Final report for presentation rate and readability of closed captioned television (SuDoc ED 1.310/2:419354)

This report discusses the outcomes of a federally funded project that investigated the characteristics of the captions on captioned television programs. A sample of 183 captioned programs stratified by program type was selected and recorded. In addition, 22 captioned music videos were analyzed. Both roll-up and pop-on captions were analyzed. In the first part of the study, captions were edited to remove commercials and then processed by computer to get caption speed data. Caption rates among program types varied considerably, with sports and music specials having the slowest caption rates. The second part of the study determined the amount of editing being done to program scripts. Ten-minute segments from two different shows in each of 13 program categories were analyzed by comparing the caption script to the program audio. The percentage of script edited out ranged from 0 percent to 19 percent. In the third part of the study, commonly used words in captioning and their frequency of appearance were analyzed. All words from all the programs in the study were combined into one large computer file. This file, which contained 834,726 words, was sorted and found to contain 16,102 unique words. The following reports are appended: Presentation Speed and Vocabulary in Closed Caption Television; Closed-Caption Television Presentation Speed and Vocabulary (American Annals of the Deaf, October 1996, Vol. 141); and Viewer Reaction to Different Captioned Television Speeds. (CR)