Dancing with Words: Using Animated Text for Captioning

摘要

Closed captioning has suffered from a lack of innovation since its inception in the early 1970s. However, television and film technologies and user preferences have changed dramatically. Sound from music, sound effects, and speech prosody are essentially missing from current closed captions. We used animated text to represent emotions contained in music and speech as well as sound effects. Twenty-five hard of hearing and hearing participants watched two short television clips with three different types of captions—conventional, enhanced, and extreme. Hard of hearing and hearing participants preferred enhanced, animated text captions as they provide improved access to the emotive information contained in the content. Text-based animated sound effects confused participants and animated symbols were recommended as a replacement.