Reply #6: We use it [View All]

[DavidDvorkin]

My wife and I both have poor hearing. For years, we missed much of the dialogue on TV shows, so I finally turned on closed captioning (thinking, "Duh! Why didn't I do this long ago?").

As someone else noted, the captions are fairly accurate for recorded shows. On news programs, they can be bizarre and often funny.

On recorded shows, they still sometimes differ from the actual speech. In some cases, I think that's because the people writing the closed captions work from earlier versions of the script. The director may modify the dialogue when actually shooting a scene, and that doesn't show up in the captions. I've also seen captions for a character when that character isn't speaking. Same cause, I suspect.

Also, obscenities usually get skipped in the captions. I'm so glad we hard-of-hearing and deaf people are protected that way. Heavens, who knows what frightful moral corruption we might be subject to otherwise?