10Readability of captions

10 Readability of captions

(a) When providing a captioning service for a program, broadcasters and narrowcasters must use captions that are readable. (b) When determining whether captions are readable, the following factors must be considered in the context of the program as a whole: (i) whether colour and font is used in the captions in a way that makes them legible; (ii) whether the caption lines end at natural linguistic breaks and reflect the natural flow and punctuation of a sentence, so each caption forms an understandable segment; (iii) whether standard punctuation of printed English has been used in the captions to convey the way speech is delivered; (iv) whether the captions are positioned so as to avoid obscuring other on-screen text, any part of a speaker’s face including the mouth and any other important visuals where possible; and (v) whether the captions are no more than three lines in length. 11 Accuracy of captions (a) When providing a captioning service for a program, broadcasters and narrowcasters must use captions that accurately recreate the soundtrack of a program. (b) When determining whether captions accurately recreate the soundtrack of a program, the following factors must be considered in the context of the program as a whole: (i) whether spoken content has been captioned; (ii) whether the captions of spoken content are verbatim; (iii) where it is not possible for the captions of spoken content to be verbatim, whether the captions reflect the actual meaning of the spoken content; (iv) where the intended target audience of a program is children and the captions are not verbatim, the extent to which the captions take into account the intended audience; (v) whether the manner and tone of voice of speakers has been conveyed, where practical and material; and (vi) whether sound effects and/or music, material to understanding the program and not observable from the visual action, have been accurately described. 12 Comprehensibility of captions (a) When providing a captioning service for a program, broadcasters and narrowcasters must use captions that are comprehensible. (b) When determining whether captions are comprehensible, the following factors must be considered in the context of the program as a whole: (i) whether the captions clearly identify and distinguish individual speakers, including off-screen and off-camera voices; (ii) whether the captions are displayed for a sufficient length of time to allow the viewer to read them and follow the action of the program; (iii) the extent to which the appearance of the caption coincides with the onset of speech of the corresponding speaker, sound effect or music; (iv) the extent to which the disappearance of the caption coincides with the end of the speech of the corresponding speaker, sound effect or music; (v) whether the words used in the captions have been spelt correctly; (vi) where a word is not spelt correctly, whether the spelling provided nevertheless conveys the meaning of the actual word; (vii) whether explanatory captions are provided for long speechless pauses in the program; (viii) the extent to which a caption over-runs a shot or scene change; and (ix) the extent to which the appearance or disappearance of the caption, as the case may be, coincides with the relevant shot or scene change.