[Bug 28666] New: Feedback on Draft Community Report 8 April 2015

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=28666

            Bug ID: 28666
           Summary: Feedback on Draft Community Report 8 April 2015
           Product: TextTracks CG
           Version: unspecified
          Hardware: PC
                OS: Windows NT
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: WebVTT
          Assignee: dave.null@w3.org
          Reporter: quass@quass.com
        QA Contact: public-texttracks@w3.org
                CC: philipj@opera.com, silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com

I have a comment/concern about the Draft Community Report 8 (April 2015) on
webVTT, where it says: "Authors are encouraged to write cues all on one line
except when a line break is definitely necessary, and to not manually line-wrap
for aesthetic reasons alone."

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the context of this suggestion (and in what
situations it is meant to apply), but I think the term "aesthetic" is being
employed in a somewhat prejudicial sense here, albeit unwittingly so.  Often
the "aesthetic" line breaks in caption text are the ones that make captions
marginally more readable by the deaf, especially in fast-paced programming,
bearing in mind that the deaf often have to rely solely on the text for meaning
unlike the hearing who pick up significant meaning clues from the audio while
they themselves are reading captions.  That's why there has long been a general
captioning prohibition (at least according to best practices) against
separating nouns from the direct and indirect articles that precede them, which
meant that one would ideally not end a caption line with "the" or "an" -- and a
still more emphatic rule against separating phrases between lines: so that, for
instance, one would avoid separating the phrase "you know" via line break into
"you" and then "know."  These may be only marginal reading aids in themselves,
but collectively they boost the overall caption readability for the deaf,
especially in a fast-paced, talkative program. Of course, if the browsers are
going to have the final unpredictable say on where line breaks occur, then the
captioner might be wasting their time to attend to that level of detail, but
this in turn makes me wonder why HTML5 captioners are creating such lengthy
captions in the first place: again, the best practices in captioning would
suggest limiting captions to two lines of text.  Even if the actual number of
lines that show in playback may increase at times based on the browser used
(and how it might have been resized), I think that the general target in
captioning should still be to provide two-line captions, and certainly not
5-or-more-line captioning that one sometimes sees these days in HTML5.

Sorry if I sound "picky" about this, but I tend to be a little suspicious
whenever I hear the word "aesthetics" used in reference to captioning
practices, because in my experience(25 years in the closed-captioning
business), it's typically employed as a pejorative term by caption companies
whenever they want to cut corners on time-consuming practices. Suddenly the old
practices are denounced as "aesthetic," whereas they were originally justified
based on actual studies that showed that such practices conduced, so to speak,
to improved overall caption readability for the deaf. Thus the companies turn
the vice of cutting corners into the supposed virtue of not being sticklers. 
This pleases the company and its clients (who get lower rates thanks to the
shortcut) and the change is often welcome by some of the more lazy new-hires,
but the deaf community takes the subtle but real "hit" of receiving somewhat
less readable captions overall.

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Received on Wednesday, 20 May 2015 22:25:32 UTC