Re: Roll-up captions in WebVTT

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 6:07 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com> wrote:

> I have to say I am a bit puzzled; given a display of
>
> This is a line of text
> and this is the second
>
> which transitions abruptly to
>
> and this is the second
> and the third line follows here
>
> The second line 'jump' scrolls up.  I would have thought legibility would
> be better if it smooth scrolled up, as it's then visually clear it's the
> same line, just moved.  But people seem to be saying legibility is worse.
>  is that an artifact of 608 etc., or a true reflection on the aesthetics of
> smooth scrolling?
>

Are you responding to "... no scrolling at all is far better than either"?
You're comparing "jump-scroll" to "smooth-scroll", but Ian was talking
about no scrolling at all.  That means

This is a line of text
and this is the second

becomes

and the third line follows here
and this is the second

Once a caption is on screen, it never moves; captions disappear and new
captions take their place.  I agree with Ian (assuming I'm reading what he
meant correctly) that this is by far the most readable way to do it,
because captions don't move around while you're trying to read them.  The
reduced motion also is less of a distraction from the video; things don't
change and move around unnecessarily, which draws the eye to them and away
from the video.  Good subtitles should pull the user away from the video as
little as possible.

It's hard to do with live captions, since you can end up in situations
where you don't have any good place on screen to put a caption.  It'd be
interesting to try this sort of captioning with "live" captions (eg.
captions without carefully-edited timing information and other tweaks), and
see what actually happens, though.  Maybe I'm assuming it doesn't work well
because of existing practice, when it's actually a solvable problem.

(It's also not obvious if the typical editing tweaks used for the above are
possible or reliable in WebVTT, but that's a whole different conversation,
which has been touched on in previous threads...)

-- 
Glenn Maynard