Quality and Accuracy Part One: Losses

I mentioned briefly the notion of “accuracy” in closed captions. Now I already had a post brewing on what exactly we mean by that, and then I saw this Ted talk:

I was all fixed to talk about accuracy, really I was. But after that talk, it Tristram Shandied its way into broader territory. As Robson says, captioning quality is the latest technical and legislative frontier of accessible television. And again, the watchword is comprehensibility (he went with “understandability”, but he’s American so I’ll allow it). So this will be the first part of a three-part post on caption intelligibility. Part two will cover errors and measuring accuracy. Part three will look at style and standards. For now though, here is a little look at a more fundamental problem: what happens when there are suddenly no captions at all.

Just how it is sometimes.

In passing, Robson drops a very important industry term: loss. A loss occurs when captions are absent, when relevant and necessary auditory information is completely elided. A loss is the worst possible outcome in any attempt to provide closed captions – far more alienating to viewers than the still-comprehensible word-soup I routinely file here under mishaps.

I See What They Did There. And that's ultimately what matters.

And modest losses occur with what some might regard as startling regularity (I suspect, however, that our more regular viewers may be less than startled to hear this).

I’ve discussed the fairly immutable limits to how long a captioner can broadcast in one sitting. The flesh is weak, the voice goes all Tom Waits.

That necessitates an endless succession of potentially awkward handovers. It also requires a large number of computers, all of which must be powerful both individually and as a network, and any one of which can, from time to time, do what all computers do, and suddenly fail to compute.

And Dragon can get huffy.

Additionally, there are two main processes which need to go smoothly in order for captions to appear without loss. Captions need somewhere to go, and captioners need an uninterrupted source of audio. Each of these can be the locus for both technical hiccups and human error.

A path through which captions are sent is called a “gateway”, and choosing the appropriate gateway is a simple but high-stakes click of a mouse. A very careless captioner may select Sydney rather than Perth. Far more likely, they may select Sydney+Brisbane, when they should be targeting Sydney+Brisbane+Melbourne. In the former case, the captions would not appear at all in the target market, while in the latter the captions would only appear in two out of three of the target markets. Either way, it’s a loss. It’s not very common; of the many thousands of gateway selections I’ve made, I’ve only selected the wrong gateway once or twice.

But it can happen.

A far more common cause of losses is the technology of gateways itself. Now I’m not a technician, just a user. So I don’t know the detail, but I know enough to respect and fear gateways as temperamental and fragile beasts. Faults can occur both on our end and the studio’s, so any troubleshooting has to be collaborative. Both ends need to be tested, and whether the solution is a reset, or switching to a backup gateway, it needs to be agreed upon by both sides. And as with roadworks on a major freeway, some of the gateways are in 24-hour use, so urgent repairs can temporarily shut them down, causing losses. For the more sporadically used gateways, test captions are routinely sent before going live (no mischievous captions in case it accidentally goes to air). If you see a caption of a dot flash onscreen briefly during an ad break, you could be witnessing the aftermath of a gateway issue. They might have had to quickly reset, and then send a brief live test, and a bunch of people are likely very relieved at that moment.

Captioners also need an audio source. This might sound like a no-brainer, but it’s a little more intricate than that. We’re not in the studio with the presenter; in fact as voice captioners we couldn’t be, it’s a noisy job.

Rather like the cruel, sadistic world of stock photography.

So we need to hear what’s going to air, somehow. One way is to watch TV. The trouble is, many live shows are broadcast at delays in excess of five seconds. And as Robson noted, long delays between visuals and captions wreak havoc on comprehensibility. They can also cause losses in themselves when it comes to an ad break or handover and the last words disappear into the Aether. Our work introduces its own short delays, as do our gateways – so being five seconds behind before you even get started makes timely captions utterly impossible. Additionally, if we’re in Sydney and captioning Adelaide, or London, we can’t just tune in an ordinary television and start watching, we need the signal piped in. The solutions vary depending on the technological capabilities of the broadcaster, but a lag-free audio source is often acquired, by any available means.

It can be deceptively low-tech – some programs use a telephone line, and back in the analogue days, the analogue signal was much less delayed than the digital. Sometimes we have a direct feed to the studio. Often we have a high-speed audio feed, but only (delayed) off-air visuals, so they don't sync up. Sometimes we caption blind, with only audio, and have to call someone to ensure they can see our captions. Sometimes there is a backup source (albeit one with a delay), sometimes not.

So again, there are a range of possible sources of both human and technological error. If the audio drops out, captions can’t happen, and if you’re hearing the wrong feed, or even if your headphones are just slightly unplugged, there will be a loss.

By far the dumbest loss is, of course, when you respeak a sentence, look up, and see the red icon indicating your mic is off. The entirely hypothetical captioner to whom that happened must sure feel silly…I bet.

We have a backup generator if we lose power. But needless to say, things get truly hairy on the rare occasions when we completely lose our internet connection.

In our contracts with our clients, minimising losses is the factor most directly tied to our profit margins. In our clients’ statutory obligations, losses are what make the percentage-based captioning requirements hardest to fulfil. And in our moral duty to our viewers, the last thing we want is a loss.

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