Closed Captioning COS

While at breakfast one recent morning at a restaurant in downtown Colorado Springs, I discovered the televisions hanging above the bar had working captions. This made me happy as I ate blueberries and oatmeal covered in milk: I love captioned television. It simplifies everything and eliminates guesswork on my part. No more guessing with closed captioning, what the man had said: “Boss, ze plane! Ze plane!”

I am deaf and the captions are a godsend to watching television. I am also old enough to remember when television consisted of four major networks, including PBS, and getting off the couch to change the channel was not a PE requirement. Captioned television programs were scarce. Today though, captioning is commonplace and now an official aspect of governmental communications.

What is Closed Captioning?

The modern captions and subtitles we see today have a long and difficult history. From silent films to the 1960’s, captions were something of a novelty sought by many with hearing loss and deafness. In the early 1970’s there was an effort to bring captioning to the public that included famed chef, Julia Child. Over the next couple decades, captioning slowly became ubiquitous, and included a wider variety of captioning capabilities beyond television networks and cable networks.

Movie theaters offered captioned movies for limited times and audiences. In college during the 1990s, I would take friends and dates to an old theater that featured subtitled foreign films. By the late 1990s, as the Internet became increasingly incorporated into everyday life, it was only a matter of when more captioning capabilities were offered.

Today, your AppleTV or YouTube or Google Television has caption capabilities. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter offer both manually and auto-generated captions for videos. Since April of this year, TikTok allows users to automatically caption videos.

Captioning During the Pandemic

As governments moved towards online video meetings during the pandemic the issue of captions and accessibility has surfaced and likely will continue.

Recently, I discovered a livestream video of a Colorado Springs City Council meeting on the city’s website and Facebook page were not captioned and inquired about it, first informing the staff at The Maverick Observer, where I write things like this article, and then later, contacting a city ADA Manager. I also checked the archives and found only two captioned videos, one with garbled text.

Frank Bokoski is a Video Productions Specialist with the city’s Communications department. In an email exchange, he explained the nuts and bolts of the city’s movement towards captioning.

“In January of this year, we purchased an auto captioning closed caption device,” Bokoski wrote. That system cost taxpayers $67,875 he said. The ongoing problems with captions can be traced to captioning software conflicts caused in part by renovations taking place inside the City Council Chambers. Currently, City Council meetings are held at a Colorado Springs Utilities boardroom, which has different equipment, sound, and other variables for Bokoski to deal with.

“Going forward, we will have the ‘generate auto-captions’ function turned on,” for the city’s Facebook page livestreams, he added, promising captions also will be working on the city’s website.

Bokoski added that archived videos will be captioned and available by request.

Captioning COS

According to the Colorado Deaf and Hard of Hearing Commission, more than 9% of Coloradans have some form of hearing loss. Colorado Springs established an Online Accessibility Policy in March of last year, requiring city websites to “be evaluated, prioritized, and scheduled for remediation no later than June 30, 2022.” I asked Robert Hernandez, the City Title II ADA Manager, how the transition was going.

“The city is doing well,” he wrote in an email. “Our plan addresses all parts of technology. In part, the city has invested into” incorporating captioning capabilities. When asked if anyone had expressed complaint or compliment about the captioning, Hernandez replied, “No, you are the first.”

It is a sweet and strange irony for Colorado Springs to finally provide captioning of City Council meetings. Parking lots? Building codes and ramps? They’re accessibility issues that are far more visible to the public in most cases. But with captions, it’s increasingly becoming a built-in part of modern communication, especially at the government level, and taken for granted by most of the public.

Here’s to hoping Bokoski and Hernandez can deliver. Though they have until 2022 to meet city and state goals for accessibility, it seems they’re well on their way. It’ll be nice to watch captioned livestream City Council meetings, and even department and board meetings, over oatmeal and blueberries covered in milk. Add brown sugar, which in this recipe, are the captions in videos: they make ‘em so much better.

Julia Child would approve.