The Homa Files

Just ask anyone under 40.
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A year or two ago, I was watching a movie with my teenaged granddaughter.

She turned on “closed captions” to “hear” the dialogue more clearly.

Holy cow …  I didn’t know you could do that.

And, I assumed that only some of us seniors had trouble understanding TV dialogue.

Now, as the WSJ puts it:

Closed captions—which display text in the same language as the original audio—have been crucial for a long time for many people with hearing loss.

They’re now a must-have for plenty of people without hearing loss, too, helping them better understand the audio or allowing them to multitask.

More specifically:

In a May survey of about 1,200 Americans:

70% of adult Gen Z respondents (ages 18 to 25) and 53% of millennials (26 to 41) said they watch content with text most of the time.

That’s compared with slightly more than a third of older respondents Source

Among the reasons “legitimizing” captions (beyond hearing loss) are:

• Separate dialogue from background noise and music
• “Decipher” accents or muttered dialogue.
• Avoid disturbing others (at home or at work)
• “Enjoy” discrepancies between the captions and the voiced dialogue
• Facilitate multi-tasking (e.g. carrying on a conversation while watching a show)

Bottom line: Captions can add to a viewing experience whether you’re young or old … and are now “de-stigmatized” for aging hearing loss deniers”.

Right on!

This entry was posted on September 20, 2022 at 6:59 am and is filed under captions - closed captions, hearing - hearing loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.