TV Time

Have you ever watched a show or movie with your eyes closed or the TV on mute? Why would you do such a thing, you might ask? For some individuals, this is how their regular TV experience is all the time. You have probably seen the little CC or AD (DV) icons next to a program and may or may not have wondered what they were, but I am here to tell you, they are services that make TV viewing for visually and hearing impaired individuals a more equal experience.

Closed Captions, or CC, are text based representations of the dialog and sounds in a TV program. They, like any other details of a TV program, have standards that need to be followed when adding coded captions to a show or movie.

As a blind individual, I can't go into as much feedback on CC, as I can't just turn it on and "see" what it actually looks like, but I'll cover the basics. Good closed captions have text shown on screen for all dialog, as well as all relevant sounds in the background. If we hear a car door slam, that needs to be shown in text on the screen.

It is completely unacceptable for these text captions to cover any important details on the screen. For example, if a guy named Mike is speaking and the caption for his dialog appears and covers his face, that is very disruptive to the program and can take away from being able to see his facial expressions. There aren't very many programs that I come across now-a-days that don't have CC, and I would imagine that the standards are fairly well followed since it is so wide spread.

In contrast, Audio descriptions, or AD, (DV) are spoken representations of the visual elements on the screen. They too have standards That need to be followed for quality accessible TV content. Unlike closed captions, audio description is somewhat in its infancy still and there are many programs that I come across in my day to day entertainment that are not audio described.

In addition, many of the programs that are audio described are done so without following the standards put forth for quality AD. Adding poorly designed AD to a program is almost worse than not having AD for that program at all...it makes trying to watch said program frustrating and, in a way embarrassing, when you are trying to watch with sighted individuals as well.

One of my favourite shows recently came out with audio description and I had been wanting to watch it with my family for a long time. I was so excited when I heard the AD track start, and for episode one of the series no less! I got my Dad to set up the program to record since I hadn't found this show with AD on any streaming service so far, and we were going to start the series the next day, exciting right?

The next day we sat down to watch episode one and as soon as we got into it, my heart fell. The description voice was consistently speaking over the show dialog and making it very frustrating to watch. We decided to suffer through the first few episodes and it is slowly getting better, we are now on season two, but the first season enjoyment was shadowed by poor audio description practice.

So you are probably thinking, so it's all better now and you can enjoy the rest of the series? You might think that, but season two episode one was recorded saying it had AD, but didn't; there are still some spots where the audio description talks over the show dialog; and going into a show knowing that there might be quality issues scattered throughout is still a cloud hanging over my excitement for this quality time with my family.

Now some readers might think that this is a small issue in the grand scheme of things, and you would be right. But for something that so many people can enjoy without frustration or setbacks or having to worry about if a show, first off, even has AD, and secondly, has quality AD, this is one of those small things that can cause a great deal of frustration and make one feel like their entertainment needs are not important.

The world of AD is ever growing, and I do feel that the quality will continue to improve as it becomes more widespread and mandatory. It won't reach that point if nobody speaks up about the cases with poor AD practice. If you or someone you know has experienced poor audio description practice, or poor closed captions practice, you are able to easily report it to the CRTC here and the more programming is held responsible to the standards, the faster the quality will improve.

As a final note, I was surprised to come across a commercial the other day that had audio description. And then there was another one yesterday with audio description. The fact that commercials are starting to see the importance of this feature tells me that we are going forward. My family can tell you that there are many times that I pause the TV and ask them "what the heck was that commercial for?" because there is literally nothing in the commercial that isn't visual to tell me what it is advertising...not a great advertising method if you exclude entire groups of people from the message right?

So if you are curious, or want to help this process move along, turn on CC or AD and see what you think of it. If you find something annoying or distracting, it most likely doesn't follow the best practice guidelines in the CC and AD standards, and you can help be part of the solution by reporting it to the CRTC. Like they say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and these past couple of weeks trying not to throw my remote through our television in frustration has made me want to squeak!