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Re: Captioning Verbatim or for Corrected English

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From: Guy Hickling
Date: Mar 9, 2016 1:09PM

My thinking on the matter of umms and errs in video recordings is that
this is an analogous situation to putting alt text on images for the
benefit of blind people. The WCAG distinguishes between images giving
useful infformation and images purely for decorative purposes, and
says not to add alt text to the latter. The reason is because blind
users don't want to hear all that unnecessary stuff about lines and
shapes that don't provide any useful information.

So I believe umms and errs should be treated in the same way, and not
be repeated in the captions. They certainly annoy me when I am
watching captions (as I often do when there is a lot of noise from the
family in the background when I'm watching TV.)

Or, to put it another way, I think deaf people have enough difficulty
watching videos (trying to keep up with the captions at the same time
as trying to watch the action on screen is much more difficult than
for us hearing people) that we should take out the umms and errs just
to make things easier for them!

Perhaps, also, another way of looking at it is that if hearing people
are watching a poor speaker in a video, our attention is half on what
we are seeing, which takes our mind off the unpleasent umms and errs.
But the deaf person has to concentrate much more on the captions, so
is likely to be more annoyed by umms. But as to the original question,
about whether to correct incorrect grammar, I am less certain about
what to do for that so I'll continue to watch this thread with
interest!

Regards,
Guy Hickling