I, a hearing person who likes subtitles just as a preference, shouldn't have to read a subtitle that's obvious nonsense, go back a couple seconds, and listen again in order to figure out what's going on. An accessibility feature should not be the most half-assed part of a professionally made production. Scripted media has absolutely no excuse for not having subtitles or having subtitles that aren't perfectly verbatim. Professional captioning services should be ashamed of the shoddy work that they put out. Captions should be treated as a part of the production, just like filming, editing, audio balancing, etc - and anything that releases with missing or bad captions should be seen as unfinished
They should also be of a reasonable size and not the same color as the background, and should include things said in other languages instead of just saying “speaks foreign language.”
And if the original production actually has subtitles translating the foreign language, the captions should not OBSCURE THE TRANSLATION with [speaks foreign language].
This. This, and Especially This!
The thing is, though, because of how the ADA is written, companies adhering only to the letter of the law (I've seen other posts here on Tumblr pointing out that), some -- if not most -- captioning companies actually penalize workers for actually accurately transcribing other languages.
This is why captioning should absolutely must be considered part of the entire production of a film or TV show.
I mean, if I can make proper captions for YouTube videos by opening up my Windows10 notepad, and copy-pasting my script, with a few time code, and spacing, and punctuation inserted in the right places, there's no excuse for a full-fledged production to do the same.
Just to make things clear to everyone out there in Tumblrland, when I gripe about captions, I am griping at the STUDIOS, not the overworked and underpaid captioners.
I have been saying for YEARS that the studios need to provide their captioners with episode scripts.
