managing hearing loss
hearing health foundat i o n
The Power of the Written Word Universal captioning, or subtitling, enhances screenviewing for everyone. By Shari Eberts
It’s well known that people with hearing loss love captions because they help combat hearing loss exhaustion by reducing listening effort, help us fill in words that we miss during a speech or when watching a movie, and give us confidence that we can participate more fully in a number of different listening situations. During the pandemic, we seem to be reaching a tipping point where the value of captions is becoming apparent to everyone. Research published by Verizon Media and Publicis Media showed that consumers are increasingly watching videos on the go and in shared spaces. Half of those surveyed said they like captions because they often watch videos with the sound off, and 80 percent of people who use captions do not have hearing loss. Since the research came out in 2019, before the pandemic, it’s a safe bet these numbers are even higher today.
Advances in Technology
Social media sites like TikTok are making their platforms more accessible with captioning. Zoom finally promised to expand its excellent auto-captions to all free accounts starting in the fall of 2021. I had started an online petition to ask for this and garnered 80,000 signatures, earning coverage from the Washington Post and NPR. (You can request early access now at blog.zoom.us/update-on-livetranscription-for-free-accounts.) Google launched Live Caption, a feature that provides autocaptions for all English-language media content viewed in their Google Chrome browser. It works across social and video sites, on podcasts and radio content, and even on personal videos, and it is compatible with all types of computers—including Apple—as well as on Android mobile devices. As with any auto-generated captions, there are errors, but accuracy and speed will only improve as the artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm is refined. Products developed for a mainstream audience are also finding an eager market in the hearing loss community. Tunity, a smartphone app that lets you listen to a current TV broadcast on your smartphone when the TV is muted, was designed for use by hearing people in loud bars, but it also works well for people with hearing loss. Another such product is Otter.ai, a speech-to-text app that was created for transcribing business meetings, but can be used by people with hearing loss for real-time captioning.
Benefits Validated
Hearing Health Foundation uses a CART captioner for live captioning during its webinars. AI (artificial intelligence) subtitles are also increasingly improving.
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hearing health
hhf.org
In a 2018 TEDx talk, Svetlana Kouznetsova, an accessibility consultant, points out that captioning is part of good universal design. Not only does it make it easier to view videos in a variety of settings such as on mute, but it also makes it easier to understand complicated or confusing content. It improves intelligibility if the speaker has a strong accent, when learning a new language, or for someone with auditory processing differences. According to a 2015 paper in the journal Policy Insights From the Behavioral and Brain Sciences titled “Video Captions Benefit Everyone,” more than 100 empirical studies demonstrate that captioned content benefits the public at large. The research found that whether the viewer has a hearing loss or not, captions improve video
