December 28, 2004

Weird closed-captioning on the TV

Watching the news on KABC in Los Angeles is kind of funny. If you watch the closed-captioning, you see a zillion instances of two types of errors: transcription and internationalization.

I am assuming that they are using either bleeding edge voice-to-text software or a typist with very bad vocabulary. With a picture of a bus on the screen, the caption says "People run to the bust."

Worse yet, there are a zillion non-ASCII characters that usually appear at the beginning and end of words. It certainly looks like they go where quote marks would, but quote marks show up as well. There are at least four different non-ASCII characters that show up in unpredictable places.

Do deaf folk really have to put up with this? Posted by lookit at December 28, 2004 09:46 PM