)… My takeaway from your writing is that, after improved access, your appreciation of captions is more aesthetic and sensual—as you say, synesthetic. But then, you certainly told it like it was with the dissertation defences and the book-festival experiences. How are you feeling about the State of the Caption and, for want of a better word, the politics of captioning right now?

AP: Captions are useful, but like all accessibility tech, they need improvement. People who don’t use captions are often the ones who take the most pride in them: “Look! Look what we have here!” But it’s not a catch-all. It’s a stepping stone. I see a lot of horror movies, and the captioning machine I use at the movie theatre always gives me a headache for the first fifteen minutes. Those little green letters, that long adjustable arm. We need open captions, but because hearing people bitch about them, we don’t get them. The one really helpful thing about these captioning machines is that they’re shaped like maces. The end is really heavy, so if any hearing punk gives me guff, I can beat him to death with it.

RW: Bahaha! And I know what you mean. I wrote about my experience using CaptiView and other assistive tech at the cinema.

AP: I feel like there’s an untapped artistic potential in captions. I was at the Saskatchewan Festival of Words last year, and I had a remote captionist typing from an undisclosed location. Who knows—it could’ve been a serial killer. Anyway, I was in a playful mood, and I said to the captionist, “We should take the captions and mix them up into a poem or something,” and the captionist typed, “Good idea.” Imagine that—watching TV or something and taking captions that are unique—like sound descriptions, or captions where the typist made an error, and combining them all into a long poem. It’d be the next Waste Land.

RW: I love that idea!

AP: But things need to improve. We’re a long way from equitable access. It goes back to ableism: as long as able people think they know better, and as long as they believe their needs are more important, and as long as they’re unwilling to relax their tight little egos, we won’t have the full access we need.

RW: My grandfather homesteaded out West, and my mum grew up in Saskatoon; prairie people are stalwart, perhaps necessarily so. I thought Voice was honest, rattling, and uplifting: very apt for your geographical home. There are insights in it that I’d like to include in my caption editing course because I think hearing about form and function is more effective when it’s given a face—or rather, a voice. Thank you so much for sharing about your writing and how it intertwines with your experiences. It makes a great read for students of writing or accessibility studies, folks in the Deaf community, and the general public.

AP: Thank you, Vanessa. I tried to be as honest as possible when writing the book. And yes, we have to be stalwart when it’s forty below without the windchill.

I’m not sure I agree that most prairie people are honest, though. Prairie people are, by and large, conservative, which means they hide. They hide their insecurities or cast them onto other people. They don’t like talking or rocking the boat—unless of course they’re publicly fantasizing about killing Justin Trudeau or murdering Indigenous people. Many writers on the prairies, such as Tenille Campbell, Louise Bernice Halfe, David Carpenter, Joanne Weber, Anne Lazurko, Brenda Schmidt, and Iryn Tushabe, are all doing crucial work to show prairie people (and really all people) how to be more open, how to be less afraid. I hope my book helps with that. I hope it helps by showing people—especially people who seldom get the chance to express themselves—that their voices are crucial and that what may be perceived as a vulnerability—whether it’s Deafness, mental illness, or disability—may actually be a source of strength.

Adam’s book is on sale as of March 2 through the University of Regina Press and other outlets.

Author photo by Deborah Popovici. Reproduced with permission.

[Reading Sounds]: Interview with Sean Zdenek

September 25, 2018June 23, 2019reelwords

Cover of Sean Zdenek's book: Reading Sounds: Closed Captioned Media and Popular Media. It is an inverted image with a blue and cloudy sky on the bottom half and paved road on the top.

VW: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Sean! I’m excited to have the opportunity to ask you more about your book, Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture. I think we agree on a lot of issues about captioning, but your book made me think about some of them differently and, in some cases, more deeply.

For instance, I liked your succinct five guidelines for thinking through the question of significance (pg.123):

1. Captions should support the emotional arc of a text.

2. A sound is significant if it contributes to the purpose of the scene.

3. Caption space is precious. It should never be wasted on superfluous sounds that may confuse viewers or diminish their sense of identification with the protagonist(s).

4. Sounds in the background do not necessarily need to be captioned, even if they are loud.

5. Every caption should honor and respect the narrative. While a narrative does not have one correct reading, it does have a sequence and arc that must be nourished. [All emphases by VW.]

And I think the echo effect you created for the captions from The Three Musketeers (see still image below of captions in a poisoning scene) honoured those points. Actually, I’m going to write an article later about creative captioning which I meant to do before now, and I polled some D/deaf and hearing followers on social media about it (separate polls). Now I’m kind of glad I didn’t get around to that post before reading your book, which made me see them in a more positive light. But more on that in another article!

Video clip of a musketeer collapsed on the floor with a caption that says, Well, just so you don't leave empty-handed, with the text repeated 3 times and overlapping, reflecting his experience of being poisoned

Copyright Sean Zdenek. Do not reproduce.

You may have seen my interview with Tessa Dwyer about her book, Speaking in Subtitles: Revaluing Screen Translation, and I was interested to see a political discussion in your book, too: linguistic imperialism, or the idea that “only English matters” (pg.271). Jon Christian’s outing of Netflix a few years ago started off a more frequent public discussion about captions on VODs and in broadcasting; more recently we’ve had Karamo Brown’s calling out Netflix on Twitter about wanting intralingual verbatim captioning and that got some coverage recently. What’s your POV on what’s happening to the online discussion these days around captioning?

SZ: As you’ll recall, it wasn’t too long ago—circa 2010—when Hulu and Netflix were scrambling to offer any captioning at all on their streaming content. The National Association of the Deaf filed a lawsuit, which was settled in 2012 when Netflix “agreed to caption all of its shows by the year 2014” (Mullin 2012). Around the same time, Hulu was only captioning about 5 percent of its online programming. I wrote a blog post in 2009 to call attention to the small percentage of captioned programs on Hulu and to show my support for what would become the “21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act” (CVAA), signed into law by President Obama in 2010. The CVAA “requires video programming that is closed captioned on TV to be closed captioned when distributed on the Internet (does not cover programs shown only on the Internet).”

Autocaptioning, which Google debuted in 2009, is an important part of the history of online captioning, too. It has received some well-deserved criticism over the years but also, more recently, some praise as it continues to improve and evolve. (See Rikki Poynter’s 2018 blog post, Are automatic captions on YouTube getting better?) No doubt the ubiquity of autocaptioning on YouTube, despite (or because of) its limitations, has been crucial in shaping the public’s understanding of good and bad captioning.

Today, digital captioning is having its viral moment, finally. The best example: Nyle DiMarco wrote a series of tweets in February 2018 following a bad experience with movie theater captioning. His story was picked up by a number of news outlets and written up as an op-ed for Teen Vogue. Other popular writers and bloggers, including Ace Ratcliff and Rikki Poynter, have called attention to access barriers and problems with captioning.

VW: Yes, I was interviewed on CBC Radio One’s Metro Morning show about open captioning [transcript here], and the conversation began with the host talking about Nyle’s tweets: his reach was international!

SZ: What we’re seeing with these stories, I think, is the power of social media to elevate to viral status the needs of people who require quality captioning. We’re seeing captioning break into the mainstream in ways it hasn’t before. Popular personalities (celebrities, models, YouTube bloggers) are driving compelling stories that seem tailor-made for viral media.

The online landscape has changed radically in the last decade too. Video rules the web. By 2021, according to Cisco’s projections, most internet traffic—from 80 to 90 percent—will be video, “up from 73 percent in 2016” (Cisco 2017). Netflix alone is responsible for more than one-third of all internet traffic in North America (Luckerson 2015). A decade ago, online captioning was a technical problem to be solved. Today, viewers demand quality captioning and lean on the power of social media to call out instances of poor captioning.

VW: I’ve shared with you that my in-house captioning experience was eye-opening on several levels. In Canada, even with the upcoming AODA in Ontario, the on-paper standards are basically moot, and as you say, it does seem like CCs are provided to “placate government requirements” (pg.xv) and that they’re seen as “mandatory…as a condition” (pg.80) of broadcasting. Even in accessible projects, captions do indeed seem to be added on at the end “after the real work has been completed” (pg.291). There’s only one full post-secondary study program in accessible media production in Canada, at Mohawk College, that addresses captioning, although I see other schools starting to pick up the idea. You mention hoping CCs will be addressed in the scholarly realm more frequently and seriously. What’s the state of captioning studies as a discipline or even a program in the US? Because, as you say, there is a lot of power and responsibility in the hands of captioners (pg.53), but that’s pretty scary when production isn’t regulated and the craft isn’t even fully taught!

SZ: Academic interest in captioning continues to grow, especially in the humanities. I think the biggest hurdle, from the humanities side, is that captioning has usually been viewed as purely technical or objective, a useful skill or trade but not a complex array of theories or deeper questions of meaning and user experiences. When I refer to caption studies, I intend to link the study of captioning to other humanistic pursuits in writing studies, sound studies, graphic design, art, accessibility, universal design, rhetoric, and more. In fact, I would argue that captioning unites these disparate areas and offers the perfect laboratory for studying questions of digital access across multiple fields of inquiry. A small number of scholars in my own fields of rhetoric and professional writing have taken up the subject of captioning, often in the name of disability studies, which has grown into a vibrant, interdisciplinary research program.

The term caption studies is performative: it doesn’t really exist (yet), but I was hoping to bring it into being in the act of naming it. In my opinion, we need a label that reflects the complexity of the subject itself, one that also aligns with the humanistic inquiry that is at the heart of other studies (e.g. sound studies, gender studies, science studies, etc.). Names matter, of course, which is why I prefer captioner to captionist: the latter sounds too much like typist or transcriptionist (with connotations of direct copying), while the former sounds like (or invokes) writer (with all the agency and creativity that being a writer entails).

VW: Exactly where I’m at with caption and subtitle editing! I’m trying to raise awareness that just as books don’t just get published as written and editors are integral to the publishing process, so to must caption editing be part of production. Someone summarized my work the other day as “fixing typos,” and I was quick to point out that editing is not just proofreading. It’s a craft, science, and art rolled into one that I’m trying to shed light on because until now it’s been ignored, or at least underserved by so-called quality control. I often make about 150 edits to 60 runtime minutes captioned by a professional captioner or subtitler, not because they aren’t good at their job, but because they’re like book authors and my making the text more clear and correct for the user’s full immersion in the content is a separate skill set. Most of the captioners and subtitlers I work with get this and thank me for what I bring to the edited timed text. Sounds like we both have an opportunity to show the academic and lay worlds that captioning is a humanistic study, as you say, and the holistic, performative aspect goes way beyond avoiding the popular #CraptionFails we see posted online.

SZ: I’m currently teaching an undergraduate course called Web Access for All this semester. It covers several topics, one of which is captioning. As far as I know, it’s the first and only course of its kind at my university. It complements other courses and programs in interactive media, professional writing, and disability studies. But by no means is caption studies a formal program of study in higher education. One way to get there, I think, is to fold the study of captioning into courses on digital access or multimedia design, and then fold those courses into disability studies minors.

Academics and practitioners also need to work together. I’m fascinated by the important work that captioners do but have never worked as a professional captioner. I’ve interviewed captioners but have never observed captioners at work. A full-bodied program of study would support collaborations among multidisciplinary teams of researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. Workplace studies of captioners are vital if we want to call attention to the forms of labor and creativity that captioners provide.

VW: They’re also vital to demonstrate to captioning houses, departments and companies that how they’re supposedly training people doesn’t work. It’s not just about being a fast typist, and you can’t be a good captioner with baptism by fire. It’s got to be taught—as in pedagogy—with a view that goes beyond having a facility with subtitling software functionalities. Like writing and editing courses.

You correctly discuss how producers don’t work with captioners (pg.77) and that there’s a disconnect between producers and captioners (pg.290). My experience is that we’re definitely an add-on and that the only feedback is about frames and other technical elements. Whether subtitles or captions, I really think production houses just don’t understand the nuances of captioning (see above) and are just concerned with getting out quick and cheap CCs to meet requirements. It’s kind of depressing sometimes! Do you have more you can add about this that didn’t make it into your book?

SZ: For me, the problem was summarized nicely in an email I received in 2012 from a professional captioner as I was beginning to work on my book. Her email (which I posted anonymously on my blog with her permission) was full of provocative claims:

The main factor that drives quality captioning is what clients are willing to pay for it.
Most clients see captioning as that mandatory last step that has to get done as a condition of their materials going on air.
The vast majority of clients do not care what the captioning looks like, as long as it gets done in time for the stations to receive their captioned masters.
Clients will often choose to go to cheaper captioning houses who promise to get their feature film captioned in a day.
When a captioning company charges low prices on high volumes of work, it’s because they hire lots of people at low wages. [All emphases by VW.]

It’s hard to imagine a collection of more depressing claims for captioning advocates. I’d be curious to get your take on them. It’s also difficult for me to imagine a harder problem to solve in caption studies.

VW: This is my experience completely, and I see it echoed on closed social media groups for captioners everyday. I also hired one of those cute-kitty-typing-ad captioning services to double check the reality. I sent in a one-minute video and the caption file came back inaccurate!

That’s largely why I’m turning to the nudge paradigm with an initiative that will be announced shortly. I just don’t think that 30 years of demands for accessibility has worked: there’s some progress in quantity but not quality. I think it needs to start with a change of view and attitude in filmmakers, since they’re where everything starts. But more on that later…

SZ: Carefully and creatively subtitled films do give me some hope. The English subtitles in Night Watch, for example, were produced under the director’s supervision. As I wrote about the film in a blog post:

In an unusual move, director Timur Bekmambetov “insisted on subtitling [Night Watch] and took charge of the design process himself,” as opposed to having the Russian speech dubbed into English or leaving the subtitling process to an outside company (Rawsthorn 2007). He adopted an innovative approach: “We thought of the subtitles as another character in the film, another way to tell the story” (Rosenberg 2007).

Several subtitles in this movie are painstakingly integrated into the aesthetic of the film. They reinforce meaning and mood by blending form and content. Meaning is expressed not only through the words but how they are visually designed (color, movement, dimensionality, transformation). When objects temporarily cover or block the subtitles, we are reminded that the subtitles are part of the scene itself (instead of an add-on or afterthought).

VW: This makes me teary-eyed…

SZ: Night Watch inspired me to explore non-traditional forms of captioning. My experiments with color, icons, typography, and effects were intended to be disruptive and controversial. But I think we need to push against conventions that are limiting and constraining. I published seventeen of my experiments as an online journal article entitled “Designing Captions: Disruptive Experiments with Typography, Color, Icons, and Effects.”

VW: Dear readers, the fact that you’re reading this interview means that you will find “Designing Captions” fascinating. And Sean, I’ll have to check out Night Watch! Whenever I see a show or film with excellent captioning, I always get on my social media soapbox and sing their praises. It’s so rare that filmmakers a) get it or b) care.

As that captioner said to you, in terms of value, “quality is what clients are willing to pay for it” (pg.80) which, depending on the genre or product type, is next to nothing. That was my experience in-house—most of my training cohort quit because it wasn’t a livable or predictable wage, more suited to students wanting part-time work who could drop everything and show up last minute (we stayed in touch and discussed our takes on it). Even now, I get inquiries about rates from filmmakers who’ve been told that they need captions in order to submit their projects for consideration in film festivals, and they balk at professional (not exorbitant) rates. I’m always banging the drum about filmmakers needing to plan for this minuscule percentage of their overall budget so that it’s not an unexpected submission issue… Aside from educating the content producers and production houses, how else do you think we can create a shift in thinking about the need for excellent captions (not just “good enough” ones) and the potential increase in distribution and profits by making them accessible to another 10+ per cent of the population (D/deaf/HoH/other folks who need accessibility)? My upcoming initiative aside, that is.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the entertainment industry is rooted in ableism.

SZ: You’re asking the hardest question of all. Advocates and organizations have worked tirelessly on behalf of individuals who need quality captioning. So many of us care deeply about captioning. It does feel, at times, as though the message isn’t breaking through.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the entertainment industry is rooted in ableism. Movies are made for people who can hear and see—it’s as simple as that. Stories about inaccessible, or accessible but not usable, movie theater captions remind us that movie producers are not really thinking about the needs of people who are deaf or hard of hearing. They are satisfying legal requirements and, in most cases, doing the bare minimum at a fraction of the movie’s budget. Captions come last because, to be frank, the needs of people with disabilities have historically come last (or not at all).

VW: Which is why I’ve been handwriting letters to directors and producers for quite a while now to ask them to be more engaged in the production and use of captions so that more people can watch their films; just because captions are made for bigger films doesn’t mean they’re well done, and usually the caption files are shelved because the cinemas claim no demand for them. So far, no one has replied, which is really depressing.

SZ: How do we “create a shift in thinking about the need for excellent captions”? I think we need to continue to write about and advocate for quality captioning from our diverse positions of expertise, as you have obviously been doing. Teachers can do their part in training new generations of accessibility-minded producers and consumers. As an educator, I teach my students about captioning and place accessibility at the center of digital design. I also advocate for digital inclusion on my campus. Promoting accessibility is one way for academics to speak to people outside of their narrow scholarly fields who will go on to work in many industries (including the entertainment industry).

VW: I agree. I write about it and I’m seeing an uptick in people in more countries, like Tweeters @deafieblogger, @lifeanddeafpost, @Limping_Chicken, as well as advocacy groups I’m a member of or in touch with, like CCAC and DC Deaf Moviegoers. I did write a speculative piece about how one day we’ll look back at this time of ridiculous exclusivity; I hope you and I are eventually proven right that advocacy will change the landscape.

Even in my work with my clients (who clearly do care about quality as they pay me to edit them, not just review them for typos), the attempt to keep things consistent within a series with a bible I’ll create for the captioners and implementation of extended style guidelines (I model mine on CMoS, too, (pg.161, 162) can still get ignored if I don’t advocate for change with explanations as to how it aids the users.

Even the oft-recommended resources are “lite” in scope and imperfect. (The Captioning Key, for instance, has at least one self-contradictory error that I can recall off the top of my head.) Do you agree with my position that, after 30 years, it’s time for an overhaul of outdated bits and pieces (language has changed since the 80s!) and for the creation of a robust and standardized “CMoS for captioning”?

SZ: Yes, I agree completely. The publicly available captioning style guides need work. I reviewed four style manuals for my book. It was challenging to try to reconcile and justify the differences among them. But more importantly, it wasn’t clear to me why some of the guidelines existed at all. Guidelines are usually offered up as facts with little justification in terms of usability and users’ preferences. For example, guidelines for styling speaker identifiers are conflicting. Do we put parentheses around names and place them on their own line? Or do we set names in all caps and use colons (which is standard in DVD captioning)? Why should we choose one or the other—the style guides are silent on this question. WGBH’s Media Access Group suggests styling speaker identifiers in all caps, but then presents an opposite example:

The Media Access Group’s convention is to show IDs in uppercase, rendered in Roman and set off with a colon. Parentheses or brackets may also be considered. For example, a bottom-center caption with an ID might look like this:

Narrator:
THE RIVERS RAN DRY
WITH DEVASTATING EFFECTS.

Guidelines like this one not only need to be corrected (so the example supports the guideline) but reconsidered entirely. A “robust and standardized” style manual would need to be deeply informed by user studies (focus groups, surveys, eye tracking) and theories of reading, typography, design, and perception.

A related issue is that captioning itself is often assumed to be simple—a matter of transcribing (narrowly defined) or copying down what people are saying. The online DIY tools are built for speed to allow users to quickly transcribe speech. But these tools can reinforce the idea that style manuals are not needed because captioning is straightforward.

VW: This brings to mind the guy who called me “simplistic” in response to my article, “Good Enough” Captions Aren’t. He was all about the tools, speed, and ease of application, and I think he felt threatened by the position I take.

I couldn’t agree more with your comments about who makes a good captioner. Just as book editors (my other hat) must be well-read, well-educated, and professionally trained in editing best practices, I think captioners do need to be mature individuals with a wide knowledge base and extensive cultural literacy (pgs. 22, 73, 221, 235). I was recently asked why I had sent back an edit to an experienced subtitler with a particular sentence put into quotation marks; in the narration, it was an unattributed quote, but because the person wasn’t of the age or background to at least twig that something had a different register and perhaps should be investigated, it had gone over their head. I’m not blaming them, but it just highlights the need for a certain type or age of person from the workforce—or at least, it validates my insistence that captions and subtitles need an editor. But sadly, typing speed and facility with software are what create the poor results from freelance-marketplace lowballers who are willing to transcribe for pennies. Aside from style standardization and formalization of training, how will we be able to create an understanding that captioning is a skilled profession requiring education (and perhaps accreditation) and to get away from untrained people banging out craptions?

SZ: You’ve raised another excellent question. I don’t have any easy answers. I think we can continue to chip away at people’s expectations and assumptions about captioning (and about access more broadly). Above, I mentioned educating the public, both formally (in our classrooms) and informally (through blog posts, social media, interactions with clients). I am hopeful that our college courses—even when they are not focused on training captioners or even captioning per se—can create lifelong advocates for digital inclusion. More students than ever are being introduced to digital accessibility and universal design. My hope is that they will take their knowledge into their future workplaces and teach others about the value and importance of video access for all.

I hoped to be able to turn some readers into captioning and access advocates. Several have told me that they will “never look at captions the same way again.”

We can also continue to research captions and user experiences to disrupt the status quo. With Reading Sounds, I set out to show that captioning is much more complex, rhetorical, subjective, creative, and interesting than we have typically assumed. I had in mind a diverse audience (not just scholars in my own fields) because I hoped that the book’s message might resonate with students, film fans, and others who may not be connected directly to captioning. In other words, I hoped to be able to turn some readers into captioning and access advocates. Several people have told me after reading my book or attending one of my presentations that they will “never look at captions the same way again.” If we can find ways to get this message into the minds of more people, including movie producers, perhaps we can chip away at the assumption that the subject couldn’t possibly be rich enough to support a book-length treatment, that captioning is not a profession but a simple skill, that captioning only benefits a few people, and so on.

VW: That’s why I wanted to spotlight your book with an interview. It is not only accessible but fascinating and thought-provoking reading for anyone, not just academia. I think I’ve told you that if I ever get to teach a course in caption editing, it’s going to be required reading.

The feedback from the caption users you surveyed did not surprise me. They struggled with having to rethink content in bad captions (pg.67) and expressed a need and appreciation for excellent captions (pg.71), which reflects my articles and guest writers’ experiences. You’re open about your son being deaf and your subsequent interest in captions; I now rely on them due to the hearing conditions that affect my hearing. Do you think, with seemingly international pressure to legislate accessibility (despite my letters to Hollywood!), that all the different types of caption users, but especially the D/deaf/HoH, will ever see true access—and by that I mean high-quality captioning? It’s been three decades already with increased application but stagnant quality. What’s it going to take til craptions are basically a thing of the past?

SZ: The number of people who need or want quality captioning only seems to be increasing as the population ages. In an era of streaming global media, more people are reading movies as well. Netflix has introduced more viewers to the pleasures and challenges of watching foreign movies with subtitles and/or with dubbed speech. (Whereas dubbing is well-known to European audiences, it is not common in the US.) Media globalization is helping to normalize words on the screen for US audiences.

Universal design has also produced powerful arguments in favor of quality captioning for all. We know the claims and contexts so well by now that they’ve become stereotypes: watching TV in a noisy bar, studying a video lecture in a quiet library (without headphones), learning to read a first language (child) or a second language (adult), and on and on. Even nonhumans rely on captions: Google uses caption data to index the content of videos on YouTube, “but only if you upload your own professional captions. If you use the auto-generated captions that YouTube provides, they won’t be indexed because the quality tends to be very poor” (Dillman 2017). Another reason why autocaptioning is insufficient!

These developments do not eliminate craptions, but they do make captions and subtitles more visible, needed, and expected. As more users encounter and demand quality captions in more contexts, the calls for quality captioning will hopefully become more frequent and persuasive.

VW: There are so many topics you covered that I don’t think are considered even by current advocates: captioned irony; treatment of silences; nonspeech information; continue captions. And I learned a new term: captioned modulation (pg.200). Thank you for such a broad introduction to captioning theory and practice. I hope by the time your next book comes out (), rhetoric will have moved out of accessibility-focused circles and into the mainstream as a career option to fill a need and is given more than lip service. I’d love nothing more than to not have material for [intensifies], [indistinct conversations], and [music] craption memes!

Sean Zdenek is associate professor of technical and professional writing at the University of Delaware. His research interests include web accessibility, disability studies, sound studies, and rhetorical theory and criticism. Prior to joining the Department of English in 2017, Dr. Zdenek was a faculty member at Texas Tech University for fourteen years, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses on a range of subjects. Dr. Zdenek's book, Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture (University of Chicago Press), received the 2017 best book award in technical or scientific communication from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (4Cs).

Vanessa will be speaking October 15–16 at #a11yTOConf on caption editing for accessibility. The title of her presentation is [dog barking in distance].

“Captions Connect People”: Personalizing the Call for No More Craptions!

December 11, 2017December 12, 2017reelwords

A cropped closeup colour photo of closed captions on a screen, the text being cut off to prevent understanding a sentence.

Guest Post by Chelsea MacLeod

Do you find craptions funny? Think closed captioning is only for “a few deaf people”? Read what one woman has to say about captions and why they need to be clear and accurate. The changes in her hearing may not be obvious to outsiders, but she depends on captions to engage in the wider world. And although her attitude is positive, she and the other perhaps 10% of North Americans who are hard of hearing or deaf still struggle with alienation, isolation, and missing out on art, culture and communication. Here is Chelsea MacLeod’s story. In the last section, I’ve highlighted her feelings. As an advocate for excellence in closed captioning and subtitling, I’m baffled as to why the Canadian government has failed to enforce the high standards that are legislated and why it has only paid lip service to the deaf/Deaf/hard of hearing. Calls for better quality have been made for 30 years! Accessibility through excellent captions is not an expensive frill: it’s a right that can be addressed and planned for in the post-production budget.

If captions are unavailable, I usually pass on participating.

I began to notice a significant change in my physicality and level of hearing in 1996.

I was at an Edmonton Oiler playoff hockey game. We were sitting in the nosebleeds, two rows from the very top. In Edmonton, hockey is extremely popular—it is like the life blood of the city—and the home team was winning. Describing the crowd as wild is a gross understatement. The whole place was electric, in a way that was beyond merely sound. It was an intensely energetic experience, in that I realized I was feeling sound in addition to hearing it. (This is difficult to explain, but I believe this was the beginning of an almost heightened sensory awareness.)

Each time they scored, the noise in the arena was literally deafening. I remember a pop or some kind of release occurring in my right ear over the course of the game, but I didn’t think too much of it. By the time it was over, I was so dizzy and nauseous that I could barely walk out of the arena on my own.

I had no idea what was happening to me. I spent the rest of the night and the next day unable to get off the couch. My whole world was spinning. I couldn’t really ground myself to determine what was up or down. This was my first experience with vertigo and the symptoms of Ménières disease, although I wasn’t aware of it as such at that time.

After a few days, the physical sensations passed, and I went on to normal life. I had periods of experiencing the vertigo off and on again, but I chalked it up to a heavy school and work schedule and simply tried to get more rest to mitigate the symptoms. In short, I was a graduate student with a part-time teaching schedule and various odd jobs, and I was living on coffee and convenient foods. In retrospect, I can safely say my nervous system was completely shot.

Fast forward, almost ten years later. In 2003, I gave birth my daughter. It was a joyous occasion despite a difficult labour and an emergency C-section. Again, I suppose my entire physical system was stretched to the limit. I developed a bad infection in the hospital and required large doses of antibiotics. My recovery period was slow and steady, but I had Chloe, and we just spent our days together getting to know each other with feedings and regular nap times.

Pretty early on, I realized that if I was sleeping on my left side, I wasn’t able to hear her when she was crying. I began a series of testing at a Rehabilitative Hospital in Edmonton where they not only tested my hearing levels but also my balance, coordination, etc.

The diagnosis was Ménières disease. I had 20% hearing ability in my right ear. My left ear also showed some damage, but it was relatively minor.

At the time, they presented a few options I could pursue that required more antibiotics and invasive surgery. I declined and opted to see what I could do to treat the symptoms naturally. I began an acupuncture and herbal-medicine protocol. I did not notice any changes to my hearing levels, but I did begin to see the effects of addressing certain aspects of my nervous system by way of meditation, diet, and increased relaxation. This seemed to keep the Ménières at bay, but if it got really bad, there was nothing I could do but surrender to it, lie down, and be with my body until the symptoms subsided.

In terms of hearing loss, this is when I began a process of learning to adapt and manage the changes to my hearing levels. I began to lip read pretty naturally. I would turn my head to position my left ear to a speaker or to any sound. I began to listen to music with headphones to direct the sound more effectively. I also began to use closed captions when watching anything. If there were no captions, chances were I wouldn’t be able to watch it. This included going to movies.

During this time, I contemplated hearing aids but felt like I was managing all right without them, and so I decided against it.

Funnily enough, at Christmas 2013, my dad made me promise that I would get some hearing aids. It had always really bothered him that I wasn’t able to hear fully. I put it off for a while and then felt badly that I was not honouring my promise to him, and I booked an appointment at the Canadian Hearing Society. I went in for another round of testing, and it was revealed that I had progressively lost more hearing in my good ear.

I signed up for a pair of hearing aids immediately and, needless to say, they opened up the world to me. I really have my father to thank, as he was the catalyst. Incidentally, the sensory input of sound was so profound to my system that it took almost a full month until I was able to wear the hearing aids all day long. It was like I had to go in stages in order to condition my ears to all the sounds they were able to hear again.

One day in 2015, my partner and I were downtown at rush hour, standing on the sidewalk. I started to feel my balance go; I got shaky and began to hear electrical currents all around me. It was like I was hearing sound emitting from street lights and the air itself. By the time we were in a taxi, I could barely hear anything. My hearing aids could not keep up. It coincided with another Ménières episode, and I thought my hearing might return if I rested. However, after 24 hours, there was no change. I booked in to my audiologist immediately for more testing and to amplify my hearing aids. Without my hearing aids, I was pretty much stone cold deaf. But even with them, I could barely manage daily life.

Also during this time, I saw more doctors, naturopaths, and herbalists. I even underwent hyperbaric oxygen treatment because I had read that, for acute hearing loss, high amounts oxygen could restore hearing loss if it was done right away, as soon as possible after the traumatic event.

The hearing tests revealed that my left ear had less than 20% hearing ability. My right ear had also decreased slightly in ability, but it was now my dominant ear. I remember thinking of the irony of all those years I had referred to my right ear as my bad ear. Now it’s my good ear. From then on, I made a commitment to myself to refrain from talking about my body negatively in any way. I just decided both my ears were good and that they were doing the best they could.

About a year after that, I began to notice I had become quite isolated, as meeting up with people, socially in restaurants or anywhere it was even slightly noisy, was pretty much out of the question. I think I didn’t notice it so much because I am blessed with a really supportive family and I have a busy and full life. All the same, I felt a need to connect with others and to be comfortable with who I was becoming without feeling shy or like I couldn’t keep up with conversation.

That’s the main reason I wanted to take up ASL. I felt like cultivating a community that was not hearing dependent—where I could communicate freely with others and learn to express myself in a visual way.

As I have progressively lost the sense of hearing, visual communication has heightened and taken precedence. And this brings me to the crucial role of closed captioning in my ability to experience the world around me. I use captioning on every type of media I can. If captions are unavailable, I usually pass on participating. Captions are my way of accessing vital information, art, culture and entertainment.

Captions that can’t keep up or that are garbled or inaccurate don’t serve anyone.

They not only distort the story or message that is being conveyed but also alienate anyone who requires them to receive information. This includes not just words but also sound experiences like laughter or a doorbell chime.

Sensitivity to captioning is the same as having sensitivity to written or oral language. How it is intended to be received by an audience is as important as translation, in order to accurately communicate anything from feelings and ideas to concepts and current events. Captions connect people. They engage a sense of belonging to the wider world and, when done well, captions have the potential to inspire a variety of interests and curiosities, not only those of the deaf and hard of hearing community.

While I’ve had hearing issues (Ménières disease, hyperacusis, and tinnitus) for about 30 years and do a fair bit of lip reading in noisy environments, I wanted to share the emotional and practical impacts of craptions and captions on someone with more hearing loss than me. I met Chelsea at the Canadian Hearing Society where we study ASL, and I'm grateful to her for being willing to share her story as a guest post for Reel Words.

“Good Enough” Captions Aren’t

September 25, 2017December 12, 2017reelwords

I recently watched an amateur video about DIY captions. The fellow who made it was earnest, trying to make it easy for the average person to create captions, and I'm sure he meant well. But then he said that although they wouldn't be perfect, they'd be "good enough."

Granted, he was referring to fansubbing movies (which is a topic for another time), but I get the sense that this is a common attitude of the hearing world towards captioning for the accessibility purposes. Would blue and purple traffic lights be good enough? How about food with just a bit of salmonella? I know I wouldn't want to buy a tire with a slow leak.

Captions are used by the Deaf, deaf and hard of hearing (Deaf/HoH), second-language learners, university students as study aids, people in sound-sensitive environments, and many other folks.

Many countries, provinces and states have legislated that media must provide video material that is accessible and that captioning be of excellent quality. It's not optional. But very rarely do I see closed captions that meet the required standards.*

Some producers of video rely on automated captioning services or, if they have "the budget for it," a closed-captioning provider. But the latter do not have trained professionals copy editing the files and/or they often don't understand the specialized editing required to meet the accessibility standards needed for users. Anybody can transcribe audio. But caption text has to be rendered readable by humans in 2-second chunks. And by readable, I mean comprehensible so that the entire video context is taken in with ease and appreciation for the content. But that's not what’s getting churned out. (See my opinion about video-on-demand services here.)

I'm tired of "good enough." I'm frustrated by reading about craptions being doled out to the Deaf/HoH. I'm fed up with empty promises about the delivery of accessibility.

When are the Deaf/HoH going to get the quality of captioning they're legally (and morally) entitled to? Why is "good enough" the status quo?

I've written many articles and posts about why captions and subtitles require not just proofreading but copy editing, just as the printed word does. (You can read them here to learn more about the nuts and bolts.) But I'm increasingly interested in making some noise about cranking up the demand for #NoMoreCraptions! As someone who appreciates closed captions (and may later need them more), I am no longer willing to let this slide.

“Captioning should not look like throwing magnetic letters on a fridge.”**

And yet, that's what the CC setting on our screens usually generates because (seemingly) providers don't think the Deaf/HoH are worth the expense of creating high-quality, copy-edited captions. Like other areas being bandaided because of a lack of enforcement or true dedication to creating accessibility (e.g. the wonderful but shamefully needed food banks, Stopgap Foundation, etc.), unedited captions are generally of such poor quality that they're useless and watching TV, movies, etc. is often given up on.** And saying there isn't money for quality captioning comes from an outlook of discrimination.

It's also uninformed. Budgeting for this aspect of production and distribution does not have to be expensive. If absolutely necessary, fine—use automated captioning in some form of AVR (automatic voice recognition). But then turn the rough copy over to a professional to be perfected. It's like writers who say they can't afford any professional editing or proofreading but then complain that no one bought their book: if its content isn't edited properly, readers aren't going to want to slog through it.

Until governments enforce the standards they've promised on paper so that the digital files are accompanied by high-quality captioning, they're short-changing the Deaf/HoH of their right to a huge part of full engagement in modern cultural content.

I'm not. . .er. . .crapping on the DIYer per se. I'm saying his comment is exemplary of the attitude society has towards people needing captioning: if you're not a hearing person, you can just make do with good enough. (And that's audism.)

#NoMoreCraptions!

*Canada's 2016 CRTC policy can be found here.

**Unattributed comments from CRTC 2008 Stakeholder Consultations on Accessibility Issues for Persons with Disabilities.