Silent Treatment

A couple of weeks ago, I joined a second gym in Toronto because, you know, a girl just can't beat up on her butt enough. This is a much fancier place than the 10-tattoo minimum cover biker and bouncer hardcore joint where I have been pumping iron for the past 10 years. This one has amenities, and lots of cardio machines, surrounded by lots of TVs.

Trouble is, you can't get any sound on those TVs. When I complained to the manager, he told me that the systems where you plug your own headset into a doohickey on the dreadmill break down too often (although that's not been my observation at the gyms I hit in Montreal). As for sound systems that rely on radio frequencies, where you tune to a certain FM spot on your Walkman, well, seems that all you young whippersnappers who listen to iPods put paid to that.

Which means we all have to rely on closed captioning to follow along with whatever show gets our feets a-pumping along with our hearts.

Well, let me tell you: I have seen some of the damndest things in the CCs. Laugh out loud funny mistakes. But, because I generally don't take notes while doing the Himalayan Trek on the stepper, I can't repeat any here.

The worst offender by far is CBC Newsworld, at least judging by my habits. (It and CNN are the channels I tend to watch most often at the gym, at least when a Simpsons, Sex and the City or Seinfeld rerun isn't on.)

This is why I was not surprised by this, which landed in my email today:

TORONTO, 15 November 2005-- Canada's English-language public broadcaster isn't living up to its requirements for captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, a new study shows.

According to Toronto accessibility consultant Joe Clark, CBC has been remiss in not captioning every minute except for commercials, as well as making many captioning errors in programs that, unlike in the case of fast-breaking news where it might be unavoidable, have long lead times. He came to his conclusions after conducting a three year study

According to Clark's news release:

CBC Television and Newsworld have been required to caption every second of their broadcast days, save for outside commercials, since 2002, when the CBC reached a human-rights settlement with Henry Vlug, a deaf lawyer in Vancouver. The survey, released today, shows that CBC isn’t living up to its 100%-captioning mandate, Clark says.

“The human-rights settlement was pretty clear – CBC Television and Newsworld had to caption absolutely everything, even their own promos and commercials,” Clark said. “The only things that didn’t have to be captioned were commercials from outside sources. And even though the human-rights settlement gave CBC some breathing room for occasional ‘glitches,’ when the networks are giving us a captioning failure every 12 days on average, clearly something is going wrong.”

CBC spokesperson Ruth-Ellen Soles told me this afternoon that the public network received word of Clark's complaint the same way I did, via news release.

We'll certainly look into it. It's not our intention to not live up to our commitments. So we're reviewing the study. We are proud of our unmatched record in making our programming accessible to people with disabilities.

You can be sure Clark won't be letting this slip anyone's attention. He's one of the most dogged people in town, and he knows every journalist's email address and phone number.

Comments

[Joe Clark]

For the information of Ruth-Ellen Soles, the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Henry Vlug were notified of my findings on 2005.10.12. I received acknowledgement from both. My covering message stated that I did not know who to send the information to at CBC (true); that I would leave distribution to CBC up to the Commission; and that the information would be published 30 days later.

I think Soles's remarks about an "unmatched record" in accessibility are disproved by the available facts, like the fact that Henry Vlug had to take them to the human-rights commission to understand all of CBC's programming. And that's just one of the available facts.

Memo to CBC: It's been a while since I visited the sixth floor of the Broadcasting Centre. Do have me in again.

[Having dealt with Joe in the past...]

Luckily for the journalists in town, they also know Joe's e-mail address and phone number, which means that they know when not to pick up the phone and which e-mails not to bother opening.

[Joe Clark]

Actually, my phone number is blocked on outgoing calls; so much for caller ID. If anyone needs help setting up an E-mail filter to screen out my messages (along the lines of matching fake@fake.com), do please drop me a line.

[DMc]

My favorite mistake was years ago when I was watching in a bar a show that was captioned in house at a station I worked at. It was a profile of Shania Twain. During the hour, she kept saying how important it had been to her to grow up "a Jew Boy."

It repeated itself about nine times, "Being a Jew Boy makes me feel..." "I think since I'm a jew boy, I..."

About incident number four I realized that they meant, "Ojibway."

I called the station. They pulled it and re-captioned it.

I think.

[Ivan Prokopchuk]

Antonia,
Follow me around in between the dumpsters
amd the parked cars. Landlord anxiety on top
of that is guaraneed to take twenty pounds off the first week. Add to that four payday
advance companies and within a month you'll
be as trim as Selma Hayek.
Happy, fit senior at 900 a month (they clawed it back because the lazy bastard worked).
Ivan

[Mach Stelmacher]

Hmm this brings to mind many things.

I know of a funky (so called)
wanna be hipster (ok Im being less than kind)
cafe/gin joint (it cant make up its mind) located in Surrey BC CANADA (not to be confused with Surrey UK)
that caters to the wanna be like Toronto crowd(lol)...

...which, too, has the annoyingly silent and sombre television screens serving as decorations i.e. distractions to clientele.

There isnt anything more disconcerting to ones enjoyment of the surroundings than looking at a hang on your wall TV screen with sports stars mouthing words what have you while youre looking on dumbly and blankly while trying to enjoy your coffee and biscotti or whatever.

So I filled out a Customer Satisfaction/Survey card (twice as I recall) asking them to turn on the CC. I even remarked I had noticed sign language users quite habitually in Surrey (true enough) and it would be a benefit too to even of us who are able to hear...(uhhh?)

But AFIK, as long as I lived there, they never did. As hip and young and urban as they were, I never found the pristine friendliness of the staff all too catching for me to call it a hang out.

An entire half block away was a really urban quaint permanent fixture of a Mom and Pop sandwich shoppe in which the owners kept both the sound ON along with the CC just so one could always read if the atmospheric din drowned it out. And also I presume to cater to the hearing impaired.

And dang, come to think of it, there was a credit union just mere -steps away- that keeps more than one TV set turne on w/the sound down with CC so you can read the words on the screen (always tuned to Dan Rather and CTV) while you lounge and wait to meet your investment banker etc.

Every person who watches TV should make it a point to switch on the CC in their TV's for a spell and watch entertainment and learning programming with it on and see how the mind works.

Other benefits?

Its also really really helpful when actors mumble (which they often do) or dont speak up and the speech is indecipherable.

You can pick up a clue as to what foreign language is being spoken if you are unaware i.e. it might tell you if you are they speaking Farsi

Its also kind of neat the way CC paraphrases sentences when the words cant fit on the screen space...delivering entire geists instead. Its really kind of interesting.

Its also pretty interesting for noting inferences. Its damn amazing how many
times you will notice how many times the caption: [Scoffs] is used for any show featuring teenagers.

See

http://www.oliversacks.com/voices.htm

for more profound insights than mine
which have also served as inspiration

[Ivan Prokopchuk]

You'd do that to my Shania?
My, what a lovely wuss.
Ivan

Go to a strip bar that has c.c.-ed porn TV. It's hilarious.

Oh! Oh! Yes! Oh! (moaning) Oh! Oh! Yes! Yes! (more moaning)

[Russ Skinner]

As I was reading the post, I thought the situation was deplorable, but then got to the error every twelve days part. There are errors more often than that on on-screen visuals!

How about a limit on the size of comments? The "Mach Stelmacher" comment above runs 475 words and is not at all unusual. People whose comments run into the two-screen range should either start their own blog or learn to self-edit. Surely there is some sort of automatic-character-limitation function that can be added to the software.

[Antonia Z.]

I agree that some comments -- and I include many of my own -- are way too long. But I don't have time to start editing comments. I just don't.

[Val]

I think the poster is sugesting something software based that would automaticaly limit commetns to a certain number of characters.

[Another Casuality of The Joe Clark Experience]

Joe Clark's "study" amounts to no more than a cobbled-together collection of post-it noted complaints. There's a reason why Clark will never be employed in any manner other than preaching to the converted at the web standards conferences. No one else enjoys hectoring by an abrasive know-it-all with negligible social skills.

[Joe Clark]

Confidential to Another Causality (sic) of the Joe Clark Experience: As the preamble to the data itself reveals, the data were not "cobbled together" and are not a "complaint." My complaint was to the CBC and the Canadian Human Rights Commission stating that CBC was not living up to its agreed-upon commitment.

"Never be employed in any manner"? You would be amazed whom I just completed a contract for, and whom the next one is for.

I do, however, agree that the audiences at Web-standards conferences are the converted. This was unexpected, actually, and the organizers I know are adjusting their approaches. How one reaches the uncoverted (i.e., the tables-for-layout/spacer-GIFs crowd, or 99% of the Web developers in Canada) is an unsolved mystery.

Tea at the Suction Cup some morning, Casual(i)ty? I'm buying.