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Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

wsj.com

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Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#71

Post by Viliam1234 »

knaik94 wrote: post #32

Another reason that I can think of is that many people are watching content at a increased playback rate. I personally limit that to education content because for things like comedy it can mess with pacing. But I have friends that have used it while watching really long shows. It doesn't have to be much faster but if you think about a 10 hour series, that is approximately an hour saved. I recognize that this seems od…

Same here. Many movies are nice but slow; watching at 1.5× speed makes it a better experience. But then it becomes difficult to understand some dialogs, so I turn CC on.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#73

Post by smeej »

The article mentions but doesn't get into the "audio description" option too. If you haven't ever tried this, it takes a little getting used to, but once you do, it makes multitasking much easier. I strongly recommend giving it a try.

During the gaps in speech, a narrator comes on and describes the most important things happening on the screen.

I had a gig for awhile actually writing the descriptions for this content, and it's really interesting work!

I love that we're discovering that features invented for "accessibility" are appreciated by many people who would not otherwise have identified an accessibility need. I can't help but wonder if it means people who were only dealing with mild impairments are now receiving assistance they didn't know they would benefit from. How many people do you think can pass a hearing test in a silent room lab setting, but have a hard time in our noisy world?

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#74

Post by zach_garwood »

I like having CCs on for movies because the dialog is always so quiet compared to the music and sound effects. I can keep it at a reasonable volume and still catch what the characters are saying.

Also, if I'm watching British shows, I like CCs because I'm really bad at accents.

Edit: I'm coming up on 40 now, so I guess I'm not the people this article is complaining about.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#76

Post by analog31 »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #12

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

In addition, I've read that young people are going deaf due to ear buds.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#77

Post by bsder »

Isn't this just because dumbass video sites are making it bloody impossible to scrub the video to a specific time point in order to increase "engagement"?

If the audio is recorded on a potato (aka: standard Hollywood audio editing nowadays) and you can't move backward to try again, you need subtitles to not lose context.

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#78

Post by simonw »

I recently graduated to the next step beyond closed captions: I've started enabling audio descriptions for TV shows too.

It's SO interesting.

They are generally really well put together. And they often highlight things that I would have missed - mentioning the name of a character who joins a scene who I don't instantly recognize, for example.

Even more fun: audio descriptions of the title sequences for a TV show. Three that I particularly enjoyed were Severance, Moon Night and Star Trek: Picard - in all three cases the titles are rich with visual metaphors relating to the show, which the audio description then carefully spells out for you!

Re: Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

#80

Post by mensetmanusman »

perrygeo wrote: post #45

The fact that there's a claimed generational gap here speaks more to the values of the generations re: passive vs active entertainment. I could also ask: "Why do all these 60-Somethings have the TV on as background noise while doing other tasks?" 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 entertain…

I die on the inside when I go into houses with multiple TVs on in the background as noise.
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