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Closed Captions are more available now through settings, great audio text models, exposure of people to foreign language films and shows, etc. The 20-somethings are exposed to it more and adopt to using them. Youtube's closed captions are both a noticeable button and a "c" keyboard shortcut.
Two reasons from my perspective, other than my ears are getting older: 1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors. 2. Dialects and accents seem to be more prevalent in content, and CC helps to cut down the cognitive load of “translation” while being enter…
I've also noticed a prevalence of mixing background noise/music into dialogue scenes which often overpowers the main dialogue, or overlaps in audio range enough to make it hard to hear. Add in sub-par audio equipment, or equipment which is compelled to emphasize one end of the audio over the other - and you have a recipe for difficult to understand dialogue.
Turning on the closed captions is an easier solution than fussing with the audio in many cases.
Not mentioned: The increase in poor audio mixing that sounds like it was done by a monkey in addition to the prevalence of devices with speakers crammed in odd directions inside of enclosures that are in no way, shape, or form big enough to contain them. If there was one advantage of the days of big tube TVs it was you had plenty of space to also fit big speakers in too
Even on my nice 2.1 setup on my PC, I always put captions on. It's because re-reading a word I didn't understand is much faster and easier than re-hearing (in my head) a word I didn't understand. It's even happened with my spouse, in the same room, speaking the same dialect of American English as me, with the same accent. I mis-hear one word, and it bleeds into the next word, and I need to think for a few seconds or…
To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption.
People who have their TV on at all hours, as background entertainment to support their lifestyle, tend to not use CC. Why should they? The words literally don't matter, it's just an aesthetic.
People who actually desire an immersive experience, who deliberately pay attention to the shows they watch, tend to care about CC since it complements the audio & visual nicely. I don't have any evidence for this but I'd wager that plot synthesis and comprehension of television shows is greatly improved by CC. Or maybe it's that people who use CC tend to value and perform better at synthesis and comprehension? Regardless of causality, CC seems related to an individual's desire for more active entertainment.
Not in that age group but I can't imagine not having cc on. I was hooked when watching anime and foreign movies but even with english movies they only have an upside. You don't have to guess what word they said or how someone's name is spelled. Loud scenes where you can barely hear them is one but also when you have characters that have accents or switch to a different language it helps (you don't get distracted by t…
I wonder if delaying joke/punchline subtitles till after the spoken line is complete would improve this
Also, for those who think viewers are morally obligated to watch ads, my experience has been that if I don't click the "Skip Ad" button, I will keep getting more ads and never get to the feature!
It's because people are listening to shows through terrible audio setups by default
Through my years of watching Anime it's also quite easy for me to watch and read at the same time.
I think for watching movies they can be useful too, because it feels like almost every movie coming out now has terrible audio mixing for the average person. Even the audio mixing in a Dolby Atmos theatre doesn't seem right. If you watch any modern film mastered in Dobly Atmos on a TV with a sound bar you will have a bad time. You'll have a worse time if you're watching with just the TV speakers.