Live Closed-Captioning Metrics Premature, Cable, Broadcast Industries Say
Lack of generally accepted metrics for judging quality of closed-captioned live events means imposing such metrics -- as some consumer groups petitioned the FCC (see 1908140037) -- is a mistake, cable and broadcast interests said in RM-11848 comments posted this…
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week. Captioning interests urged FCC action. NCTA said it backs the goal of good captioning for live programming, but rules already "are ensuring the presence of quality captions" and the petitioners haven't shown evidence warranting reconsideration. It said using caption quality metrics on live programming could be unfair given the challenges of captioning in real time, and perfect synchronicity is "nearly impossible." It said since petitioners are in the midst of a multiyear study of caption quality metrics, it could be years before they can propose specific metrics. NAB said the petition didn't show why the FCC should change its approach to caption quality standards and best practices: "The Commission's approach is working," and caption quality metrics are unnecessary and premature. The association said an automatic speech recognition declaratory ruling is premature given how young the technology is, but if there's a look at ASR and best practices, that should be done by the Disability Advisory Committee rather than through a rulemaking. Meredith, which also owns Dynamic Captioning, said the proposed rules overlook human elements. Because mistakes happen, "a punitive 'big Brother' monitoring and enforcement mechanism" will discourage creating accessible content. ASR technology company AppTek said live captioning is rife with quality problems and the FCC should encourage ASR use, as it often is better than live captioning by humans. It said the agency should appoint ASR providers to the DAC. The 21st Century Captioning Disability and Rehabilitation Research Project submitted a survey on local news captioning by the Hearing Loss Association of America, and said consumer perceptions of caption providers, stations and broadcasters were generally negative. It said future caption quality standards and metrics might need to account for punctuation, with experimental results showing human captions with punctuation scored highest, but ASR captions with punctuation were preferred over ASR or human captions without punctuation. Closed captioner Ai-Media said the FCC should consider adopting the "number, edition, recognition" method -- which some states and numerous countries use for assessing captioning quality -- as its captioning quality metric.