Bring Back Good Captioning, and Make it Closed

October 13, 2024

Captioning is both dying and more alive then ever, and it's getting kinda annoying.

Good Captioning

When I say that captioning is dying, this is what I mean. The quality of captions has fallen down the drain in the past few years. Instead of using quality captions, most people just resort to AI captions. This has been a trend before the ChatGPT AI boom, as automatic captioning has been a thing for quite some time now.

First off, I am not saying that I am against automatic captions, far from it. I am aware that not everyone has the time, skills, or budget for captioning. I'm not expecting you to add captions to your family posts on Instagram. Some people don't even think of adding captions to videos. There are also times when adding manual captions just isn't feasible, like livestreams to 2 people.

Fun fact, on live television in the United States, live events such as the local news are usually typed out with a Stenograph in real time, usually with a ~15 second delay. You can actually see them occasionally make typos and backspace them out. YouTube supports this type of captioning, you can sometimes see it on local news channels. Here's an example from WDIV Local 4 Detroit, set your captions to English - CC1.

The problem with automatic captioning comes to when it is used in placed of manual captioning. The worst offenders of this happen on YouTube. YouTube has a tool where you can turn their automatic captions (the same ones that spit out "foreign [Music]" whenever there is silence) into regular captions. This has several problems:

Generated captions are good as a starting point, but should not be relied on entirely.

One of the reasons good captions have been dying, at least on YouTube, is the removal of community captions. You used to be able to write the captions for other channels. Not only did this allow anybody to help with captions, but it would also allow captions to be written in languages other than the one the video is spoken in, making the video more accessible. What a great feature it was. YouTube's internal statistics said otherwise, so they removed it, citing "low usage" (i was going to try and find the original post but the Internet Archive is still down). Nice job team!

Tom Scott

Now, I would like to give an example of someone who has gone above and beyond with captioning in their YouTube videos. When I think of good YouTube captions, Tom Scott always comes to mind. He no longer makes videos, but the ones he does have usually have REALLY good captioning. I would like to give 2 examples (you may have to enable captioning manually first):

First, this video about copyright. It seems clipping has been disabled, so just stop watching at 4:35. You can see a lot of features of subtitles being used here, a lot of which I didn't even know existed until I saw them here for the first time. Different captions have different colors meaning different things, italics are used (ex. ...I can play Pachelbel's *Canon in D*), and multiple captions are shown on screen at once in different positions. These small things make the caption experience so much better.

This video shows 2 people talking, sometimes over each other. This is conveyed well, by making TomSka have yellow text in captions, while Tom Scott has white text in the captions. When they're talking over each other, both captions are shown at the same time. It's all so simple, but rarely ever do you see people do this.

Closed Captioning

When I say that captioning is more alive than ever, this is what I mean. The cool feature about closed caption is that you can enable them if you need them, but if you don't need captions, you can simply disable them. However, on social video sharing platforms, it seems like we're slowly losing this choice. Captions are starting to be embedded into videos themselves.

It all started with short videos. I'm not sure where it exactly began, but my guess was it began with Instagram. Instagram added a feature where you could automatically generate captions and embed them into your video. Not only did this improve accessibility, but the captions also just looked nice. People started adding captions to whatever.

Later on, Bytedance, the company behind TikTok, launched a video editor called CapCut. One of the features of this app was the ability to automatically add captions to your videos. People started noticing that adding captions to videos made it so people were less likely to scroll away, as the captions were another element of visual stimulation. So, captions started becoming fancy. First, it was word by word captions, where only one word is shown at a time. Then, people started adding animations and transitions to the captions. There were flashy pops, highlighting words when they were said, to having emojis automatically appear above key words in captions. This cannot be just for accessibility anymore, can it?

Of course, this trend of captions started spreading beyond just short videos. Some YouTubers use it in longer form videos, usually more annoying YouTubers making videos for children. Use of the captions is usually just in the introduction, but some YouTubers put them through the whole video. In long videos, captions don't usually have all the flashy effects, but they're still forced onto the video. They're also slapped onto every ad now. Adding on screen captions to ads, especially political ads, is not a new concept, but they at least used to have some effort put into them.

The problem with these in video captions is that you cannot turn them off, as they're embedded directly into the video. If they're distracting or you just don't like how they look, there is nothing you can do about it except ignore it. True crime channels on YouTube seem to be the worst about this. I'm watching the story of a real death, not a Disney lyric video.

Conclusion

It seems like these trends will just carry on, and there isn't much we can do about it. But if you are tired of worse, forced captions, there are some things you can do.